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Beyond postmodernism: The millennial revolutionary guard

#1
C C Offline
https://www.berfrois.com/2018/11/how-muc...s-it-make/

EXCERPT: [...] In the five years since I moved to Paris as an American philosopher working within the French system, my disdain for what Americans know as ‘French theory’, and particularly for the American reception of it, has only deepened. [...] Jacques Derrida means nothing without his Parisian institutional setting [...] individually, because the tricks he was encouraged to perform that so dazzled the crowds at Johns Hopkins and Irvine were taught to many others just like him, who would all of course insist on their own uniqueness, would claim they were always outsiders to the true French intellectual elite [...]

The logic of this performance of outsiderness is the same as in many genres of popular music, where the whole delicate game is to appear to maintain your street cred as a bad boy who disdains the major record labels and the award shows, all the while clamouring for such distinctions. The peculiarity of the Parisian intelligentsia is that it combines the bad boy ethos of punk or hip hop with an institutional upbringing comparable to Juilliard...

[...] The American right and the ‘classical liberals’ continue to denounce the ‘postmodernism’ of the academic left, as if it were still 1984, as if nothing ever changes. They have not detected the massive upswell in the past few years of what is in crucial respects the exact opposite of postmodernism. Graduate students in the humanities are not deconstructing anything anymore, and are in no doubt about the existence or accessibility of certain basic truths. They are defending the truth of their moral world view, against the falsehood of the world view of their enemies.

The dividing line is generational, and nowhere has it been more visible than in the recent revolution of comp-lit graduate students against their elders and ostensible mentors, Butler and Žižek and the others, who for their part, in the wake of the Ronell-Reitman sublimatedly-sexual harassment scandal, insisted in various ways that [...] sometimes the real truth is hard to come by. However wary I am of the stark black-and-white moral realism of the grad students who rose up against Ronell, I am at least happy to see her New York branch of Derrida’s horrible chain finally closing down. [...]

The millennial revolutionary guard has, by now, mostly through the social media that still confuse the elders, seized symbolic power, and institutional power cannot be far behind (I am thinking for example of Andrea Long Chu, a lucid young mind who simultaneously fascinates and horrifies me, and to whom, I am certain, the future belongs). It is, again, definitely not postmodernism that they are enforcing.

Perhaps, soon enough, if the new guard does not place an outright ban on these materials, it will be possible to go back and read Derrida (though I will not be the one doing this) in the only way any scholar should ever read anyone: as a product of his time and place. I certainly think this is scholarship worth doing [...but...] I would never even think of worshipping or fawning over any of them...

MORE: https://www.berfrois.com/2018/11/how-muc...s-it-make/
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#2
Syne Offline
Defending wholly subjective views against objective reality ("the world view of their enemies") is no more productive or useful than outright attempts at deconstruction. One could even say that such defense is just an attempt to discredit those who hold the objective world view, which is just an attempt to make their deconstruction more permanent.
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