Since it went up last week, "The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis" seems to have created some interest at antiglobalization and anarchosyndicalist websites. It would be interesting to know if people are then hunting down the bootleg material in question. While plugging the title of my article into Google yields more than 500 hits, the title of the Castoriadis work in question, The Rising Tide of Insignificancy, shows up on just 22 web pages. Since the latter is a rather hefty volume (my print-out of the PDF fills two binders), it may take a while before enough people have read it to comment.

 

I hope to have a review-essay on Rising Tide together for the next issue of New Politics. It's great to have an excuse to reread Castoriadis. (Revisited volume 3 of the Political and Social Writings over the weekend.) Might also go back to Lyotard's essay about being in S. ou B. My friend the late Marty Glaberman -- "an unreconstructed Johnsonite," as he once put it, "there aren't too many around any more" -- went to Paris around 1964, when the group was debating Castoriadis's challenge to Marxism as the theoretical basis for their revolutionary orientation.

 

Of course, what was left of the Johnson group were allied with the "paleo-Marxist" current around Lyotard. Which meant that a retired auto worker ended up sleeping on the couch of the guy who later wrote The Postmodern Condition. 

 

For some reason I have the sudden urge to write a one-act play.

 

But instead, I'll just toss up this link to the first two installments of the Zizek Watch column that I'm doing at odd moments at the paper. This also seems like a good occasion to point you to Adam Kotsko's useful and nicely done page of Zizekiana. No blogging at all for the next couple of days, as I head off to NYC to attend a seminar at Columbia University. The train ride and down-time will be a good chance to get caught up on some reading. (On reflection, "getting caught up" is a dubious expression.)

 

I've said it before, yet must say it once more -- I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this.

Well under 20 percent of the visitors to this site come from an "edu" domain. So it seems a fair guess that much of the readership may not have heard the news that Invisible Adjunct is calling it quits. It's hard to know what to say about this development that others have not already put better. (For a partial rundown of commentary, check out Ralph E. Luker's entry yesterday at Cliopatria.)

Just some scattered ruminations, then.

 

It was last December that IA provided a link to my incredibly vile, destructive, mean-spirited, sarcastic, bitter, and altogether unconscionable effort to destroy the Modern Languages Association, by placing tongue-in-cheek. (Or maybe tongue-in-chic.) And I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for those darned kids! 

 

Actually, IA herself never really caught on to my dasterdly scheme. She was much too sane. But in any event, two realizations followed from that experience.

 

One was that, unlike most academic blogs, IA had a really broad readership. Just to avoid another spasmodic incident, I should make clear that this is not a dis of blogs with tiny readerships. Many of the subjects I most want to read about interest maybe 14 other people in the world. (The Husserlian component of Bourdieu's notion of "habitus," anyone?) But if we take it quite for granted that even the best academic blog might be a niche phenomenon, then the existence of a cross-institutional audience for one individual's comments is all the more impressive.

 

Then came the second realization; namely, that IA had drawn her following by somehow using unidentifiability to universalize her experience. Which was, if anything, even more puzzling. The ability to do so cannot be taken for granted.  Or rather, perhaps, the strength of character involved shouldn't be.

 

Anonymity does not seem to bring out the best in people. Someone using a fake name can be just as much of a blithering, ranting, resentment-crazed, semi-autistic creep as he wants to be. No accountability! Woo-hoo! It's a virtual paradise for any chump with a chip on his shoulder. 

 

So I learned, the hard way. Remember, folks, you're nobody 'til some nobody hates you. As it happens, the phenomenon in question has now been reduced to an elegant formula (Q.E.D. courtesy of Easily Distracted).

 

IA's use of her anonymity stands out, by contrast, at utterly honorable. As a very small token of respect, then, here is a short interview about the early history of anonymous public discourse. I don't know much about the circumstances of IA's departure. But it would be good to think that she will, in time, find some other way to exercise in public once againt the combination of critical intelligence and civic-minded civility that has distinguished her site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In any case, just as soon as I finished paddling against WTV's stream of  logorrhea, along came Alice H. Flaherty's The Midnight Disease, which discusses, among other things, graphomania. Now that is some kind of synchronicity. My short item on Flaherty's book appeared in Newsday on Sunday.

