MARX, LABICA, INTELLECTUAL TRADITIONS

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Health problems and pressing obligations have prevented me from
following up on certain threads as I had promised to do.
Recently, I raised the problem of intellectual traditions in
connection with responses to David McInerney and Justin Schwartz.
For now, I want to confine my discussion to the question as
relates to Marx and the work done on him by Georges Labica.

What Labica represents politically or how he relates to Althusser
or other French intellectuals does not matter to me at all right
now.  For in his book MARXISM AND THE STATUS OF PHILOSOPHY he
actually got off (or on?) his ass and did some real, painstaking
work that follows Marx's development step by step.  I believe he
leaves some loose ends finally, but he poses the questions and
describes the relationships between successive stages of Marx's
work -- including the question of continuity and discontinuity --
in a way that Althusser was just too lazy and schematic to do.


What is most interesting about Labica's book is that he does not
take the lazy intellectual's way out of dealing with the
troublesome understanding of intellectual development simply by
subsuming it under categories, traditions, allegiances, or such
labels.  Rather, at each step Labica takes great pains to question
and examine the orientation, motives, goals, and individual
trajectory being pursued in connection with the external material
being taken on.  This is especially important for Marx far more
than for most thinkers, for his very relationship with the
philosophical tradition with which he struggled was fundamentally
different than for what it was for other thinkers.  So to simply
label Marx as a Hegelian gone bad or good -- depending on your
stance -- does not really explain the nature of Marx's engagement
with this tradition, with the appropriation of or set of concerns
which he brought to the philosophy that he absorbed.

McInerney's entire approach to intellectual questions, including
his readiness to label me a bhaskarian, not to mention his
self-proclaimed utter indifference to philosophy other than in his
capacity as an -- ugh! -- political scientist, indicate just how
shallow his understanding of this problem really is, as befits an
academically trained puppy dog.  And for Justin to suggest that
for him clear thinking means having to answer to Quine, I can only
say that I feel embarrassed for him.

To manipulate general categories characterizing a person's work as
a substitute for getting into the real meat of a person's work and
the specific dynamics that pertain therein is not something
everyone can do spontaneously, certainly not without acquired
erudition, but it is also not a task that requires genius or even
great intellectual talent.

Interestingly, this fundamental issue of intellectual history was
understood quite well by Jonathan Ree and his associates, who
questioned the notion of history of philosophy by interrogating
fundamental assumptions about continuity and tradition.  (I posted
on this a couple of years ago on a couple of lists -- I'm not sure
about this one.)

That's all you're getting out of me now.


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