I’m away from home till late tomorrow, so will not be posting again till then. Some reading matter.
> Fred Inglis, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies, University of Sheffield, apropos some reactions after September 11, 2001:
The postmodern intelligentsia should be reproached not for their irony, still less for ‘pseudosophisticated relativism’, but rather for self–righteousness, self–referentiality, and an impregnable sanctimony only made to tremble by the danger of speaking with strong and spontaneous feeling about circumstances of such deliberate horribleness.
The failure was one of thought, thought charged to the utmost with the actuality of experience and the feelings inseparable from living it.
Who, for example, could take seriously someone who talks like this?
“This, strictly speaking, is de(con)structive pedagogy. Like all good teaching in the humanities, it is hopeful and interminable. It presupposes and looks forward to a future anterior of achieved solidarity, and thus nurses ‘the present’. In the strictest sense, then, (para)logical: morpho–genetic (giving rise to new ways of reading, writing, teaching in the strongest sense) without terminal teleological innovation. Its ‘present’ is a field of value–coding …”
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: SdeW.)
> Mick Hartley takes a critical look at Robin Cook’s view of why Tony Blair supported George Bush over Iraq.
> Tim Burke has a post up about evil which you should read. (Hat tip: Gary Jones.)