[lbo-talk] How radical was Derrida?

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Mon Nov 9 14:49:06 PST 2009


way to take all the nuance, complexity and subtlety in the abortion debate and erase it in the name of black and white morality - esp. by framing it in a manner where, implicitly, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 month old fetus/child has choice and that the normative content of aborting all fetus/babies under any and all personal, social and medical conditions is exactly the same...

either way, as you have it, all the confidence, uncertainty, torment, relief and sadness of all the people I know who've decided to terminate pregnancies - and I know a raft of people who've made that choice (not always feeling it was a choice), and for wildly divergent sets of reasons - was wasted emotional energy: their choice was either objectively right or objectively wrong and there's nothin' else to it.

and, on top of that, that intimate, personal, reproductive and bodily issue is certainly _just_ like that of international politics in a post-colonial, nationalist and neoliberal nuclear age... who could see it any other way, the personal is political after all, fer shur...

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 4:26 PM, James Heartfield < Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:


> Well, I agree with Chris that hiding behind the holocaust is childish. But
> the fact that there is debate over moral choices does not indicate that
> there are no moral choices, on the contrary, it indicates that there are
> moral choices. There are indeed people who think that a woman's right to
> choose should be subordinate to that of her unborn child, just as there are
> people who think that the US should strike pre-emptively against Iran's
> nuclear programme, and they are either right, or they are wrong, whatever
> God has to say about it.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list