Michael Burns reminds me that the deadline for the next Dundee conference on “20th Century Idealisms” is coming up. It was a real success last time and if this is your research area send in a proposal. The keynote lectures from Markus Gabriel, Beth Lord, and Iain Hamilton Grant promise to be excellent.
As is well-known, the rationale behind an academic hiring decision cannot be the object of a possible sensible experience. As with other supersensible realities such as God, the soul, and the whole of the universe, the attempt to reason about said rationale ends in irreconcilable antinomies, which is to say, it results in contradictory statements, both of which can be demonstratively proven.
I’m sure my readers can supply additional examples. Overall, however, I believe these antinomies demonstrate the abusiveness of the academic hiring process — an abusiveness that comes not from the members of the various committees, who are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, well-meaning people who take their job seriously, but rather from the intrinsically arbitrary nature of the process.
Zizek has said enough “contrarian” offensive things that one of them was bound to get a critical mass of people pissed off enough to start questioning the value of his work overall. The remarks about the Roma seem to have fulfilled that role in recent weeks.
For my part, I’m surprised that no one was up in arms over the discussion of child porn in The Parallax View.
Yesterday in Feminist Theologies, we discussed the extreme overreaction people tend to have when accusations of sexism come up. It’s a typical pattern: the accusation of sexism is worse than any actual sexism could possibly be, a single mention of sexism leads to claims that sexism is all anyone ever talks about and we’re so sick of hearing it, the world is completely dominated by women and their needs and we’re sick of giving them special advantages when they should be fighting on equal terms, etc. The slightest suggestion that sexism might have taken place is exaggerated into a totalitarian conspiracy that excludes all other concerns and that the hearer is powerless to challenge.
One student mentioned that she was representing a feminist group at an event where students could learn about a variety of groups, and one male student came up and told them he was tired of hearing about rape. His basis for this all-pervasiveness of rape in Kalamazoo College discourse was a poetry reading event where one poem had one line that discussed rape. This student was unique in his idiocy, insofar as he actually volunteered this position to (I assume) strangers — but how many other people at the event were probably thinking, “Oh God, here we go again”?
This pattern of course repeats itself with anything related to what is called “political correctness” — even requests for basic politeness are treated as a huge imposition. In reality, the truly “politically correct” position is that we are all past the point of talking in ridiculous euphemisms and should just tell it like it is and that we have basically eliminated discrimination based on identity markers and have a fair system where everyone should succeed on their own merits without asking for special privileges. It has long been the case that “political correctness” concerns are exclusively brought up to be mocked, and the term itself is invoked only to announce one’s pleasure in violating these supposedly oppressive and unavoidable rules. Nonetheless, the whole system depends on invoking a paranoid conspiracy theory where “political correctness” somehow rules over everyone despite being routinely mocked, belittled, and rejected.
For this familiar dynamic, I propose the term “discourse allergies.” Just as the body overreacts to innocuous pollen and treats it as a major illness, so too does the system treat even the most isolated and good-faith complaint as an attempt to take over the world.
This morning in my philosophy of religion class, I lectured over Spinoza and then gave them a fairly frank answer for why we weren’t reading him in the class: I find him much more interesting to read about than to directly read. I’ve worked my way through the Ethics and actually studied the Theologico-Political Treatise in some detail, but I can never quite work up the enthusiasm for Spinoza that you see in Negri, for instance. Given the very real constraints of a ten-week quarter, it seems that focusing on works that I feel enthusiastic about might not be a bad standard for selecting text books.
In that light, I have a question for you, my loving readers: is there a figure for whom the differential between reading about and reading is particularly large? By contrast, is there a figure who excites you, while virtually all subsequent interpreters leave you cold?
An apocalyptic mode has descended upon me in recent weeks. The winter is always a difficult time for me, as it is for a lot of people living this far North, but the usual doldrums have been intensified by the depressing social and political situation so many of us are finding ourselves in. The culprit of this situation is clear to me; it is primarily economically determined and its name is capitalism. But understanding the particularity of the crisis had eluded me for some time. After all, for the rich to get richer it would seem that they need people to buy more products so that they can profit and so it would seem like a broadly Keynesian approach would be attractive to THEM (to use the negative name for the ruling class, since it seems more and more difficult to even point them out anymore). Such an approach is attractive to me too! I would prefer to not live under harsh austerity measures, which threaten to turn me and my friends into a permanent debtor class and to increase the suffering of those who were already worse off, or see the profession I’ve been training for disappear in the name of belt-tightening.
