TO LIVE AND THINK LIKE PIGS - GILLES CHÂTELT, trans. Robin Mackay

Quick little number I polished off while some longer pieces are in the works. I’m not sure where I first heard of this book or what I thought it was about. It does have an intriguing title and it is relatively short. Gilles Châtelet, who I’d never heard of before, is a French mathematician and political theorists who was active from the 70’s until the early 2000s. This volume came out in 1998 and seeks to chart the situation, in the West generally but France in particular, since the uprisings and rebellions of the late 60’s as they were swept up in the neoliberal counter-reformation (his term) and destroyed. Parts of it are fascinatingly precinct and spot-on, especially given that he wrote them at the very beginning of the internet age. He really nails the idea of turning everyone into a monad, a disconnected individual who, thanks to the cybernetics of the internet, can work (and be surveilled) from anywhere in the world. “Cybercattle, the sucker-nomad” as he calls it. He points out how this makes various cities around the world, the global cities, into flat mirrors of one another, merely places to check-off and say you’ve been without ever really being there. He nails the way that individual poverty is now a personal failure, a lack of hustle and grind, while this push to be a unique individual and to cultivate an authentic identity is weaponized to destroy solidarity and the possibility of political change. He also calls Satre and Foucault, “narco-lefitist pedophiles.” All good stuff and, again, amazing he was able to see this from the vantage point of 1998, it seems much more relevant now than the time 25 years ago when he wrote it. The last sections of the book are the strongest, it’s a bit to rambly for me for the first couple chapters. Also, it is very French, there all all sorts of references to French characters, real and fictional, that are briefly touched on in footnotes but were unknown to me and play big roles in his thinking. I felt like I was missing a lot of context in these sections. That being said, parts of this were among the most scathing and insightful passages I’ve read about the purpose and function of neoliberalism. A pretty good bird’s eye view level take on the whole phenomena.