Imagine for a minute how you might respond if I were to insist that Cornell West can only be understood as a black philosopher and presented my own work in terms of the necessity of overcoming black philosophy. Imagine that my work involved understanding the history of philosophy in terms of a contrast between black and Greek philosophy and moreover understood different black philosophers in terms of their place in this contrast. Moreover, imagine that Cornell West repeatedly publicly stated that he hated my reductive understanding of his work as merely being epiphenomenal aspect of some black racial essence, yet I continued to hector him with it.
Would it be hyperbole to say that I was being racist?
Is it hyperbole to say that the homologous aspects of François Laruelle's work are anti-semitic ("black" being "Jewish" and "Cornell West" being Jacques Derrida)? I write this because I feel bad for snarkily responding to a comment by "APS" to this post. The fact is, I had no idea what she was talking about when she wrote:
So is this what OOO does now? They just write posts about how they are unfairly maligned and treated poorly while their major figures go around accusing people of anti-semitism? Neat. Really makes me want to take you guys seriously.*
APS' comment was not only surreally uncharitable to my post, but I just had no idea who is going around accusing people of anti-semitism. This has prompted quite a bit of e-mail discussions to try to discern what she was talking about. Yesterday we figured it out.
Let me note two things to try to forestall a useless debate in what follows. (1) I'm not convinced that this isn't something that people of good will can disagree about. Thus, I have no beef with "APS" (whoever she is, I am presuming that she understands this stuff better than me) thinking that Morton, McGettigan, etc are mistaken. But on the other hand, I can't see how it's beyond the pale for someone to say that they find these kinds of expressions of essentialist thinking** to be anti-semitic. (2) I'm not at all convinced that this reflects in any profound way on Laruelle as a (non-)philosopher. From the papers I've attended and people I've talked with (I don't know enough continental philosophy to understand his books, which by all accounts are difficult to read in any case), Laruelle's thinking is seperable from the anti-semitic tropes. Is the anti-semitism expressive of some greater flaw in the thinking? This seems to me to be an open question about which reasonable and informed people of good will can disagree. My intuition from going to talks and reading Mullarkey's great book is that the thinking is seperable.
Moreover, French academic philosophy weirdly permits kinds of essentialist thinking that everyone else in the West has rightfully consigned to the 19th century.*** Just google "French feminism homosexuality" and see how influential French academic feminists to this day use essentialist thinking to oppose legal recognition of the marriage rights of homosexuals. This is of course ironic, since so many of the great 68 philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida (and de Beauvoir before them) produced fundamentally anti-essentialist work of lasting significance. But maybe it's not so ironic. That is, if you work in an institutional framework where it is acceptable for your colleagues to dismiss your work as far as you can tell based solely on your ethnicity, you probably will end up having greater insight into essentialist tropes.
[Notes:
*Of course the remark itself is very good evidence that it is a priori that APS will not "take us seriously." Fine, seriousness is overrated anyhow.
** No fair noting all of the ways that Laruelle is himself anti-essentialist in other contexts. We are not talking about those contexts or Laurelle as a person. We're talking about the expressions themselves. This being said, see point (2).
***Cf. Duhem on the French versus English way of doing science or the way Nietzsche talks about various ethnicities sometimes; this kind of thing used to pass for common sense.]
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