>You have long championed the virtue of psychoanalysis against churlish &
>curmudgeonly skeptics like Carrol, and your eloquence has made me a
>convert, so here's my psychoanalytic reading of your relationship with
>"sectarians."
Obviously any dissent on my part will only be coded as "resistance," but let me associate...
>A: You feel ashamed & embarrassed to find your thoughts clothed in the
>untutored rhetoric of "sectarian" autodidacts. Familiar made strange --
>uncanny.
No, if anything it's overtutored.
>B: It's like running into your urbane friends when you are escorting your
>old-fashioned country cousin around New York City. You have been a New
>Yorker for decades, but you fear your Garden State roots might still show.
<gasp> caught
>You must act as if you didn't know your country cousin. In case you'd be
>cast out as "one of them." Likewise, your shame makes you distance
>yourself from "sectarians," making fun of them before others get around to
>it.
>
>C: Tragically, it's only "sectarians" who actually agree with you, for
>neither non-Marxist union members (be they officials or rank & file) nor
>Brad DeLongs think that American imperialism exists and must go and that
>capitalism must be abolished, though they might "listen to" you
>respectfully. You mourn your rejection, and the rejection by the
>"mainstream" is abjected -- and the abjects are "sectarians," not you.
>
>D. "Practically everything I write on political economy is influenced by
>Marx, but I rarely use the received language. (I do like throwing in
>'bourgeoisie' or 'capitalist hyena press' every now and then, for shock
>value.) I find people listening to me, and maybe even agreeing with me,
>who might well have stopped listening if I'd sounded like a party paper."
>Why doesn't anyone speak like me? The mirror stage, the imaginary,
>narcissism, and aggression. Down with Sectarians!
My major objection to the rhetorical style is that it alienates the unpersuaded rather than attracting them. And to an aesthete, the language grates.
>Cruelty -- your name is psychoanalysis. M. Henwood, c'est moi! Hypocrite
>lecteur, - mon semblable, - mon frère!
Old man with wrinkled Dougs...