bourgeois highdomes

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Justin:
>There is an embarassing book by Derrida on Marx, but it
>hardly acknowledges that there is a Marxist tradition as opposed to a
>solitary figure. Laclau and Moore had a book that was big a decade ago that
>did contain a series of caricatures of various figures in the Marxist
>tradition; Geras attacked in in Discourses of Exremity.
>
>There was an anthology a while back--I have a copy somewhere--called
>something like Marxism and the Critique of Culture. It reflected a lot of bad
>appropriation of Gramsci and a certain amount of uniformed sneering at Lukacs
>asa  literary critic, but mainly a lot of stuff about how great G was a
>cultural critic, if only we can read around that embarassing class analysis
>and talk of revolution.

You are right.  A good point about selective appropriation of a few
Marxists as if they were "solitary figures" divorced from the Marxist
tradition and "embarassing class analysis and talk of revolution."  Out of
need to escape such embarrassment comes postmodern irony.


>But while pomos had to be interested in Marxism at first, since it was the
>major intellectual tradition on the left and had won a foothold in the
>academy after the 60s, it is now no longer an intellectual force with any
>substantial following in the academy (never mind in the working class;
>probably it never was there in this country). It's not a pole of attraction
>for students who might be drawn to it rather than pomo in areas where pomo is
>in; people aren't writing exciting new Marxist books or engaging in a lively
>Marxist debate in the journals. So it's neither an important target in terms
>of academic politics or intellectual interest. It won;t get you tenure or
>advanacement to write about it when you could write about the
>(de)Construction of (Ma)donna's (post)Moderrn (hyper)Sexuality.

I'm not as pessimistic as you sound here, but I agree that postmodernists
have no political need to engage our contemporary Marxist thinkers such as
Wood & Geras, so their critiques go unread and do not generate debates.
Speaking of new Marxist books, I just picked up Sean Sayers' _Marxism and
Human Nature_ (reviewed positively by Martha Gimenez in Monthly Review,
negatively by Terry Eagleton in New Left Review).  It's a concise
exposition of a Hegelian-Marxist view of "human nature," but I can't say
it's exciting.  Have you read it?  What are you reading nowadays, besides
Richard Posner, that is?  (I'm gonna take a look at _Economic Analysis of
Law_, since several people here mentioned it.)

Yoshie