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(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, March 25, 2006

A La Pelouse, Citoyens!


(Via Butterflies and Wheels, excerpts from Russell Jacoby’s review, in The Nation, of an English professor’s new book.)




Brother From Another Planet


[The author] claims the high political ground, but he cannot formulate a single coherent sentence about politics as seen from there. He tosses off phrases about "intersectionality" and "the praxis potential of antinormativity," but politics hardly enters this political book

…[The author] admonishes Cornel West for "his low estimation of black cultural life." West cannot fathom the genius of ex-Geto Boy Willie D.'s rap single "Fuck Rodney King." West hears nihilism, but [the author] registers "rigorous" political thinking and an aesthetic "worthy" of Rimbaud...

[The author writes:] “[T]he only acceptable political notion of the universal -- and therefore of the organizational imperative--is that of the empty signifier, not a present, given, or essential fullness waiting for troops but an impossible ideal whose very emptiness and lack create a pluralized, difference-based competition on the part of various particularisms in a democratic social-symbolic field to assume the position of the universal organization.”

...[Describing a rally in which he took part on the famous “Lawn” of the University of Virginia, where he teaches, the author] approaches the Lawn as if it were the Tsar's Winter Palace and he Lenin in the October Revolution. [He] and his allies, 150 strong, brush past the mounted police. "Juiced," they rush the maw of state power…. "We were not stopped.... As we took to the Lawn.... We were a movement now, and we couldn't lose." Their march lasts all of five minutes--but [the author] has lost interest, and tells us nothing more. Presumably another conference beckons.

So closes The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual, an almost flawless exemplar of tenured vacuity and mock radicalism.