A big surprise: This morning, Arts and Letters Daily provided a link to my article in this week's Chronicle about an anonymously translated and edited volume of writings by Cornelius Castoriadis. The table of contents is available here, with the full text of the book now download-able in PDF.

 

Last week I had lunch with Chris Lehmann, an old friend who is an editor of Book World, the review supplement of the The Washington Post. He said something like: "Well, you've got the Castoriadis beat pretty much to yourself." I'd never really thought of it that way, but fair enough. That a tip about this bootleg came to me was not exactly a chance occurance.

 

In 1988, when the first two volumes of the Political and Social Writings were published -- collecting CC's work from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, as he worked his way from a heterodox Trotskyism to something that can only be called, for want of a less lame expression, "post-Marxist" -- I read them constantly for at least a month. A major event in my intellectual life. His group, Socialisme ou Barbarie, had close connections with the American organization best known (which is to say hardly known at all) as the Johnson-Forest Tendency. If you want an account of the similarities and differences between Castoriadis's notion of "bureaucratic capitalism" and C.L.R. James's of "state capitalism" -- and the relationship of either to the theory of "bureaucratic collectivism" -- then I am quite prepared to discuss the matter until your eyes roll back up in your head. 

 

When a couple of new volumes of his work were published a few years ago, I wrote an item for Lingua Franca -- later reprinted, if that is the word, at the website of Civitas International. Late last year, I got a tip about the existence of this "samizdat" or "bootleg" edition of some CC writings. As luck would have it, not only did my editor at the paper, Rich Byrne, know who he was, but he'd seen CC at a conference in Prague in 1997, not so long before he died. Rich had a vivid memory of what a brilliant presentation Castoriadis had given. (A very funny line from that paper is quoted in the new article.) So it turned out to be a very easy "sell" to get to do this piece.

 

The fact that this new book was published in such curious circumstances made it a great story, in any case. But a complex one to report. And no less so to condense into a narrative that could be read by people with no idea who Castoriadis might be -- which is to say, slightly more than 99.9 percent of anybody in American academic life. You could fit all the people who have published scholarship on CC in English into a very small bus.    

 

Unfortunately, my article gives only the sketchiest account of the material in the new book. That is a pain. Life is an endless struggle between content and format. But a case can be made that The Rising Tide of Insignificancy provides the single best point of access for readers who don't come to Castoriadis with anything like my own insatiable interest in his work. I am working on a review-essay about The Rising Tide itself -- rather than the circumstances behind its publication -- for the next issue of New Politics.

 

The latter, by the way, now has a web address that is much easier to remember than the one it used to have: newpol.org. A year has passed since the death of Julius Jacobson, one of the two founding editors. (Will put up my speech at his memorial before too long.) Earlier this month, we visited Phyllis Jacobson in the nursing home where she has been since a stroke a few years ago. She was alert, at least for part of the time, and seemed able to follow most of what we said.

 

For example, I asked if she remembered Castoriadis, who she and Julie met at some point in the late 1970s. (They also knew some old SouB comrades in France.) She clearly indicated that she did. I'm going to try to get her a copy of the print version of the article, which has his picture. It also shows a copy of the cover of an issue of the SouB journal -- which, come to think of it, looks quite a bit like New Politics did, before its recent format change.

 

 

 

 

 

A long weekend of no pressing obligations....no stress....I have some household chores to do, of course, but with no sense of urgency. Don't recall the last time things were like this. 

 

It feels very strange. But in a good way. Verging on euphoria, actually. It's like that joke about the guy hitting his head with a hammer: "It feels so good when I stop!"

 

 

It's Saint Patrick's day, and at long last I am reading Studs Lonigan in the new Library of America edition. That is a coincidence, really, but the good kind. I'm also dipping around in the new biography of Farrell (strictly speaking, the first full-length bio of Farrell ever published). It is a book I plan to read from start to finish, probably next week. But for now, curiosity obliges me to explore it some via the index – which is rapidly turning into an exercise in frustration.

