Monday, July 07, 2003
(8:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Of Linkology
Part of the definition of a "weblog" is that it provides links to other sites. So how about one of those excellent Norman Mailer essays that comes out from time to time? I think that the most perceptive critics of the current political scene are easily Norman Mailer, Paul Krugman, and Slavoj Zizek. The fact that the best analysts are a novelist, an economist, and a psychoanalytic philosopher should tell you one thing: I'm not sure what that thing is, other than the fact that I like to get my opinions from indirect sources.
Oh, okay, here's the real "one thing": In today's postmodern world, one must straddle disciplinary boundaries in order to have any sense of the real power relations of the contemporary scene. Those who strictly limit themselves to one discipline (such as most analytic philosophers) end up blinding themselves to the real of the situation and effectively wind up in the space Lacan carves out for "university discourse": unwittingly legitimizing the status quo through a supposed appeal to knowledge. In order to see what's really going on, a thinker must be constitutively split, as in Krugman's split between economics and political analysis, Adorno's split between philosophy and music theory, Jameson's split between lit crit and philosophy, and Lacan's polymorphous erudition in psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, set theory, mathematics, comparative lit, etc., etc., etc. The fact that "interdisciplinary" people sometimes have more trouble getting jobs should be taken as a positive sign, at least from a certain perspective.
Very profound. Now, please, someone else needs to post.
