Friday, February 25, 2005
(11:30 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Notable Internet Reading
Robert "KC" Johnson has done it again, blazing trails in the battle for the new political correctness. His defense? He's all for dissent... as long as it happened in the past and every sane person now agrees that the dissenters were correct. Not quite "my country, right or wrong," but more like, "my country... well, the jury's still out." When Tim Burke feels he needs to step in because your criticism of the far left has gotten out of hand -- well, that should tell you something, Robert "KC."Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias reminds us of why making nice with the right-wingers is useless: they'll just hate us anyway. Michael Schaefer once summed this up nicely: "The Republicans were elected on a platform of vengeance." Michael Bérubé's ongoing discussion of David Horowitz's utterly ridiculous and slanderous Discover the Network site provides a nice case-in-point for Mr. Yglesias's argument: the reason that Roger Ebert is grouped with Islamic jihadists is because leftists (read: enemies) control Hollywood, just like enemies control the Islamic jihad movement. What all the members of this "network" share is their status as non-rightwingers and therefore, obviously, the active or passive "agenda" of doing things other than what rightwingers want (or, in the case of those Democrats who, for instance, supported the Iraq War, doing things that the rightwingers want while not actually being rightwingers!).
I'm also really liking Bitch, Ph.D., lately. In all my ventures in emancipatory studies lately, feminism is an area I have neglected, and the discussion of the Larry Summers shit and the recent flap over Kevin Drum's question about "why women don't talk about politics" has provided a nice opportunity to discuss why this stuff is so infuriating and why women are always put at a huge rhetorical disadvantage in such conversations.
I also like Ralph Luker's post about our non-Christian constitution.
An unrelated remark: A couple nights ago, Anthony and I listened to the complete Godspeed You Black Emperor, straight through. I enjoyed it so much that I'm doing it again this afternoon, while writing about the necessity of intertwining politics with love. That's my take on Wesley: out with holiness language, but in with "perfect love." In fact, I would love to have a temporary moratorium on the use of such phrases as "the sanctity of human life" or "human beings are of sacred worth" or especially of the language of "sacrifice." Love and other such theological language (joy, peace, etc.) can be used, but only if it is allowed to range over the whole terrain of our life together -- the limitation of "love" to dyadic relationships or to families goes hand in hand with the "sanctity" (set-apartness) of every human being. That is, the "sanctity of human life" is a religious way of talking about what Norm Geras calls the contract of mutual indifference. Insofar as Badiou segregates love from the political in his "quad," I think his politics are bound to be inadequate; and if Dave is right that Badiou is wrong about Paul insofar as he ignores Phillipians, I would emphasize that he is wrong insofar as he ignores the intense passion of 1 Thessalonians. In this sense, even if Hardt and Negri don't seem to offer as much of a model for "getting shit done," I would choose their political theory over Badiou's.
