> New York Times - November 10, 2001
>
> Do you think a philosopher's political mistakes, like Heidegger's
> Nazism or Sartre's infantile Maoism, can destroy the value of their
> philosophical insights?
Alterman can be such a total idiot. Sartre's Maoism -- come *on*. He hung around some radical groups, defended their right to protest peacefully, resolutely rejected acts of violence, and then went home to write "The Family Idiot" -- one of the great psychobiographies of world history. Lilla does say one interesting thing:
> they glean from translations and domesticate into English. When
> Foucault speaks darkly of "power" and Derrida of "deconstruction,"
> they may very well be right. But if they are, that means that most of
> what their American proponents believe about individualism, freedom,
> democracy and justice is wrong.
There's a glimmer there of the underlying horror of neoliberalism -- the abyss underneath the veneer of Empire. Most of what passes for individualism, freedom and democracy in the US is indeed wrong; it is sheer ideology, false appearance, expensive white males in suits making decisions in Congress on behalf of other expensive white males in corporate boardrooms, an oligarchy so shameless it doesn't even bother to count votes anymore. Instead of a critique of the US' 18th century electoral system, we get a lecture on restraining those vile passions -- the ideological mirror-image, it should be noted, of precisely the individualism in question. This bourgeoisie does not bother to even preach what it long since abolished in practice.
-- Dennis