As I was working on a draft of an essay to be posted in "Against Dark Arts," hackers again engaged in deliberate alterations of my text and prevented me from making corrections at NYPL computer #7, Morningside Heights branch. I will struggle to finish typing this text in order to post the essay dealing with Mr. Roque's arrest and indictment and Mr. Christie new troubles which I am, at this moment, being prevented from writing by Trenton officials, seemingly, with impunity for their crimes committed against a person living in New York.
Sabotage prevented initial publication of the essay that appears below at this blog. An earlier version of this text was posted on January 30, 2012. I am not on Face Book nor am I on Twitter. I do not have a e-bay account nor have I ever had such an account. There are no photographs of me posted on the Internet. Bogus images and web sites purporting to be associated with me may be posted by New Jersey persons. These blogs are the only locations where I write on-line.
http://www.amacad.org/news/pressReleases.aspx?i=199 ("The Heart of the Matter.")
http://www.facebook.com/juangalismenendez?ref=fs (Bogus Facebook site purporting to be mine and bearing the photo of a man in his seventies who is not me. There is no "Jose Galis-Menendez" in the USA or on facebook. I have no idea who created this site or why. OAE?)
There is no New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs "Final Order" against me, nor any other state agency judgment against me that I am aware of, nor do I face criminal charges anywhere in America or the world. I have never been charged with a crime in any jurisdiction. I do not own (or use) a cellphone. I never have made use of such a mobile device. ("Invicta Watch Company" and "The Invicta Watch Company Caper.")
I will attempt to retype the work in order to fit the text into this altered format. I will also attempt to print the republished essay. For an example of the cybercrime and censorship that I struggle against, please see "Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" at Philosopher's Quest.
Recent hearings have confirmed Pentagon claims that the "entire world" is a battlefield in America's "War on Terror." This military and intelligence struggle is estimated to be likely to persist for ten to twenty years "at least."
The U.S. government claims the right to monitor ALL communications between persons on-line and news organizations. Accordingly, ALL records and sources from any publication or writer may be seized. Perhaps this claim explains my experiences as an Internet writer.
"The Return of the Democratic Left." West, Piven, Walzer. February 12-19, 2012, St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, New York. A conference on Building a Democratic Socialist Left. Will this conference provide the basis for a book?
President Barack Obama admitted in January, 2012 that the U.S. has made use of drone weapons which are "very precise." Estimates of "collateral damage" -- in the form of "unintended casualties" -- number in the thousands. The vast majority of these casualties may be women and children.
Among the disturbing developments in American academia is a turning away from standards of excellence and respect for the intellectual monuments of our civilization. This includes the political achievements of American society which receive far less attention than its failures. For example -- at least until recently -- America's endangered commitment to freedom of the press and privacy of citizens was insufficiently appreciated.
Young people have always defined themselves in opposition to tradition. This is a healthy and, often, extremely wise attitude on the part of the young. Like sex, the fundamental ideas of philosophy are rediscovered by every generation of young persons.
In the past, however, there was a slight recognition of the need to glance at the classics in order to determine whether allegedly unenlightened commentators -- like Aristotle, for example -- may have had something interesting to say on subjects of continuing interest to youthful admirers of Lady Gaga or "The Colbert Report."
I refer to subjects and concepts like justice, politics, or the meaning of history and goodness as well as truth. This naive notion that there is merit in the classics -- or such a thing as truth -- is dismissed today as a relic of a world and the educational experiences of persons unaware of The Simpsons television show and lap-top computers who are, thus, no longer worthy of concern or respect. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")
A young person attending a so-called "elite" (translated as "expensive") liberal arts college in America may be told by a trendy, politically correct, and duly-tenured imbecile that it is not only possible but advisable to read a difficult author (Michel Foucault) -- who is immersed in the Western philosophical tradition even as he contributes to it -- without ANY knowledge of that tradition or, indeed, of Foucault's roots as (successively) a phenomenologist, Stucturalist, Poststructuralist, historian, or even a Kantian Critical Theorist.
