Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1998 13:18:10 -0400
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [PEN-L:457] Re: Philosophy, Marxism and the ecological
crisis
Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Louis Proyect wrote:
>Having said that, I find the notion of a phenomenology-Marxism synthesis
>sort of dubious. Phenomenology is a subject-driven methodology,
while the>historical materialist approach is just the opposite.
Isn't it a problem of historical materialism that it's so uninterested in
subjects and subjectivity? Some Marxish people turn to Freud, among others,
to understand how subjects are produced and why people think & feel the
things they do, but lots of Marxists seem to think that's impure. A
bourgeois taint. A lot of hardcore Marxist opposition to "postmodernism" is
probably based on a prejudice that it's too interested in subjects.
I thought it was the other way around. Although marxists speak of
classes, they (Lukacs in particular) think of the proletariat as
a class-subject, capable of self-knowledge, self-consciousness and
rationality. Freud, on the other hand, inverts the primacy of the
subject, questions the very idea that the subject can know itself, be
conscious of itself, for there is an unconscious within us which is
never transparent. But certain followers of Freud thought it was
possible to "cure" the subject of certain unconscious drives via
psychoanalysis. Lacan read Freud differently, arguing that the
unconscious is too opaque, heterogeneous, always beyond the subject's
intentionality. Postmodernism too rejects any notion of a grand
subject of history; instead they speak of a "decentered subject".
ricardo
