Brief Reply to a Bad Review

Evan Selinger wrote a bad review of my book in the LARB.

It is difficult for me sometimes to know where the boundary is between the forbidden ad hominem and the simple acknowledgment that some potential interlocutor inhabits such a distant world from mine that communication on points of substance will be impossible. So it is with some hesitation that I begin by reporting the strong signal of proud American philistinism that I get from Selinger; the awareness that I am dealing with someone who does not know what to do when, in a book that announces in its title that it is a ‘history’, he encounters ideas and authors coming from, well, history (Sor Juana, Saxo Grammaticus); the sort of person who is used to having an audience for which he has to explain, and thinks it is normal to have to explain, when the name of William S. Burroughs comes up, that we are talking about a ‘writer associated with the Beat Generation’ (one recalls those high-school acquaintances who take a once-in-a-lifetime vacation to Rome, say, and post photos on Facebook, standing in front of the Coliseum, of their trip to “Rome, Italy”); who, for all his dissatisfaction with my project, seems most affronted that I should publicly say what I think of recent popular culture: that it is for stunted and self-infantilising people, and that academics in particular are failing at their duty to at least try to be intellectuals when they spend their time talking about action-hero movies and fantasy television.

What I mean is that it is hard to think of anyone with whom I share less, in terms of general intellectual, moral, and aesthetic sensibility, than Selinger, so it’s hard too to have any other reaction to his review than to shrug and say: ok, fair enough, but I think I’m just going to keep doing more of what I’ve been doing. This reply is not meant, I mean, as an escalation, but as an explanation of the grounds for indifference.

The only glaring factual error in the review is the claim that ‘most’ of the material in the book previously appeared elsewhere. In fact the material in two sections of two chapters, out of nine chapters, is adapted from earlier publications, as I state explicitly in the acknowledgments. There is also at least one glaring failure to engage with the actual ideas put forth in the book, where I discuss at length the significance of the fact that, in our present philosophical culture, ‘erudite’ generally functions as a back-handed compliment extended to the person who is presumed to lack the sheer brilliance to really ‘do philosophy’, and so instead compensates with mere erudition. I invoke in this connection Petrus Ramus’s project of uniting these two strands --‘eloquence’ and ‘logic’, in Ramus’s terms-- and the deep reasons why he thought such a unification was necessary for the advancement of human knowledge. But perhaps all of that is just another ‘esoteric diversion’ for Selinger. I have dedicated my life to such esoterica, because I think it is all in fact very important, for human thriving, for our life together. This book is my attempt to share the results of that dedication with others, and perhaps to draw some of them into its glow.

I'll just make a few more minor points, while leaving many other possible ones of a similar nature unmade. Selinger does not seem to know what the adjective “woke” means. One is not woke, in current parlance, because one knows who William S. Burroughs, the writer associated with the Beat Generation, is; one is woke because one knows who he is, and moreover finds him “problematic” for some reason or other. More disconcertingly, Selinger does not seem to know what the noun “square” means (“...squares that have sides of equal length...”), or if he does know what it means then he has a peculiar understanding of the rhetorical force of redundancy. Nor does he seem to know what to do with a block quotation, such as the one that ends the “Murder He Wrote” section of the review. A block quotation is to be explicated after it is given, otherwise it leaves the strong impression that the author is only filling up space and really has no idea at all what he's doing. It is the sort of thing commonly seen, as a friend remarked to me, in the sort of student paper to which one gives a hasty and insincere B+, after which one entertains the brief fantasy of a total career overhaul.

I might also note that I’ve already responded, by way of anticipation, to the main line of Selinger’s criticism, in an interview posted at the Princeton University Press website: “The book is an essay and not a theoretical or argumentative work, which means that it is a contribution to a genre in ill repute among academics, and runs the risk of being dismissed by my philosopher-peers as conveying little more than what is called on Twitter a ‘mood’. I can live with that.” Otherwise, what more can I say? I think it’s impressive that Los Angeles, of all cities, has a review of books now too, and nice that they let Evan post his essay to their website.

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Modified 8 May, 2019.

Comments

[a.i.b.]

De Irrationalitate librum novum atque doctissimum tibi gratulor. Eruditione tua dignus est liber et ingenio. Non te exaniment peditus indoctorum invidorumque.