wed., 25 sept., 2019: on varieties of french backhanded compliments, i.: give us This Day our Daily Curse

[NOTE: these terms are weaponized language, & meant to give offense. Which is the whole & compleat point of insult & invective, obscenity & blasphemy, & other political speech.]

FRENCH: Quel noble sauvage.  (s.)  ‡

  ‡)   “What a noble savage…” 

NOTE:  simultaneously a mickey, a piss-take, & a backhanded complement of the concept of the “Noble Savage”, a concept that flows through the 17^th.,  18^th.,  19^th.,  &  20^th. C. European encounters with “the Other” of the North American indigenous cultures, noble by their not having been corrupted by civilization, admired & fetishised & romanticised, as often as not projecting their prejudices & ideals, their hopes & fears, rather than really looking at these cultures, & how these ideas permeated European Civilization, & how this admiration was variously & contradictorily expressed in the work of such playwrights, philosophers, (often racist)  polemicists masquerading as anthropologists (as well as well-intentioned anthropologist),  painters & novelists as John Dryden,  Thos. Hobbes (Leviathan),  Alexander Pope,  Paul Hazard,  Michel de Montaigne, Bartolomé de la Casas (an observer of the decimations & genocide of the Conquista who became a champion of the basic human rights of the North & South American Indians), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who is often misquoted & wrongly credited for many of the concepts), Benjamin Franklin & Thos. Jefferson (who borrowed from the Iroquois peoples concepts of democratic governance to draft what became the US Constitution,  George Catlin (the painter),  & Chas. Dickens (who inserted himself into controversies of the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, joining the racist chorus of Brits who blamed Inuit cannibalism for their vanishing,  when in fact they had been driven mad by lead poisoning in their canned goods), & even influencing the work of 20^th. C. anthropologists such as Franz Boas,  Margaret Mead & Lévi Strauss (who tried for a balanced view of the indigenous culturesP, & the novelist Wm. Golding whose novel Lord of The Flies took a hard-arse attitude to any notions of romantic primitivism & its noble savages,  & by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who also took a hard arse in such films as 2001 & Clockwork Orange, & filmmaker Terrence Malick, whose depiction of the founding of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia & such figures as Capt. John Smith, Pocahotas & John Rolfe, is closer in spirit to the 17^th. & 18^th. C. romantics.

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from curse + berate in 69+ languages, from Soft Skull Press

                        

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=curse+and+berate+in+69%2B+languages     http://softskull.com/?p=271

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