[lbo-talk] do people still read post-structuralism?

[Asad Haider]

>
>> We do? I don't think there's a single deconstructionist on this list.
>> I could be wrong.
>>
>>
Why do you bring up deconstruction here? Are we talking about
post-structuralism, post-modernism, or deconstruction? If we mean
post-structuralism, that term is generally used to describe people like
Foucault--he was nothing like a "deconstructionist." Derrida, de Man, etc.,
are nothing close to "post-modernists" and Derrida as far as I know used the
term once, ambivalently, in any essay about video video art. He was pretty
much a classical philosopher situated firmly in the intellectual context of
20th century France, when the legitimacy of the Cartesian philosophical
orthodoxy was thrown into crisis by the increasingly apparent irrationality
of colonialism (increasingly apparent for French people; it was always
apparent in the colonies). Tellingly Althusser said Derrida was the Hegel of
their age.


> I think he's talking about some of the Marxists on the list and their
> connection to Marx' appropriation of Hegel and Ricardo and___________.
>
> Deconstruction is not a  political tradition. Marxism is/was/is.
>
>
Gold star! Don't the young Hegelians seem like good approximations of the
snobby, apolitical American academics who call themselves postmodernists?
Read someone like Bertrand Russell or Chomsky talking about Hegel; sounds a
lot like any of the criticisms of so-called "post-modernism" by leftists.

Here's an interesting biographical question: was Marx criticized by other
socialists of the day for his interest in Hegel? Anybody know?