Enemies of Dissensus

T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
yeah its total bullshit. let it burn.
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No fan of old Eddie here but I think you can dismiss him with more finesse you know? No need to be an uncultured brute if you want to retain the compound, you must be more barbaric, extract the useful bits from it, cast away the rest. Unlike the civilised critic who has to criticise things in their totality, discounting their dialectical movement within society.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
im sure its great in many ways, but like anything it gets out into the wild as One Big Dumb Idea
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It could have been great but that opportunity was strangled when people started using the text as a roadmap rather than a dialogue to engage in. I.E: the idea of Europe and Asia as fixed ontological units weren't deconstructed, everyone was like oh well we now can apply any western caricature of the East as orientalism, but that doesn't really get at how the orient and the occident are ideas inherent to the comparitively early capitalisation of agriculture in England, for instance.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Martin Bernal has written a book called Black Athena which current fashion likes to lump with Said’s, even though it rests on the opposite view of the relations between cultures, and does not deny the existence of progress in history. Bernal’s book is sub- titled “The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization”, and is an attempt to show precisely how Egyptian (and therefore African) and Phoenician (and therefore Semitic) cultures influence the Greek achievement in antiquity. For Bernal, this is not an attempt to trivialize the Greek breakthrough, but rather, as he states from the outset, to restore it to the true dimension which modern racist and anti-Semitic classicism had obfuscated, by setting it against its real backdrop of dialogue with other cultures. If Said had titled his book “The Hellenistic Roots of Islamic Civilization” or “The Islamic Roots of the European Renaissance”, he would be much closer to Bernal than he is, but then he would have written a different, and far better book, one not likely to become popular in the “era of Foucault”.
In such a climate, then, it is quite refreshing to read Samir Amin’s Euroocentrism, a book by an Egyptian Marxist intellectual whose critique of Western ethnocentrism, including actually Eurocentric variants of Marxism, is not made from a relativizing discourse of cultural “difference” incapable of making critical judgements. Amin’s critique of Eurocentric Marxism is not aimed at the latter’s (unfulfilled) aspirations to universality, but rather on the premise that such Marxism IS NOT UNIVERSAL ENOUGH. Amin seeks a “way to stengthen the universalist dimension of historical materialism”. He has plenty of problems of his own, though they are of another order. But his book has merits which should be highlighted before people read no further than the title and assimilate it too quick to the genre established by Said (whose world view Amin characterizes, drawing on the earlier critique by Sadek Jalal el-Azm, as “provincial”.
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breaktheirhaughtypower.org

Break Their Haughty Power » The Universality of Marx

<p>The question of the status of universality, whether attacked by its opponents as “white male”, or “Eurocentric”, or a “master discourse”, is today at the center of the current ideological debate</p>
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luka

luka

Well-known member
once i got over my fear and clicked on it i realised it was a pisstake account luckily
 
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