--- cgrimes at rawbw.COM wrote:
"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 havent read this book of Drury's, but your comments on Strauss above seem to describe most contemporary conservative writers (like Roger Scruton), so it's hard to imagine that she missed this point.
BobW
>
> 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
>
>
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