> On an unrelated point, when I was reading Spinoza, I went looking
> through indexes of some of Nietzsche looking for references to
> Spinoza, but didn't find any by very passing mentions. After going
> over some Spinoza, I thought, if Nietzsche thought God was dead in the
> 1880s, he should have checked out Spinoza, who for all intent and
> purposes abolished the old dude back in the 1660s.
>
> So where I am going with this is that the postmodernist interest in
> Nietzsche reflects a kind of historical parallelism between two
> empires. Postmodernism seemed to devote most of its efforts to
> critiques of what it selected as representative of the establishment
> intellectual milieu---completely excluding any interest in the
> material conditions of the masses, much like Nietzsche.
Actually Nietzsche recognizes Spinoza as an ancecedent (although some of his readings of Spinoza are a bit problematic.) As for the question of postmodernism, I am not sure what you mean, but one can certainly find concern for mass conditions amongst writers such as Foucault, Montag, Haraway, etc. I am beginning to feel that these postmodernists are a bit of a phantom (one of considerably less substance than the specter of communism)
> In my own limited readings in the pomo school, I was constantly
> reminded of Nietzsche even if he wasn't mentioned, partly because most
> of these readings gave me the same feeling of nausea.
>
> I think my reaction to both was just that I was sick and tired of
> endless attacks, critiques, haggling over small points, and never
> asserting a single positive point of view. Maybe it was just that I
> don't like the hermeneutic method. This is why I keep returning to
> Cassirer. He almost never bothers to criticize others in order to make
> his ideas clear. Instead he picks ideas that help illustrate what he
> is writing about.
I'd recommned Wendy Brown's Wounded Identities for a reading of Nietzsche towards a radical politic.
> On the other hand, your right, the pomo crowd are a pretty elite
> bunch. I don't see many of them in wheelchair repair or over at the
> auto shop getting down with la gente. While they are quite adept at
> using intellectual relativism in the culture wars, I am not all that
> sure their relativism translates into concrete political equality. But
> who knows, maybe getting run out of the academy will help clear their
> heads.
>
I don't know. I just remember that when the secretarial staff went on
strike at the University of Minnesota, the comparative literature grad
students and faculty made a lot of effort to help out. This is true of a
lot of grad students around the country. I feel like this assertion might
be a bit unfair.
robert wood