Monday, September 19, 2005
(2:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Arguments
I propose that the following is an invalid argument against the value of the work of thinker X:No one in X's original discipline cares about X anymore; only people working in other disciplines do.(I'm thinking of things like: "Derrida's not a real philosopher." "If you go to any psychology program in the US, you're not going to be learning Freud." "The economics department at the University of Chicago does not give much credance to Marxism." Etc.)
If a thinker's value is only measured by the degree to which that thinker manages to insinuate herself into the passing fads of a particular discipline, then no thinker is very valuable at all. The very fact that this is an argument that is deployed against thinkers with wide-ranging influence may well be an argument against the value of our current disciplinary regimes -- or at least against taking the maintence of disciplinary boundaries as a value in itself -- and even, perhaps, an argument precisely in favor of the value of the work of thinker X.
A thinker who is exiled from her "own" discipline, yet whose influence is dispersed to the greatest possible extent, manages in some degree to transcend the limits of the university as presently constituted -- yet remains still very much a creature of the university, calling, at most, for a reform of the university. That such a reform is unthinkable illustrates the profound powerlessness of the intellectual at the present.
