Sunday, November 27, 2005
(1:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Academic fatigue
I am tired of reading the following words:- Marginalized
- Excluded
- Voices
- "the other"
- All forms of the verb "to other"
- Heterosexism
- Any word with a slash in the middle of it
- Any word that is hyphenated in order to emphasize its etymology, real or imagined
Perhaps I'm naive. Perhaps I have too much faith in the power of human empathy and imagination. All I know is that the identitarian scholarship that I've read has presumed to know a great deal about what it's like to be a white straight male, even though supposedly the experience of each group is utterly incommunicable. Way to go -- once again, you're reinscribing the white straight male figure as the identity-free zero category, the universal accessible to everyone. Part of the problem might be a confusion between the distinctive white straight male identity (which actually exists, as I'm noticing more and more as I live and work in a racially diverse city) and the Enlightenment ideal (or maybe even Christian ideal) of the universal human subject. Maybe it's giving the white man too much credit to claim that he was somehow able to colonize this attractive human ideal and keep it all to himself.
But who am I to say any of this? I'll just go back to quietly reading my Church Fathers and European philosophers.
