Doug Henwood wrote:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >The last line of my post, the line Doug quoted, was one of those
> >throwaway lines that in published text gets edited out and in
> >conversation gets cancelled with a hand wave.
>
> To quote Bryan Ferry, throwaway lines often ring true.
>
> Of course, Carrol, I can't resist the temptation of zeroing in on the
> very line you now disavow. The editing out or erasing handwave
> suggests conflict. As my old guru Harold Bloom once said, the
> question the critic should always ask is "what is being freshly
> repressed?" So what are you repressing here, freshly or not?
Nothing very deep -- an intellectual embarassment over sloppy use of a rather important term, "fetish." (The next step, why should that be embarassing, or more embarassing than other probable sloppinesses in any textw written quickly, is the illegitimate one all forms of psychoanalysis seem to make. The best critique I know of is Timpanaro's *The Freudian Slip.*
A number of people from the most varied perspectives have noted that the peculiar flaw to psychoanalysis is that its propositions are never about the world or about some model, correct or incorrect, of the human mind, but about *you*. It is this aspect of Freud that gives weight to what otherwise would be fairly trivial positivist criticisms (trivial because positivism is inherently trivial). That parallels the way in which the insanities of Christianity give weight to the trivialities of the Village Atheist.
Carrol