Picture the scene: a polite philosophy seminar with a paper given by a young, dishevelled and chain-smoking scholar, who declares not only that philosophy is class struggle in theory, but quotes Lenin’s description of academic philosophers as ‘flunkeys and dunces’ . Outrage, shuffling, a few leave, how dare he!
2 November, 2009
Gotta Love Althusser
Posted by stalinsmoustache under academics as wankers, Louis Althusser, philosophy | Tags: class struggle in theory |[3] Comments
3 November, 2009 at 8:01 am
Macks book has just arrived and is not good. He’s so self assured he has no footnotes, and indeed he never does, and his chapter on Early Christian mythmaking is just baseless assertions – Jesus spoke Greek, “Q” is the earliest gospel, Luke was a poorly educated second century bla bla. No argument, never is, just presupposition and assertion. No concept of early Jewish culture, sources, etc etc. He’s wrong wrong wrongity wrong.
3 November, 2009 at 8:12 am
I like the phrases he uses like ‘we now know’ or ‘humans do’. And we all act in lovely, rational ways that make perfect sense. Actually, it’s a very American book, with a grand narrative that starts in the USA and ends there. You see this a lot: their specific problems are effortlessly universalised – what I call ‘imperial blinkers’.
3 November, 2009 at 8:40 am
Absolutely. It’s all hopelessly simplistic, truly Americanised social subgroupy imperialistically blinkered ethnocentrism.