From: "David McInerney" <borderlands-AT-optusnet.com.au>
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism.
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 11:34:27 +0930



----- Original Message -----
From: ".: s0metim3s :." <s0metim3s-AT-optusnet.com.au>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 1:37 AM
Subject: AUT: Re: The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with
Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism.


> : http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/i7705.html
>
> Gawd Michael, is there some cloning facility for
> this stuff? Slanderous anglo-americana humanist
> bs. Structuralism is not post-structuralism;
> post-structurlism is not the same as
> postmodernism; the perceived threats to
> anglo-american 'Reason' might be many but are
> hardly conflatable except as part of some new 'War
> on Error' - which, no doubt, has much to do with
> the 'War on Terror' and its pretensions to
> Universal Reasonableness.

Angela, from what I've read over the last decade or so I would say there
*is* some sort of industry reproducing this unthinking scheiße!  People keep
recycling Charles Taylor's 1980s article on Foucault and truth, for example.
They must think it's like shooting fish in a barrel.  The important trick is
to read the text selectively, which is of course possible because the reader
already 'knows' what they are setting out to find - either the dreaded
'Nietzschean nihilism' or 'cultural relativism'.  'War on Error', I like
that.  I guess everyone would like to think of themselves as part of Bush's
and Berlusconi's 'civilized world', where Truth is available on tap and the
good guys are immediately distinguishable from the bad guys (although these
days the bad guys seem to wear white).

> Levi-Strauss can be accused of many things,
> including a shonky 'cultural relativism' (which is
> not, btw, a feature of any postmodernism I've come
> across, and) which, to be fair, L-S saw as a
> strategy against colonial assimilationism (hardly
> symmetrical with de Gobineau or Herder).  Sure, a
> version of cultural relativism has been used in
> recent times as a new form of racism (a la Le Pen
> and Hansonites here in Australia); but its
> references are precisely Herder, not Levi-Strauss.
> And, isn't it peculiar that the the first solid
> critique of multiculti ('everyone in their place')
> racism came from Balibar?  Dastardly antihumanist.

While I agree with Thiago that Hanson is unlikely to have ever read Herder,
or at least, that it wasn't what prompted her along the racist road (who
knows though what she had time to read in prison), it does seem that Herder
is an important precendent for most modern xenophobes (even if Hanson didn't
know the meaning of the word, it fitted her perfectly).  Balibar is a
theoretical antihumanist, although I think he'd make the same point that
Althusser did, namely that political humanism - such as implied, for
example, in Spinoza's Ethics, of which Balibar is perhaps the greatest
leftist advocate - doesn't entail theoretical humanism, a theory that
develops out of a notion of a 'human nature' in the Kantian or even
Hobbesian vein.

> Cultural relativism might be awful; but so too is
> the cultural (and political) absolutism that lurks
> behind every humanism.  For my part, I think it's
> become well-apparent that any defense of the
> promise contained in human rights discourses
> begins with a critique of human rights doctrines.
>
>
> Angela

Interestingly, Balibar and Spinoza do not argue against 'rights' per se but
rather for the idea that power is coextensive with right, and this has some
relation to Negri's reading of Spinoza in terms of constituent and
constituted powers.  This line seems to me a more productive one than an
epistemological critique of the very possibility of 'right' full stop.  By
the way, Warren Montag wrote a good review article on Negri's _Insurgencies_
that focuses on this stuff on constitutent and constituted power, I picked
it up online as part of a sample issue at one point but it seems to not be
available that way at the moment.  If you want a copy, just ask.

David

DM



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