Doug Henwood wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >Who's afraid of desires and pleasures? Us or Doug & Eric?
>
> One more time: I'm arguing for desire & pleasure, not against it. I'm
> against the idea that D&P are products of capitalist society to be
> transcended in some vague future when basic needs are all met. The
> meeting of basic needs is the beginning of more D&P, not the end.
I have no intention of fighting personally with Doug. I respect his journalism immensely, and in this current set of threads I have attempted to keep the focus on the principles involved.The disagreements expressed here are serious, but not in themselves of a nature to prevent Doug and me from being members of the same "Leninist" party (though he may think differently). The debate is over some rather fundamental issues -- but in my conception a Leninist Party (not a "marxist-leninist party") can contain within it differences of this sort.
But in this debate Doug has consistently failed to honor the actual positions which he purports to be attacking. Here Yoshie speaks of "desires and pleasures" and he immediately rewrites that statement as concerning Desire and Pleasure. But that is the whole debate.
One more time: the argument is that positing Desire as an abstract characteristic of humans fails to explain the concrete desires of particular human beings -- and that therefore Doug and Zizek deny the reality of concrete desires. In ordinary discourse we can of course use "desire" as a collective noun, referring in a genealized way to the endlessly varied desires of actual persons. But that does not seem to be the way either Doug or Zizek or Lacan use it.
It seems that it is not "postmodernism" or even Kantianism we are dealing with but an aggressive and unmodified Platonism. And as the great idealist bourgeois critic Northrop Frye observed, there is no room for poets, let alone irony or sexual experience in Plato's ideal state. And that is why we are claiming that Doug denies the legitimacy of human desires -- and that in ascribing such denial to us he is exhibiting a serious inability or refusal to recognize what we are saying.
Actually, this falls nicely in the Platonic tradition. In the great debate between Thrasymachus and Socrates in the *Republic* Plato arranges for the defeat of Thrasymachus by writing Plato's own principles into Thrasymachus' attack on those principles. Similarly, throughout this debate Doug has consistently rewritten the arguments of the various critics of his Platonic notion of Desire so as to make them dismissable without argument.
Carrol