Well, I am no more fond of theocracy than a personal religious faith.
>After I told him of your comments about obscurantism, I mentioned
>that you're hostile to psychoanalysis.
Zizek should have no reason to be concerned about whether or not I like his work. He is well known and probably well remunerated (as academics go), whereas my criticisms of his work are only available from LBO-talk. No practical threat to his reputation.
>He asked what your theory of
>psychology is - and, specifically, why humans do the sometimes
>strange things they do. I didn't have an answer. What is it?
In my view, a task of historical materialism in cultural & social criticisms is, first of all, to make the familiar strange by resisting the assimilation of the past (before capitalism) to the present (no "always already" in historical materialism either, especially in that it is critical of an epistemic fallacy), not to explain the strange in terms familiar.
Sartre's criticism of Marxism is not without interest, but it seems that he misconceives what its task is. For instance, Sartre says:
***** Existentialism refuses to abandon the real life to the unthinkable chances of birth for the sake of contemplating a universality limited to reflecting indefinitely upon itself. It intends, without being unfaithful to Marxist principles, to find mediations which allow the individual concrete - the particular life, the real and dated conflict, the person - to emerge from the background of the general contradictions of productive forces and relations of production.
Contemporary Marxism shows, for example, as Flaubert's realism offers a kind of reciprocal symbolisation in relation to the social and political evolution of the petite bourgeoisie of the Second Empire. But it never shows the genesis of this reciprocity of perspective. We do not know why Flaubert preferred literature to everything else, nor why he lived like an anchorite, nor why he wrote these books rather than those of Duranty or the Goncourt brothers. *****
It is not the task of Marxism to "explain" what Sartre calls the "individual concrete," "particular life," etc. -- e.g., "why Flaubert preferred literature to everything else," "why he lived like an anchorite," "why he wrote these books rather than those of Duranty or the Goncourt brothers" -- so his criticism is off the mark. By insisting that Marxism should adopt existential psychoanalysis, among others, to supplement it and explain the concrete particulars of individual lives and events in terms of severally mediated "historical necessity," Sartre unwittingly ends up becoming more deterministic than even dialectical materialists whose "determinism" he rightly criticizes.
Sartre goes on to say:
***** In other words, we reproach contemporary Marxism for throwing over to the side of chance all the concrete determinations of human life and for not preserving anything of historical totalisation except its abstract skeleton of universality....Against the idealisation of philosophy and the dehumanisation of man, we assert that the part of chance can and must be reduced to the minimum. When they tell us: "Napoleon as an individual was only an accident; what was necessary was the military dictatorship as the liquidating regime of the Revolution," we are hardly interested; for we had always known that. What we intend to show is that this Napoleon was necessary, that the development of the Revolution forged at once the necessity of the dictatorship and the entire personality of the one who was to administer it, and that the historical process provided General Bonaparte personally with preliminary powers and with the occasions which allowed him - and him alone - to hasten this liquidation. *****
Unlike Sartre, I don't think that reducing "the part of chance" in history "to the minimum," endeavoring to create an existential or psychoanalytic "explanation" for any old "strange things" that human beings sometimes do, is a good idea. I prefer Stephen Jay Gould's emphasis on contingency in biological and historical evolutions.
Yoshie