Rhetorical Gestures (was Re: Spivak sez...)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>On Tue, 12 Oct 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>> For Eagleton's review "In the Gaudy Supermarket," visit
>> <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eagl2110.htm>.  Be warned that both the style
>> and content of the review are predictable (but so is the book reviewed).
>
>Yeah, she's just like Marx, going on and on about that class
>struggle/revolution thing. Thank goodness the mighty, flourishing
>AmeriLeft doesn't need to bother about actually thinking through such
>concepts in any detail.
>
>Eagleton can be interesting, but he misses the point: theory does not
>think in sentences. It's the grammar, the space between the sentences,
>through which the lightning-bolt of content flashes.
>
>-- Dennis

I warned you that the review is predictable, so don't complain.  I think,
however, it's interesting to investigate the post-Leninist/post-Marxist
rhetorical gestures, which speak in sentences as well as through other
means.  Eagleton says: "She contrasts her own critique of metropolitan
post-colonial theory with her Indian colleague Aijaz Ahmad's scorching
assault on it in his book In Theory, and describes her own volume as 'more
nuanced with a productive acknowledgment of complicity'. But why exactly
should this be thought a virtue, if the result is a less searching
account?"  In other words, why has a claim to superior knowledge come to be
based on saying that one's product is 'more nuanced with a productive
acknowledgment of complicity'?

toward a study of (post)modern rhetorical tics,

Yoshie