Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 21:10:07 -0400
From: Michael Harrawood <mharrawo-AT-fau.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Marxist Propaganda/I Feel Good


Okay, a comment and a query:


>>  Troy boy, go play with people of your own intellect/age. This is not a
>>  Marxist list. 
>>  g
>
>Let's see, 29 and entering a PhD program in Arts and the HUmanities... WHat
>makes me think at the very least that I'm older than you?


I've been following this thread with some interest and am curious whether
anybody has any notions as to why it went so quickly to ad hominum and
personal issues.  Why does THIS particular discussion have to do with who
is gay and who is straight, who is part Cherokee and who isn't?  

I wonder if it is because of what's under discussion.  Troy's early
comments -- of the "Ya can't talk to the damn marxists"--type -- got me
thinking about Merleau-Ponty's defence of French communism in _Humanism and
Terror_.  His argument, mostly cast in response to Arthur Koestler's
_Darkness at Noon_, is that Marxism cannot answer to Liberalism in
Liberalism's terms and must always seem to shrink from any sort of
exchanges with Liberalism that are cast as "principled."  I'm sure somebody
else on the list can put this better than I have here.

My sense is that here the move to ad hominum comes from the fact that these
two critical modes don't address one another, and so there isn't really
anything to do except get into one another's faces.  (In _Three Kings_
there's a scene where Mark Whalberg is trying to justify the Gulf War in
terms of universal principles: "You invaded another country.  You're not
supposed to do that."  And the Iraqi soldier holding him prisoner shoves a
CD into his mouth and makes him swallow crude oil.  Fin de chapitre. . .)

That's the comment -- that Merleau-Ponty has gotten something essentially
right; that Marxist and Liberal discourse are set up to refuse to answer to
one another; and that such a refusal at the level of thinking invites ad
hominum.  Of the two, I think American liberalism is winning the war, which
makes me want to stop and look on the ground behind me for what has slipped
away in the way we think about these things.  I'm thinking particularly of
the Fukiyama book, _The End of History and the Last Man_, which thinks in
terms of triumphal finishes for humanity.

Here's my query.  I'm preping a syllabus for a course on Humanism, a course
I think I've mentioned here already.  I thought it might be a good idea to
thematize some of the humanist and anti-humanist elements of cold war
political life.  Somebody mentioned Kundera.  I'd like to have my freshmen
read the Merleau-Ponty, but I think its too tough for a freshman course.
Does anybody out there have any suggestions for a good and readable defense
of post-war Marxism that I could throw in alongside, say, The Unbearable
Lightness of Being?  Or, maybe better, critical works about Gulf War
rhetoric?  Any ideas at all. . . ?

I'm pleased and excited to be teaching this course and will welcome any
help or criticism that anybody might have.

With thanks in advance,

Michael Harrawood
Jupiter, Florida



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