 

In the 1930s and '40s, Farrell was a Trotskyist. He later became what would now probably be called a neoconservative. An inordinate number of really stupid things have been said over the past year by journalist who refer to the "neoconservative cabal" around Bush, claiming that they are "Trotskyites" whose foreign policy is an application of "the theory of permanent revolution" to the world post-9/11.

These people have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. All they know, or think they know, is that some people who call themselves neoconservatives used to think well of Trotsky -- and that Trotsky had a theory called "permanent revolution." (Which means….uh … that you have a revolution all the time?) From this they deduce that anybody described with the one label must have absorbed a certain body of ideas and political persectives. And so, having already come up with a headline like "A Bad Case of the Trots" or something comparably witty, they go on to write absolute gibberish. It is very difficult to underestimate how little real historical knowledge is required by a Washington pundit. This is a town where "cultural literacy" means the ability to do a Nexis search.

Of course, it is entirely possible that I am wrong. Perhaps Condoleeza Rice really does have a definite sense of the role of the peasantry in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The smart gambler would not bet on this scenario, however.

Anyway, about 90 percent of this stuff on "Trotskyites in the Pentagon" sounds kind of like an effort to wrap what would otherwise seem like pretty straightforward anti-Semitism in packaging that is a little more respectable. Because come on, let’s face it, the Trots were pretty much all Jews, right? The anti-Stalinist left was just something for them to do until the state of Israel came along…..

Well, actually, it’s all a bit more complicated than that. Which brings me back, in a roundabout way, to the index of the new Farrell biography. In the early 1940s, while still a Trotskyist, Farrell worked on a set of essays on Napoleon. While writing them, he discussed his readings with C.L.R. James – a Trotskyist of a different variety, which makes the fact that they were talking (rather than hectoring each other) kind of interesting. James had studied the French revolution for about twenty years, with only part of his knowledge of the topic reflected in The Black Jacobins. 

There’s also the fact that James – a Trinidadian who was in the U.S. under dubious circumstances – had done his stint of revolutionary agitation in Ireland. So did they talk about that, too? People who treat the history of the American Trotskyist movement as a chapter in the history of Jewish identity probably won’t see that as interesting. I don't know what they would make of the fact that James, after he was grilled by the FBI about his passport violations, James adopted the party name "G.F. Eckstein." (A six-foot tall black man with a British accent, being pursued by the U.S. government and trying to hide behind that pseudonym ....it seems like a bit of gallows humor, maybe.)

In the preface to the book reprinting the Napoleon essays, Farrell thanks "J.R. Johnson" (another of CLR’s party names) for his help with them. A few years ago, I tried researching the Farrell-James connection by going through relevant parts of the Farrell papers at the University of Pennsylvania library. No luck. Another source yielded some correspondence between Farrell and Raya Dunayevskaya (the "Forest" of the Johnson-Forest Tendency) about the political economy of the USSR. Exactly the sort of evidence to suggest that exploring the relationship between JTF and CLRJ could throw some light on both parties.

So the first thing I look up in the new biography is, of course, "James, C.L.R." No luck. Nor is there an entry for Dunayevska. Nor Napoleon, even. The pages on Farrell as Trotskyist are … well… not a contribution to the specialist literature. 

My fond hope that the book would save me some research is long gone, and so I am moved to tears of manly self-pity.

Other than that, I look forward to reading it.

Anyway, to celebrate St. Patrick’s day, here is a link to a page full of sundry Trot documents on Eire, including a series of essays on James Connolly that Farrell published in the late 1940s.

My own somewhat convoluted response to the holiday, and to ethnicity itself, is reflected in an essay from three years ago, now available online for the first time since the sad day that Feed disappeared from the web.

 

At long last, my review of William Vollmann's behemoth "treatise on violence" has appeared as the cover story in this week's New York Times Book Review. The cover art for which contains what would appear to be the wheels of several power saws, cutting red lines through a field of black.