Intellectual Figurehead of Our Time?
 

The 50s had Sartre and Camus
The 60s had Marcuse
The 70s - 80s had Foucault and Jameson
The 90s had Zizek and (posthumously) Deleuze
The 00s? Please God not Michael Moore, surely.

naomi klein
noam chomsky
norman mailer
arundahti roy

how's that for start

i'd agree with chomsky.

the thread title was intellectual figurehead so michael moore is immediately discounted

actually i suppose chomsky was most active in linguistics during the 60s and 70s - can he be considered "our time"?

jamie foxx

Jon Stewart or Lewis Black. Haha.

I don't see the obsession with the present. There is so much past to get up to date with, and by the time you're done with that, the present is in the past.

Camus, Sartre, Nietszche, Kierkegaard, Descartes, and Socrates are all just as relevant now as they were in their own times, possibly moreso.

That's probably true, and all the people mentioned so far have borrowed from those before them anyway. Even so, a generation usually either throws up or adopts an intellectual figurehead of its own. The 50s had the existentialists, the 60-70s had the new left, the 80s-90s the postmodern lot. I suppose today the dominant issue is globalization, so whoever it is it's going to come out of debates around that. Chomsky is the obvious candidate then, I suppose.

Oprah

i'd agree with chomsky

add richard dawkins

habermas

michael gazzaniga! (neuroscientist)

if you want political-- francis (yuck) fukuyama <- vomit-worthy, yet influential among the neocons that rule our time

I can't think of one. But the Chomsky love fest is sort of curious to me.

Gary Kasparov

wiki:
Kasparov announced his retirement from professional chess on March 10, 2005, to devote his time to politics and writing. He formed the United Civil Front movement, and joined as a member of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration of Vladimir Putin.
On September 30, 2007, Kasparov entered the Russian Presidential race, receiving 379 of 498 votes at a congress held in Moscow by The Other Russia. [1]
Kasparov was arrested on November 24, 2007 by riot police in Moscow while trying to march on the federal election offices to present a letter of protest against Putin and the upcoming election[2], and was subsequently given a jail sentence of five days. [3][4] He was released from jail on November 29, 2007. [5]

Nice choice! Interesting person, I didn't know of until last year. The only real voice of dissent in Russia.

Stephen Colbert!

odb!

Why not Michael Moore? I guess you're too afraid of what some turds might think. Or perhaps he just didn't fit your cookie-cutter notion of an ivory tower intellectual like the rest on your list. At any rate, he's scapegoated just like Socrates was in his day and it's better to be a gadfly than a fly.

I've read a lot of Sartre and Camus. Sure, there's some valid stuff to ponder, but they each perverted existentialism quite a bit with atheism and humanism. At least Camus rejected nihilism and Marxism and like Kierkegaard, despises Hegel.

Marcuse is an intellectual rabble-rouser Marxist that perverts Wittgenstein.

No thanks.

i'd add susan sontag, john berger, gore vidal...

Velly Velly Intellesting.

he's definately intellectually influential even if he is basically abhorrent.

Well, you gotta go Susan Sontag before you go Al Gore, that's for sure.

once again atari you assume. because i said michael moore doesn't belong on a list described as intellectual doesn't mean i don't like him, on the contrary i have some of his books and most of his films. michael moore is great infact, i like him alot, however, i donot believe he belongs on a list of intellectuals. his populist films are fantastic for highlighting the problems that people face and the world faces blah blah blah, and bringing these issues to a global audience, more so than any academics really ever achieve. you seem to enjoy making assumptions about people by a once sentence post though, as you did when i first joined the old board, and you usually follow these posts up with some psuedo intellectual banter so people can see how widely read you are. get the chip off your shoulder and don't assume so much. i put my list up of people who i think are important, they are opinions and opinions only.

it is ironic how you say i have a cookie cutter notion of an ivory tower, im not the one with the massive chip on my shoulder and name dropping, ohhh i have read alot of camus and satre and i can name wittgenstein and hegel, so what, people read books good on you for being sooooo widely read, you are a genius and i bow to your intellectual prowess. i will not appologise for having an opinion so shut the fuck up.

