>So when are you going to give us an introduction to B's book that
>explains some of her terms (e.g. "trope", which annoys me no end) that
>us non-pomo-literate, tough-minded empiricists have trouble with?
Trope is an old friend to anyone who's been through a literature program.
I don't have time to do this sort of blow-by-blow thing, and there are people far better qualified than I to do the job. But what I find valuable - and I'm appropriating this for my own purposes, and translating it into my own language - is the argument at the beginning of the book about how human subjects are formed in subjection. That is, we come to think of ourselves as selves by abandoning our infantile narcissism and submitting to what Zizek, following Lacan, calls the big Other - law, discourse, society. Sometimes we resent the demands of the big Other; we rebel in tiny ways (some of them like Burawoy's schemes for getting along), but basically conform. We internalize the strictures of those who have power over us, because they're the foundation of our psychic cohesion. This is a rather conservative, and from my point of view pessimistic, analysis. I'm happy to hear arguments to the contrary; obviously there are exceptions - people do resist, and revolutions do happen from time to time. But why isn't there more resistance and more revolution?
Doug