Re: The materialist road...

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jukka, your post on materialism, structure and agency, and
Althusser was very good.  If you can get something out of this
Lacanian crap, good for you.  However, Lacan and the Slovenians
sound very unappealing even by your description.

I am really amazed that people could take the juvenile writings of
Althusser so seriously.  I read his essay on ideological state
apparatuses recently because it was recommended by a friend of
mine.  I could get a better understanding of human behavior out of
comic books.  Who could take this jejune shit seriously but some
dumbass bureaucratic professors?

I don't see how Althusser could have opened anybody's eyes to
anything, unless the Communist Parties of the world (such as his
own) had degraded thinking so much, it required one of their own
childish number to reopen investigation -- for those very same
kind of people -- into fundamental questions once again.  But
Althusser deserves no credit for doing anything new.

The category of the subject is not just the province of precious
academics and philosophers.  Resurrecting the subject has always
been part and parcel of the fight against Stalinism.  Richard
Wright was doing this back in the 1940s.  He is explicit about it
in THE OUTSIDER (1953).  We don't have to count the commas and
semicolons in Marx's writings or worry to death the reflection
theory in Lenin's to discover the roots of Stalinism.  We have
clear and concrete evidence of which bad ideas are associated with
abominable political practices, for those who want to know.  So if
we can strangle Shawgi Tell with the entrails of David McInerney,
we can help prevent the reoccurrence of the disease.

Instead of wasting any more time over the Parisian Strangler, I
recommend checking out the recent discussion on the Bhaskar list
of structure and agency, which is on a much higher level.


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