Last exit fascism

[Dave Monroe]

... okay, have read that essay (how could one not have by now?), am familiar
with Jameson's take on him, do have Habermas' The New Conservativism somehwere
around teh house (started it, lost interest, apparently), will review.  Would,
of course, note that, just because Habermas calls poststructuralsim
"conservative," poststructuralists "young conservatives,"  "it ain't
necessarily so" ((c) George Gershwin).  Recall that, in the two chapters he
devotes to Derrida, deconstruction in The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity, at lesat one of them, perhaps both, JH manages not once to actually
cite JD, which isn't exactly in the spirit of "responsible" critique, or even
reading, for that matter.  But I believe the bone of contention is that
Habermas is still holding out for such things as consensus, unproblematically
"clear" communication, and so forth, things which, of course, yr avg
poststructuralist tends to see as inherently problematic, if not
nigh-unto-impossible, and perhaps even, on occasion, a bit undesirable.  But,
again, these are issues of interest to me, alwasy interested in discussing
them ...

Paul Mackin wrote:

> This isn't really exactly what I had in mind in my "hopelessly
> reactionary" figure but it may be a useful addition anyway. It's something
> Habermas has  in his piece "Modernity versus Postmodernity" (1981)
> (in a readings book). Habermas according to Jameson's
> (3 dimensionl) classification of the various postmodernisms falls
> into the promodernist/antipost-modernist politically progressive
> contingent. (Thinks modernism ought to be hung in with a while
> longer in other words) Anyway, focussing on the aesthetic aspects,
> Habermas explicitely attaches the appellation "Young Conservatives" to
> those  antimodernist/propostmodernist who have embraced the ideas of
> poststructuralism. (there are also the old conservatives and the
> neoconservatives in his schema)
>
> Will keep looking for the Jameson and Eagleton discussions. Something more
> in the directly political realm.
>
>                         P.