Does anyone really believe THEY are worried about inflation? The current “jobless recovery”, a very soft name for a harsh reality, reveals the underlying vindictiveness of the capitalist class towards both the working class and the middle class, who inexplicably buy the austerity line. As they continue to magically make profits they refuse to redistribute that wealth along even the softest Social Democratic means and punish workers and professionals for something the capitalist class themselves caused. It’s a true anti-humanism and I finally gained some understanding of it through reading Alberto Toscano’s “Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri, and the Subject of Antagonism” in the edited volume The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (available for free through the Open Access publisher Re.Press). In the article he discusses Mario Tronti, the virtually unknown theorist of workerism, and his description of the unilateral relation of capital to the workers. In other words, capitalism is dependent upon workers to function in real terms, but nonetheless “the political history of capital is the history of the successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class.” Capitalism, too, has it’s theory of antagonism and utopia: “capital is concerned with the dialectical use of antagonism, whose ultimate if utopian horizon is the withering away of the world class the untrammled self-valorization of capital”.
For some time now my working mythic-model for capitalism, especially through the technology of money, has been the Golem (which Hardt & Negri use in Multitude). However, if Tronti’s description of the separation of workers and capital is true, and it does seem to me to explain the current intentional attempts at a jobless recovery and destruction of any secure, non-precarious career for workers, then this myth doesn’t do it for me. Instead, capital is not a Golem, but Cthulhu and the capitalist class are his priests. It isn’t just the workers anymore, capital wants to be free from all humanity.
“If we don’t get them, they gonna get us all” – Dead Prez
It has been observed in the last couple days that while many are quick to claim that there are “extremists on both sides,” it appears that recently the overwhelming majority of violent incidents are perpetrated by right-wing extremists. Naturally most of these people seem to be unhinged, given that they’re seeking to murder someone they’ve never met, but somehow craziness keeps finding right-wing ideology to be more hospitable.
What relatively few people are asking is why this imbalance exists. Is it because right-wing ideology is inherently more violent than left-wing? I don’t think that the history of international communism bears that conclusion out. Indeed, it seems to me that the reason leftists are so non-violent right now isn’t that leftists have no one they want dead — rather, they are relatively non-violent because they are so radically hopeless as to have moved past the phase where you do crazy, desperate things like assassinating opponents. For despite its obvious intuitive appeal, assassination has always struck me (other than in a unique case like that of Hitler) as an “underpants gnome” type of strategy:
So radical is the despair of the left that arguably the most prominent leftist in the world, Noam Chomsky, devotes all of his energy to stating, in the clearest and most unemotional way possible, all the reasons that we are well and truly fucked.
Now from a common-sense perspective, it does seem that the appeal of right-wing ideology for crazy people indicates that there is something questionable about right-wing ideology. Yet I wonder if on a deeper level, the fact that there don’t seem to be left-wing crazy people nowadays stands as a kind of testament to the hopelessness of the left: not even crazy people believe left-wing goals to be achievable.
I am teaching philosophy of religion this quarter, my first attempt at a philosophy course. In my courses on contemporary theology, I have tended to emphasize dialectical thought as a pedagogical key, using Cornell West’s summary, “negate, preserve, transform.” What is emerging in my teaching of philosophy is the pedagogical usefulness of Derrida’s idea of “binary oppositions.”
Already in a couple different texts, I’ve brainstormed with the students what the main categories and contrasts are, and repeatedly it turns out that they line up pretty well into two columns, governed by some overarching opposition. In book one of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, for instance, the opposition between “perfect and imperfect rights” (essentially “coersion vs. persuasion”) governs all other oppositions, causing them to come out in unexpected and even counterintuitive ways — most notably the claim that religion belongs entirely to the sphere of imperfect rights or persuasion. And that opposition then gives me a structure to help guide their reading, telling them to watch for the opposition between speech and writing and how that falls into the established governing opposition.
Derrida is often regarded as “obscure” (or “abstruse”), and certainly his project of overturning received oppositions is “advanced” when you’re dealing with students who are coming to philosophy for the first time — but for me at least, it’s clear that the notion of “binary oppositions” has an immediate pedagogical appeal.
It seems that one thing on which there is bipartisan agreement is the importance of social mobility. It factors heavily into discussions of education policy, where universities are presented as vital engines of social mobility and school vouchers are justified on similar grounds. And fair enough — social mobility does seem good, all things being equal.
What no one ever talks about, however, is the actual social ladder up which people are supposed to be moving. It’d be as though there was a huge problem with traffic jams, and some brilliant mayor came up with an idea to have people compete for a ticket allowing them to drive on the shoulder and get ahead of the worst of it. Problem solved, right?
Stanley Hauerwas has a review of Peter J. Leithart’s Defending Constantine: The Twilight of Empire and the Dawn of Christendom, available for free here. After reading it, it sounds like Hauerwas is being very gracious and receptive to what Leithart has to say, but it appears that Leithart has a plurality of arguments, lacking any single thesis other than that Yoder is wrong about some things relating to Constantine and war/pacifism. I own the book, and have not yet had time to read it in full, but based on my skim of the final chapter and Hauerwas’s review, I am unimpressed so far with his arguments against pacifism (or with his motive for this aspect of his book).
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