Discussion here: “What Is “Continental Philosophy”?”
On this: “16 TRAITS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY”
To the layperson, Anglo-American analytical philosophers would be as obscure as Continental poststructuralists. Lacking facility with symbolic logic, the Anglo-American tradition would seem even more obscure. For those of us who grew up reading SF from a young age, the ability to infer entire ‘worlds’ from a few lexical clues is a strong prerequisite. One always gets a rough idea of what’s going on in a text.
It is always possible to read disingenuously, to appropriate offered specificities & consider them in the light of an entirely different problematic altogether. Has this been done here, to Terence Blake, in the preceding comments? Well, maybe.
I don’t think that Zizek is the best example of a ‘Continental’ or ‘Poststructuralist’ thinker. I see him as an explicator turned media intellectual. He’s ok, but I don’t see him as an originator. However, his sources, and what he discusses, are ‘canonical’, I guess, & so he is going to exemplify them to some degree (don’t really know, haven’t read his books).
If academics in the USA can be considered ‘Continental’, I don’t see that there ought to be any difficulty with those who so consider, to consider Zizek, too, in the same light.
Emile Cioran, after all, was East European, too. Of course, he was brilliant! But brilliance is not the distinguishing criterion at issue.
As to Terence’s “16 Traits of Continental Philosophy”, it might be more valuable to see it as a Borgesian ‘classification’, so to speak: provisional and subject to revision, and additions.
In any case, if Chomsky attacks Derrida, Foucault, & Zizek, etc., for obscurity, is that so significant? He is a towering intellectual figure, but he isn’t a philosopher, some could argue. But it isn’t only Chomsky that thinks thus. Who remembers the controversy over Derrida’s honary degree from Cambridge?
It could be that Anglo-American philosophers never got over Descartes being French. That they obsess over clarity and “jargon” because, subconsciously, they are out to prove that they can be as clear as Descartes? lol