>Indeed, but so what? I just wonder why intellectuals who work in
>English-speaking countries (especially in the USA) tend to get tied in
>knots about their being intellectuals and apologize for this fact in a
>convoluted way (e.g. accusing other intellectuals of being intellectuals,
>'acknowledging complicity,' etc.). I find this rhetoric moralistic (the
>word 'complicity,' for instance, suggests something of prosecution in
>criminal justice).
Oh, I think there's something to be said for exploring the contradiction of being a critic of imperialism and capitalism while enjoying its fruits. Otherwise you end up like Proyect and Blaut, going on about the evils of the colonizers and the virtues of the colonized without reflecting much on how much "development" has to recommend it materially and intellectually, and without any sense of being embedded in the contradictions of capitalism.
>Might be interesting, but you say you
>haven't read Kant.... If you had, you wouldn't think of postmodernism as
>such a novelty.
I'm ignorant of many things, but thinking "postmodernism" - whatever exactly that is - a novelty isn't one of them. I figured that out the first time I laid eyes on Of Grammatology in 1978.
Doug