Has anybody out there read Shadia Drury's Alexandre Kojeve, The Roots of Postmodernity?
I got it UPS today at work and have managed to chapter three on the slave. SD is re-reading Kojeve back from Hegel in order to understand the twisted up vision of a continental postmodernity where she puts Kojeve's late 30s lectures on Hegel as something of an origin or benchmark.
Her idea of Postmodernity is of course the usual one, of a romantic reaction to the project of modernity started in the Englightenment and culiminating in the totalitarian and emperial states of the 20thC. Postmodernity sees Reason as the culprit. Too bad. I see capitalism as the culprit and it is not rational, but irrational.
The background importance is that Kojeve was a long time friend of Leo Strauss, and I can already see some of the concordences. I have Kojeve's Intro to Hegel, but after a few dozen pages I couldn't stand it and didn't believe it, since I had already struggled through about half of Phenomenology a couple of years before. Kojeve was just wrong, but I didn't and still don't have enough background to argue otherwise.
Shadia Drury is supplying the missing critique. She is pretty good at it. The trouble is I am not sure I believe her either. The reason is that she is a little to a lot wrong about Strauss. Not that Strauss wasn't the jerk she said. He was. It is just that his mendacity has a central theme that she missed. Strauss wrote for the elite, or as if he were the elite, in a country and in a time when the elite were threatened by the likes of the common man waking up---that is to say, guys like me. The great mass of kids from nowhere who hit academia by storm in the 60s. So then his ideas about political philosophy were essentially repressive and anti-democratic in spirit, a spirit opposed to the spirit of the time. He was out of time, out of sync with the fundamental thrust of his time. His return to the Greeks was a return to Sparta, to nasty old rabbis of the temple, and to the hierarchical militaristic elite patriarchy of Pussia---which he was theoretically revolting against. His revolt was based on envy, not distain.
I also got Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity, which judging from the first few pages puts both modernity and postmodernity into a Latin American and Spainish context as the source of origin. I distantly remember objecting to this idea because both words are part of the fundamental intellectual currents in art history and have distinctly other orgins and meanings. For example, properly speaking, it is traditional to introduce modern art with David and Goya. They form a dialectic between neo-classicism and romanticism that is pictorially un-mistakable, and form a dialectical theme that works its way through-out the 19thC into the 20th.. The ying and yang of empire, Napoleon's coronation and the Second of May, especially the firing squads by landern.
In any event, the Latin source that Anderson apparently cites (I have not read the book yet) is not entirely un-reasonable from my experience. I remember going to a bank in Guadalajara with my parents as a kid that had the most beautiful and futuristic architecture I had ever seen.
Other book notes. Lessing's, first Canopus novel was disappointing. It started off great and then deteriorated. Too bad.
Anybody got any opinions on Drury, Anderson or Lessing?
CG