Germany and France are the historic centers of Western academia and Western thought is largely based on French and German writing. Of course English-speakers (not Americans, dammit) can find out what's going on there to a much greater extent than they can in say Slovenia or Thailand, because English-speaking academics to a large extent know French and German (both being required languages when I was in grad school) and therefore read, are influenced by, and translate those books. A book written in Thai is far less likely to be translated, no matter how brilliant it is. Therefore, English-speakers will likely never know about whatever intellectual currents are going on in Thailand, unless some Thai intellectual decides to write in English. Even in this case, the only way the book will gain a wide readership in the English-speaking world is if it is of interest to a broad enough circle of English-speakers. If it quotes Lacan, as opposed to some Thai
philosopher, say. This is precisely why Kagarlitsky is pretty much the only contemporary Russian left-wing intellectual anybody in the English-speaking world has ever heard of. Kagarlitsky quotes Wallerstein; Kara-Murza quotes Gumiliev.
----- Original Message ---- From: Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>
At 03:04 PM 10/28/2009, Chris Doss wrote:
> The only way to actually know what Slovene academics are talking about would be to learn Slovenian, which I am not going to do.
Yeah. That's why hardly anyone in the U.S. knows anything about what academics in France or Germany are doing. They don't know French or German.
> Unless Slovenia is some kind of exception to the general rule, its intellectuals are likely to be most concerned with things that effect Slovenes, such as Slovene history, the meaning of the EU for Slovenia, the legacy of communism and the break-up of Yugoslavia, etc.
Precisely the things that NSK was/is concerned with.
> I am not attacking Zizek here. I rather like him, but he's not a standard Eastern European academic, which was my original point.
But you're just guessing, which is my point.
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