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Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged; to be transcended it must first be remembered.
Russell Jacoby
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The individual, before it can determine itself, is determined by the relations in which it is enmeshed. It is a fellow-being before it is a being.
Russell Jacoby
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Those seeking to work out the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis have not been immune to the intellectual division of labor that severs the life nerve of dialectical thought.
Russell Jacoby
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Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.
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Skinner … decrees … the abolition of freedom by way of behavior modification and a souped-up environment, in the name of a new scientific value—survival. The irony is that freedom and individuality have only existed in their mangled bourgeois form; to propose junking them in the name of survival is to propose the very society we now have, one that subsists exactly by an ethos of survival, paying lip service to freedom and the individual while rewarding the victors and punishing the victims. Freedom and individuality have never been more than adornments for an ugly environment of survival of the fittest.
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Once upon a time leftists and radicals talked of liberation or the abolition of work. Now the talk is about full employment.
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[Carl] Rogers's Encounter Groups … is copy for the campaign of self-manipulation in an age of mass manipulation. … The notion here is simple: the real person is locked within the artificial, the role, and needs a little encouragement to step out into the fresh air. As with the neo-Freudians, society is conceived as an external factor, an outside force acting on the individual, but not decisively casting the individual from without and from within. The mechanical conception, severing within and without, and presupposing that only the outside is prey to social forces, is assumed or stated throughout the post-Freudian writings.
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What must be acknowledged, for example the prevalence of anxiety, is grafted onto man's essence as if it grew there. Such is the tried and tested method of the apologist: what is social in origin is presented as natural.
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In the name of a new theory past theory is declared honorable but feeble; one can lay aside Freud and Marx—or appreciate their limitations—and pick up the latest at the drive-in window of thought.
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The disdain for culture expressed by Johst and Fanon is not identical, however. Both despise the deceit of culture, but for opposite reasons. For Johst, culture is in itself a fraud, the cheap talk of weaklings; for Fanon, culture deceives by reneging on its promises. Johst and the Nazis hated culture itself; Fanon hated its hypocrisy, a very different notion.
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As Comte wrote, the task of positivism was to imbue the people with the feeling that … no political change is of real importance. … As Marx wrote, to it everything that exists is an authority.
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The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist.
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To fasten on the facts while forgetting the social content is to fall prey to a mystifying immediacy. In an antagonistic society, appearance and essence, immediacy and mediacy, diverge; things are not what they seem to be.
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The story of the rise, fall, and forgetting of the individual is the tale of the rise, fall, and repression of psychoanalysis.
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Freudian concepts exposed the fraud of the existence of the individual. To be absolutely clear here: the Freudian concepts expose the fraud, not so as to perpetuate it, but undo it. That is, unlike the mechanical behaviorists, the point was not to prove that the individual was an illusion; rather it was to show to what extent the individual did not yet exist. To critical theory, psychoanalysis demonstrates the degree to which the individual is de-individualized by society.
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Freud's link to a Hegelian tradition—with which he otherwise shares little—is in the deliberate renunciation of common sense. A person who professes to believe in commonsense psychology, Freud is reported saying once, and who thinks psychoanalysis is 'far-fetched' can certainly have no understanding of it, for it is common sense which produces all the ills we have to cure.
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The free market in ideas has never been free, but always a market. To undo this necessitates not commissars and censors but critical intelligence loyal to an objective notion of truth. If there is a repressive tolerance, then there is also a liberating intolerance.
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The concept of human existence suggests an abstract human condition; class existence indicts bad conditions. The former suggests a nonexistent egalitarianism, as if master and slave, owner and worker, bomber and bombed all participate in the same universal abstraction. … The human condition for the rich is the inhuman one for the impoverished.
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Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of on the one hand and the other but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source.
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The professional philosopher in keen competition with the natural scientist resolves to be more certain about less.
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[Freud's] concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist: in the privacy of the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society. … Freud exposed the lie that subject was inviolate; he showed that at every point is was violated.
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At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.
Lafcadio Hearn
Russell Jacoby
Born:
April 23, 1945
(age 79)
Bio:
Russell Jacoby is a professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles an author, and critic of academic culture.
Known for:
The last intellectuals (1987)
The end of utopia (1999)
The Bell Curve Debate (1995)
Most used words:
society
individual
social
contradictions
bourgeois
culture
freud
theory
sense
ideology
thought
notion
common
psychoanalysis
critical
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