The Order of Things was reviewed in France as a twentieth century version of The Critique of Pure Reason. Please see Jacques Derrida's debate with Michel Foucault, then Jurgen Habermas's critique of the later works of Michel Foucault.
There is "no need to know all of that stuff," our children are told and then explain to the rest of us, because people can "just read the book" -- for instance, Discipline and Punish. "Think outside the box!"
Reading the book will not be enough (even for Gloria Anzaldua) without a knowledge of the issues to which the "author" is contributing, or how Foucault's method is both revolutionary and a continuation of Nietzschean genealogical methods from the nineteenth century, along with suspicions filtered through the French high-cultural tradition that includes Sartre, Ganguilhem, Deleuze, and so many others.
To turn your back on what an "older" student of Foucault's works may contribute to your appreciation of such thinkers and much more is foolish.
Demonizing authority, especially in its masculine form, is a bizarre deformation of what purports to be feminist theory. Judith Butler studied with Hans-Georg Gadamer. To my knowledge, Professor Butler has not vilified (publicly) the works of her mentor despite the fact that Gadamer was an unrepentant male person until his death. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory" and "'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
I cannot accept that contempt for scholars who happen to be men over 40 is now a requirement of feminist scholarship. I am sure that some of those over-forty students and thinkers of the male persuasion may be highly sympathetic to feminist "discourse." Plato, Freud, Marx, Hegel, Wollstonecraft and Weil may still merit an occasional perusal before finals. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
To praise ignorance or bad taste is dangerous for those who would challenge conventional or traditional understandings of fields of learning. ("Why Jane Can't Read" and "America's Nursery School Campus.")
Challenges and suspicions of power are most effective when uttered by those who have mastered the same fields of learning, displaying impressive scholarship themselves, as did Michel Foucault and as does Judith Butler today. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question.")
Hostility to the achievements of classic thinkers may account for shallow and incompetent writings in the humanities, which seem to be more common than ever these days, together with laughable reviews of films and books by the likes of "Manohla Dargis" of The New York Times. ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review" then "Is the universe only a numbers game?")
Civilization is your inheritance and also your legacy to future generations of students and scholars. The purpose of higher education or cultivation of taste and judgment -- which is a life-long process -- is to become, in the fullness of time and with a lot of luck, also much effort, a civilized human being. ("Master and Commander" and "Conversation on a Train.")
Relish and celebrate the civilization which your fine education will allow you to absorb, if you are at an elite university today, so that you can improve that civilization for those who come after you, or who will never be as fortunate as you are and (I hope) will be.
This is a major part of what the word "graduation" means: to make a better world that you can then give to others who will come after you.
"There is thus a definite correspondence between the Kantian critique and what in the same period was posited as the first almost complete form of ideological analysis." Michel Foucault explains: "But ideology [power] by extending its reflection over the field of knowledge -- from primary impressions to political economy, by way of logic, arithmetic, the sciences of nature, and grammar -- tried to resume in the form of representation precisely what was being formed and re-formed outside representation. This resumption could be accomplished only by the quasi-mythical form of a simultaneously singular and universal genesis: an isolated, empty, and abstract consciousness must, beginning with the most tenuous form of representation, build up little by little the great table of all that is representable. In this sense ideology is the last of the Classical philosophies -- rather Juliette [the Marquis de Sade's "sado"-masochistic novel] is the last of the Classical narratives. ... [Kant] sanctions for the first time that event in European culture which coincides with the end of the eighteenth century: the withdrawal of knowledge and thought outside the space of representation. ..."
Michel Foucault, "The Limits of Representation," in The Order of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 242-243 then Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 170-195. Please compare Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1998), pp. 15-34 with Quassim Cassam, "Mind, Knowledge and Reality: Themes From Kant," in Anthony O'Hear, Ed., Current Issues in Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1998), pp. 321-348.
