From: "David McInerney" <borderlands-AT-optusnet.com.au>
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism.
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 15:03:49 +0930



----- Original Message -----
From: "FoofighterPilot" <cwright-AT-megapathdsl.net>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 12:59 PM
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: Re: The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual
Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism.


> 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
> Deleuze's preface on buggering Hegel, for example.  They must think its
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 'Hegelian
> transcendentalism' or 'historicist teleology'.

Well put - this seems to be the case all round in Anglophone academia, on
both sides of the 'postmodernism debate'.  I see this in a most cynical
manner: the proceduralist-managerialist-neoliberal mindset dominating
university administrations since the early 1980s - coincidently the time
when this whole debate began - rewards research *output* rather than
innovation or quality (the latter require qualitative judgment, rather than
quantitative analysis).  So everyone divides into camps and jabbers at one
another, in a debate that conveniently seems interminable.  For what it's
worth I see Zizek as the worst offender, he is merely riffing off the
inanity of much of the debate, using his seemingly original position as the
pretext to recycle the same work over and over again.  Regardless of what
one thinks of Zizek's early work - e.g., that from _The Sublime Object of
Ideology_ to _Tarrying With the Negative_ - it seems that post _Metastases
of Enjoyment_ he has said very little that's new, presumably because he's
too busy taking advantage of the plenary speaker junket.  Now I guess he can
present himself as an opponent of the 'Third Way'.  Well, that should keep
him and Tony Giddens in clover for a few more years.  Anyone who puts out
two books a year rarely says something new, at least in my experience.

DM



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