Why Tyler Cowen Wrote Off Derrida and Still Tries Lacan

Tyler Cowen has a litmus test for dense thinkers. He calls it the “there there” question. If after genuine effort the substance does not appear, he writes them off. Jacques Derrida failed that test. Jacques Lacan still has a chance.

Cowen, speaking on a podcast with Nabeel Qureshi and Jackson, explained his approach. Derrida got a fair amount of reading. The verdict: no there there. “You can, in my opinion, write him off,” Cowen said. Qureshi has not read Derrida. He is not convinced there is anything there. He would read him if Cowen insisted. No one has made that case.

Lacan is different. Cowen called him a marginal case. He has tried multiple times. Smart people still tell him the work is amazing. A new Lacan book is coming later this summer. Cowen plans to try again. “That's my marginal 'is there a there there' figure,” he said.

Foucault also came up. Cowen praised him as extremely interesting but pointed to a problem. The history in Foucault's work is wrong in a mundane way. The core ideas are almost too simple. The fact that the current right has latched onto Foucault is itself a sign of that simplicity. “It's not just the individuals who form the conspiracy. It's how a lot of the world thinks today,” Cowen said.

Qureshi takes a shortcut. He runs Foucault through GPT to get the gist. That is good enough for now. He said modern French thinkers put too much of a premium on sounding cool. Postmodern philosophy repays some effort to grasp the core ideas. It does not repay making it your life's reading.