>antihegelian philosophies for whom the
>very notion of 'historical necessity' is already a contingent one.
Necessity exists only within an over-arching contingency, to be sure, but philosophers have been of little help in clarifying this fact; it is renegade scientists like Stephen Jay Gould & Richard C. Lewontin who can help us understand it best. It's a topic that cannot be usefully discussed by the philosophers who are trapped in an epistemic fallacy.
>Who said anything about taking up ontological residency? If indeed, as I
>think it is, the statement 'migrants steak our jobs' (or 'our way of life')
>is linked to a whole series of statements about birth, sovereignty and
>rights that the French Revolution announced and which continue to be
>iterated in various ways (both as racism and its ostensible criticisms),
>then why ignore the 'self/other problematic'. Or, as this discussion began,
>why ignore the continuing bond between desire and scarcity in the familial
>(and oedipal) terms of Malthus and neomalthusianism?
I've said enough about Malthus & population thinking on various lists, so your quarrel must be with other LBO-talkers (like Max). As for your remarks on 'migrants,' the French Revolution, & 'self/other problematic,' I think that the history of republicanism and imperialism can be better examined empirically than schematically. Philosophical considerations of race and nation of the kind offered by Balibar & Zizek, for instance, do not tell us much about the politics of Cuban-Americans and their fixation on Elian. In any case, psychoanalysis offers no exit -- it simply inflates & eternalizes an aspect of what exists in ideology.
Yoshie