MDMD Eagleton & Aliens

[Terrance]

Paul, 

Enjoying your posts. 

Eagleton is apt.  M&D "aliens", "others", "stereotypes",  postmodern ism
ist, the hard boiled Left, the class struggle and all that. 

 

Thanks again, 


Much of this fascination with otherness
involves the liberal assumption that there are no real
aliens, just ways of seeing others as aliens. For
conservatives, aliens are other people; for liberals,
they are the fruit of false consciousness; for
radicals, they are ourselves. There is indeed a
monstrosity, an enigma resistant to understanding;
it's just that it is a lot closer to home than the Dinka
or Transylvanian aristocrats. The Yahoos, as
Gulliver begins chillingly to realise, are as close to
the bone as you can get. What we share with the
allegedly impenetrable other is just this overlapping
of strangenesses; and it is this, rather than some
mutual mirror-imaging of egos, which has to
become the basis of a genuine encounter. Always
seeing the other as others is partly a way of
avoiding this unnerving recognition, just as
attending consistently to the margins is usually a
way of implying that there are no conflicts or
subversions to be found at the centre. In this
assumption, Post-Modernists are rather more
sanguine than the World Bank.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n16/eagl2316.htm