Rob Schaap wrote:
> I still don't get it. Am I necessarily a liberal because I am a humanist?
well, yes, but a progressive or critical one, which as i said, is a step up from rorty.
> And can't freedom-from-exchange-relation be imagined from inside that
> relation?
yes. i thought this was my point: that a critiique of capitalism is generated by the contradictory character of capital itself. critique does not come from some point outside. i guess this is why i was suggesting there may be problems with trying to see the precondition of freedom as a condition of externality.
> And what is that would be free, anyway, if not the human
> subject? Or must we throw out 'freedom', do you think?
i wuldn't throw the notion of freedom out, tho i would rethink it as something that is internal and contradictory - that necessary contradiction - if you will - are the condition of freedom. is this gettng a bit hegelian? probably, since to talk about freedom in an abstract way always conjures up spirits, doesn't it?
>>
>
>> I go a step
>
> further, of course, in claiming that we can know some things about being
> human.
like what exactly? go on show us your list of what you know to be essentially human.
> We must critique universalist claims, but I have never seen it done without
> the deployment of implicit universalist claims (eg. 'will to power' in
> Nietzsche and Foucault or a priori 'differance' in Derrida and Lyotard -
> and whatever 'discourse' and 'power' are in whatever hands they are being
> shaped).
sure, i agree which is why these folk don't quite come up to scratch for me. but why this should bother you... doesn't this tho kinda prove my point: that the particular, the relative, always appears to haunt even the most well-intentioned of critics against universalism, who criticise it for the particularity that universalisms attemtp to (well) universalise? doesn't then critique ('freedom') move by being such an immanent critique? isn't this the only way of avoiding the conceit of transcendance that is is implie dby humanism? don't you halt critique the very moment you claim there are indeed transcendant or essential attributes? this is why i think, when all is said and done, that humanism (especially in a battle with any critique of humanism) is an obstacle to freedom/critique, not a condition of it.
> I still reckon the most modest of human universals (Habermas on
> communicative rationality; Chomsky on linguistic structure; Kant's
> categorical imperative; Marx's creative social being) afford us both
> rhetorical defence and critical space - such premises seem quite up to
> negating the whole legitimacy of our order, to my mind..
yep, and i would not belittle the importance of the rhetorical, this is pretty much what philosophy and politics are. but i reckon chomsky gets into some kind of biologism with his linguistics, doesn't he, which is the line he draws against change. kant situates his imperatives as rooted in nature, and naturalises distinctions between men and women, for instance, as the line against change. marx i reckon has the most to offer, since the notion of creation (whilst having elements of the deistic, which he recognises and criticises in things like the theses on feuerbach) doesn't predetermine the line of 'development' or set into place limits for change or for critique, and btw, i don't reckon marx sees labour as the source of all value, so he does not strike me as a subjectivist.
rob, i reckon on most things we'd be on the same side of the barricades. the difference here i think comes down to whether you see the space of critique as internal ort external to the given. which of course, relates to whether or not you see the given as contradictory. rorty for eg doesn't which is why his anti-universalism is just so much fodder for the easily-impressed anglophone poseur-deconstructionists (gee, is that going to get me into trouble?). so, given this, i reckon it's time marxists stopped thinking the debate was one between pomos and marxists, and started thinking a bit more seriously about what the stakes really are here.
i'm going offline for a couple of weeks or so, or at least until i'm back from hols and have finished a couple of articles that i should have already done by now.
best,
angela