Date: Mon, 6 Mar 1995 23:28:19 -0800 From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-IGC.APC.ORG> Subject: Re: Bhaskar and dialectics Tonight I pulled out Roy Bhaskar's DIALECTIC: THE PULSE OF FREEDOM to see what Bhaskar had to say about the Hegel-Marx relation. So I attempted to read chapter 2, sections 3-5, and chapter 4, sections 6-8. I was not happy with what I read. My first impression: Bhaskar's very style betrays whatever seriousness of intent he may possess: it is a style of shameless intellectual huckerism: a constant barrage of impenetrable, abstract prose, indulging in unbridled name- and concept-dropping with every word, unnecessarily abstract terms and neologisms every other word, this mumbo-jumbo of obscurity given a veneer of scientific justification by means of quasi-mathematical symbols, abbreviations, and diagrams. The arrogant, merciless ostentation of Bhaskar's logorrhea hurts my eyes and offends my brain. Second impression: Maybe Bhaskar is not a charlatan after all. He is the James Joyce of Marxist philosophy; DIALECTIC is his FINNEGANS WAKE. The manifest content of his prose is unreadable because it is pregnant with the semantic overload of its own internal relations of the entire manifold of philosophical ideas impatiently clogging up every syllable, too excited to wait for sequential explanation in real time, insistent on resonating in the reader's consciousness like dense chords too thick to unravel into discrete notes or comprehensible melodies. There are indeed a few paragraphs that make some sense. I have seen these ideas explained much better, more comprehensively, and more comprehensibly elsewhere, however. I do not take kindly to authors who make themselves deliberately and unnecessarily incomprehensible, when it seems the little they have to say could be said without torturing the reader. --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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