We have one---you should read Plunkitt of Tammany Hall by George Washington Plunkitt.
It explains all the mysteries of the universe.
Your email pal,
Tom L.
rc-am wrote:
> I asked:
>
> >pop quiz: who wrote -
> >
> >"All the second volume of _The German Ideology_ (manuscript in
> >Engel's hand) aims at those who lay claim to what they call 'true
> >Socialism'... writers who have adopted certain French and English
> >communist ideas and 'amalgamated' them to their 'philosophico-German'
> >premises, by considering the French or English texts, precisely, or
> >as purely theoretical writings come from 'pure thought', as they
> >imagine is the case for the German philosophical systems."
>
> jayson wrote:
>
> >>That is, these German writers abstract those movements from the
> particular
> needs and historical situation of a particular class--bien sur: the
> working
> class. So is your question an intervention against idealism,
> abstracting
> theory from historical practice.<<
>
> me thinks jayson gets the nod for spotting the sense of the quote, if
> not the author.
>
> I kind of burdened the citation with more tasks than is fair. the
> first, was to try and trip intuited understandings of a particular
> theorist. the second, was to point to an explanation for why such
> intuited understandings might take hold as they have done.
>
> the author is Derrida, from _onto-theology of national humanism
> (prolegomena to a hypothesis)_ , olr, 14:1-2, 1992.
>
> the essay discusses, amongst other things, why political and
> philosophic 'communication' cannot forget the idiomatic (the specific
> situation in which a theory or philosophy emerges), but is nonetheless
> compelled to brush up against it for the sake of this communication.
> what Derrida warns against is both a nationalism which either wants to
> purify a communication of 'other national idioms',
>
> {{"... a war in the course of which ... you see the enemy within, the
> one who in France likes German philosophy too much, who in the USA is
> over-impressed by French philosophy, or in Britain by Continental
> philosophy, etc."}}
>
> or wants to absorb them without any trace of their idioms, their
> differences - a move which can only be accomplished if one believes
> (as grun did, and as I think many in the US do now) that one's own
> philosophy is the pure expression of a philosophy without idiom,
> I.e..,
>
> {{ " ... as they imagine is the case for the German philosophic
> system."}}
>
> also:
>
> "the United States of America have played a quite odd and revealing
> role in this question of philosophical nationalism since the beginning
> of the nineteenth century. Today it is the market or the Kampfplatz,
> as you wish, which is the most open to the greatest intensity of
> exchanges, debates, ... it would be easy to show that the USA is the
> major place, the obligatory passage for all philosophic circulation,
> with all the problems that that poses... among other things the place
> today of Anglo-American idiom is the socially and economically the
> most powerful legitimating discourse; taking into account also of the
> fact ... that there seems to be developing ... a sort of American
> nationalist renewal or reaction which claims to defend or restore,
> against the European invasion ... a more properly American tradition."
>
> angela
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