Love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
I’m not entirely sure I get Richard Rorty’s article on academic freedom (via). What he seems to be saying is, it’s vitally important that liberal humanist intellectuals be free to stir up the presuppositions of their students, on the condition that this has absolutely no effect beyond the classroom.
And, of course, Žižek should have the last word:
Richard Rorty, otherwise my good friend, if there ever was an honest liberal I think it’s Richard Rorty. Of course I disagree with him, of course when we take power he will go to gulag, but I will provide for him a nice cell with a double ration of meat every day, and so on.
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Where do you get the “no effect beyond the classroom” bit? All he seems to be saying is that this role (of making each successive generation doubt itself as well as its paying parents/funding elders) cannot be talked about in public - a banal enough point, really. His remarks about the rampant “deconstructing” of “the Nietzschian left” are sort of nauseatingly liberal, yes, and bizarre if one considers the gushing elegy he penned for Derrida (he was kind enough to email back when I enquired, back when)…but then, it’s a popular article, whose polemical tack seems maybe clear enough.
That’s a funny Zizek quote (surely he is being absolutely personal and serious!)
Comment by Matt @ 1/22/2006 6:38 pm
There were a couple of paragraphs that pissed me off, both examples of Rorty’s “my society right or wrong” position: thesis 8, which seems to imply the impossibility of any critique more radical than “telling America to be true to its ideals,” and thesis 11, where he suggests that the humanities are needed to provide “common reference points with people in previous generations and in other social classes.” Both seem like examples of Rorty’s infuriatingly smug pessimism about the possibility of any radical alternative to the status quo.
Comment by tim @ 1/22/2006 10:33 pm
Well, yes. But then I don’t know if you’re familiar with them or not, but the universities with condition in the US are still, and increasingly, very. conservative. places.
Comment by Matt @ 1/24/2006 8:32 am
(And that is the apparent context for his polemic - not that it excuses anything.)
Comment by Matt @ 1/24/2006 8:34 am
Yes, that’s quite true. And Rorty here is being a good liberal, in the sense of trying to keep open a space in which those of us to the left of liberal can also work. He’s on our side here, so the Phil Ochs reference was probably rather harsh.
Comment by tim @ 1/26/2006 12:28 pm
Worst song writer ever.
Comment by Matt @ 1/26/2006 3:37 pm