The Contempt felt by Left Intellectuals towards their peers (Re: A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back by Judith Butler)

Paul Henry Rosenberg rad at gte.net
Wed Mar 24 06:34:22 PST 1999


Catherine Driscoll wrote:


> Car Remick writes:
>
> >The object of the literary/cultural critic is not to enable people to
> >understand the periodic table or mathematical theorems; it is (or should
> >be) to help people at large understand the rights and responsibilities
> >that they have as social and political beings. If you really believe in
> >democracy, I maintain you have to be a populist.
>
> Why is the object of the literary/cultural critic 'to help people at large
> understand the rights and responsibilities that they have as social and
> political beings'? I can't see why this should be so more than say
> mathematicians or scientists. Not at all. And it certainly lets a hell of a
> lot of people out of the responsibility.
>
> And certain 'to help people at large understand the rights and responsibilities
> that they have as social and political beings' is *not* the 'object' of the
> literary/cultural critic -- that's literature/culture.

So, only bourgoise critics strive to make works of art more intelligible to the masses. Revolutionary critics create dense texts that only a grad-school-trained elite can comprehend.

Dialectical contradictions, you just gotta love'm!

In a anti-neo-post-Lacanian sense, of course!

-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net

"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"



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