Unfotunately, some degree of assumption and relevant probing is necessary in this medium; it's inevitable. It's not like we are having an actual conversation. Phrasing ideas in a nutshell (because no one is likely to have an attention span for much else) is also essential. Sorry to see you flip your lid over such a trifle. Glad you like Michael Moore. Roger & Me is still my favorite.

You know it to be true.

As Sean Loch once commented, "I thought [his] pants were fashioned by exquisite boys, by loom". You don't get more intellectual than that.

My fortune cookie the other night:

"the wise man is the one who makes you believe he is a fool"

sorry to break the heart of some of you tits, but you should know the wonderful ms. sontag no longer answers her correspondence, due to the very unfortunate fact that she died of cancer at least a couple years ago.

Going with globalization as the defining issue of our time, chomsky wouldn't be a bad choice... i'm not that big a fan of his linguistics, but i do enjoy his political writings. i'd go with gayatri spivak, though. even though she translated of grammatology in 1976, she didn't start writing exstensively about the post-colonial condition until the 90s. and a critique of postcolonial reason (which i'm trying to work my way through now) came out in 1999. ...maybe, edward said, posthumously... i'm not that familiar with his work.

really jon stewart's not a bad choice either. ...i hope this writer's strike doesn't last too much longer... where am i supposed to get my news from?

Jon Stewart is my hero.

I think it's pretty wrong to suggest that 'great intellectuals' can be broken down by decade - as we all probably know, the favour of current climates can change. Your Moores, Humes and the like might be important for the historical narrative of thinking, but I'd be surprised if anyone saw them as anything other than bit-players in the general narrative of thinking.

It'd be nice to see a bigger uptake of Abdul Karim-Souroush's writings in these times where the secular-democratic appears opposed to religion (or theocracy, in some cases). No-one's mentioned Derrida, Lyotard or Badiou yet, but then, I'm sure we could all wank off about the books we've read, right?

derrida: dead
lyotard: dead
badiou: hmmmm....

abdul who???
sssplain, sssplainn...

Iranian philosopher, writes a lot about the Islamic revolution - I'm mainly interested in him for his efforts to reconcile religion with (a very fluid interpretation of) democracy. I think in these troubled times he's managing to propose, in the particular, a 'progressive' Islam without compromising core values and, in general, providing active solutions for the State/ religion 'conflict'. He is actually active qua politics as well - he was (possibly is) an adviser to the state, which assuages those fears of dilletante-ish intellectualism.

nice-- i hadn't heard of him. if what you say is accurate then i hope the ayatollah concedes him an audience-- ha ha ha-- concedes... but yeah.


============

att: titheads

michael moore is NOT an "intellectual". he's a journalist, an investigative journalist with a flair for speeches. if you're adamant about inducting a journalist to the pantheon of contemporary thought leaders, however, allow me to suggest seymour hersh as an improved alternative-- there's someone with a lot more depth than mr. moore. just saying.

Link. You might like to note my spelling of Arabic names is pretty dire.

Michael Moore is necessary. I am necessary in my office, and I've yet to receive any plaudits for that, so that fat, patronising gobshite Moore can cunt the fuck off as far as I'm concerned.

Excellent suggestion, Glice...yes, yes, a massive literary JO is in order...magnificent.

Sontag...you know, I was actually thinking of Rachel Carson and not Susan Sontag. Of course, her environmental tome, Silent Spring, was written in the '60s. The whole S.S. thing threw me off. And what's worse, I think this isn't the first time that I've pulled the same exact boner confusing Carlson with Sontag.

Oh well, there's some proof that I don't research everything I post about, right? I suppose I should have checked, but I was intoxicated.

Here's Mr. Garry Kasparov up against Deep Blue like the modern-day intellectual John Henry folk hero that he is. He defeated the computer in 1996, but lost the 1997 rematch.

Robert Anton Wilson

Criminy!