Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >The following paragraphs from Brennan identify some of the features of
> >_Empire_ that make it, in my estimation, utterly useless as political
> >analysis.
>
> You don't like the book, Carrol? I'm surprised to hear this!
>
> Doug
Why are you so much more interested in personalities than in ideas or politics?
Carrol
More from Brennan:
Also at issue is the question of whether the theoretical legacies of '68 were really an adventure or exploration of new possibilities or only a conservative redoubt where thinkers huddled with eyes fixed on the past.55 One of the most striking aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's powerful evocations is the extent to which their strange and wonderful prose is studded with archaisms, allusions to medieval metallurgy, the fratres of primeval tribes, the autonomous craftsmen dotted along the pristine hills, the Spinozist God hovering over the world's molecules like a benign shepherd, the glorious nomadism of the Crusades. Is this antiquarianism merely a coincident element in the toolbox, or does it signify a special relationship to the past itself? In times as dark as these, such lines of flight are, perhaps, increasingly attractive, but they appear less comforting in a pact with thinkers such as Arendt, whose ideas are inseparable from cold war America, or Schmitt whose legal theories consciously emboldened Nazism. One is reminded of Slavoj Zizek's recent cogent comments on the Arendt revival: "This elevation of Arendt is perhaps the clearest sign of the theoretical defeat of the Left -- of how the Left has accepted the basic co-ordinates of liberal democracy (`democracy' versus `totalitarianism,' etc.), and is now trying to redefine its (op)position within this space."56 It might be said that, as a matter of intellectual convergence, a Deleuzian leftism is less a neo-Marxist revamping than an old-fashioned anticommunism. The genius of capitalism, one might well conjecture, is that it can create such allies in this costume. Anticapitalist in impulse, but theoretically inoculated against the war of maneuver in all its forms, the new Italians project themselves into a futurology that largely reinvents and reinvigorates capitalism's dominant clichés.
56. Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London, 2001), p. 3.