Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

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"What is the opposite of bullshit?" Possibilities of intellectual engagement, since Sartre: An interview with Bill Martin / Joseph G. Ramsey [Part 1]

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Introduction

Bill Martin is Professor of Philosophy, at DePaul University in Chicago. There, he has been an active supporter of Norman Finkelstein in his widely publicized tenure fight. Martin's work encompasses a wide range of topics from ethics, imperialism, and animal rights, to actually existing revolutionary movements, to philosophies of science and secularism. He engages seriously with figures from Sartre, Lenin, Marx, and Mao, to Plato, Aristotle, Derrida, Kant, Marcuse, Habermas, and Jameson in books including: Matrix and Line: Derrida and the possibilities of postmodern social theory (1992), Politics and the Impasse: Explorations in postsecular social theory (1996), and Humanism and Its Aftermath: the Fate of Politics and Deconstruction (1995), and The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations (1999). He has also published several books and articles dealing with creative and avant-garde music, from classical, to jazz, to contemporary rock. His forthcoming book, Ethical Marxism, argues for the necessity of an ethical supplement to Marxism, while tracing out what he sees as the persistent if fraught ethical presence at work in actually existing historical revolutionary projects. His own sustained radical project insists that in a contemporary capitalist world - that has been rendered internationally lop-sided by imperialism and cynical by postmodernist "hyper-capitalism" - the need for a Marxism rooted in ethics, and in a commitment to post-secular socialism, is greater than ever. He is editor of the series Creative Marxism, in which Ethical Marxism is the second volume, the first being Marxism and the Call of the Future, a volume of extended dialogues between Bill Martin and Bob Avakian.

Joseph G. Ramsey is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the English Department of Tufts University, Assistant Professor of English at Fisher College in Boston, MA, and co-editor of reconstruction 8.1.

This interview for Reconstruction 8.1 was conducted over email from December 2007 through February 2008. A longer version of this discussion should appear in Bill Martin's forthcoming book, "To flourish: another communism, after deconstruction."

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<1> Joe Ramsey: What do you see as the role and responsibilities of left public intellectuals today?

<2> Bill Martin: First, let's try to understand the question and the fields that need to be defined. The things we have attempted to do before, as engaged intellectuals, are to speak out where and when that is possible, to express solidarity, to sign our names when that seems as if it would be helpful, to give money when we can and because those of us with university positions are relatively privileged, and perhaps at times to place ourselves in harm's way, because this is sometimes the right thing to do and because some of us might have a certain status in society that might make other people notice the cause we are supporting and that might make us less vulnerable to attacks that people who do not have this status might not be able to endure. I would say two things about all of the foregoing. First, it seems that we do not have a lot of choice but to continue doing these sorts of things. Second, all the same, I think these sorts of things have less and less meaning and force as we go ever more deeply into this time of postmodern imperialism. The role of the engaged intellectual (whatever model one wants to pursue), and for that matter of the protestor and the activist has been increasingly neutralized, in ways that most of these folks have not taken much account of - quite possibly in most cases for the reason that the whole thing is incredibly frustrating.

<3> Let us add to this that, for much of the left, a good deal of which might be called the "so-called left," and even for many of those who are truly radical or revolutionary, the "intellectual" only has to do with the "standing" or status or cache of the person, and not with the actual intellectual work. Much the same could be said about the engaged artist, where the actual art is not understood to be any kind of contribution - it is not a matter for understanding in the first place. Obviously I am expressing a certain frustration here, but it is rooted in the reality that, if the only thing the left cares about with the intellectual is her or his standing, then this is easily undercut in a society in which intellectuals have no standing, at least not as such - as opposed to someone who might get a decent paycheck. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about my paycheck, I feel quite privileged (especially as someone who didn't really have a paycheck until I was almost thirty-five years old, which was also when I first had medical insurance as an adult), but most of our paychecks aren't that impressive to people, and there are many truck drivers and plumbers and whatnot who make just as much as professors do.

<4> In the Marxist tradition specifically, or at least Marxism that is connected to the attempt to "make revolution" (as we used to say and that I still like to say), there is very little respect for the fact that, to really be an intellectual, you have to "do your homework." This should seem bizarre in the midst of a tradition (or set of traditions) that had as its founder someone who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, who read and spoke many languages, who brought both a tremendous depth and a tremendous breadth of learning to his masterwork, Capital, and who even set out, in later life, to understand and explain the supposed mysteries of the mathematical calculus. Unfortunately, Lenin's distinction between the philosophical revolutionary (himself) and the revolutionary philosopher (Marx and Engels), along with relatively crude designations of certain schemes of thought as "materialist" and others as "idealist" (and ignoring the spirit of Lenin's own remark that it is better to have a good idealism than a bad materialism), has been used to set aside the sense that we need any of the latter, revolutionary philosophy (or even any philosophy where we do not see the immediate and direct "application to practice"), at least not since Marx. For these folks, Marx helpfully ended philosophy, when of course it is also the case, for these folks, that philosophy never started. Can one end what one never started? Can one set aside what one never took up in the first place? So, again, I am expressing some deep frustrations, made even deeper by the fact that these questions have been around so long now that they have been rendered moot.

<5> Two quick side notes here. First, despite what I just said, it would still be worthwhile to revisit some of the key moments in this basic denigration of "revolutionary philosophy" that doesn't appear immediately useful - and is therefore useless and worse - to the increasingly non-philosophical revolutionaries (or "supposed revolutionaries," I think it becomes at some point). Lukács wrote History and Class Consciousness in order to capture, philosophically, the meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution. Apart from whether he adequately achieved his aim, or whether his understanding veered off at some points into "idealism" (for my part, for what it's worth, I'll state the opposite perspective, that this was a brilliant work, and that the kind of talk concerning "idealism" heard from some Bolshevik commentators was just bullshit), why was the first reaction from certain leading Bolsheviks to simply immediately throw this book into the trash and be done with it forever? It would have been one thing if some of these leaders, many of whom were highly educated, had said, "thank you, comrade Gyorgy, we look forward to studying your book when things settle down a little bit." Instead, they couldn't get the book into the wastebin quickly enough, and they couldn't whip out the standard epithets quickly enough. What is interesting is that, after Lenin's passing, the top leaders found the time to engage in a battle of interpretations over the meaning of the October Revolution, but who needs the work of some philosopher at this point? I think it would be worth risking the opposite perspective, that history might have gone quite differently if these leaders in 1924 were the sort of people who would have grappled with History and Class Consciousness - which is not to say agreed with it at every point or even in its basic orientation, but instead the sort of people who would have wanted to engage with the book. Perhaps it is worth adding that this group included not only those one might expect it to, such as Stalin and Zinoviev (as I understand it, it was the latter who directly told Lukács that his philosophical efforts were not needed, and I don't know how far the discussion went beyond that) but also Trotsky. To pose the question sharply, we should wonder if the needs of revolutionary leadership and even day-to-day administration, and struggle under very difficult circumstances, also require outright philistinism as regards intellectual work.

<6> If the pattern had not been set already, it was certainly set then, that there was no further need for philosophy, even Marxist or even "dialectical materialist" philosophy. We want your money, your "support," sometimes even your activism, but as for your work we hate it and hope to burn it at the earliest opportunity. Perhaps existing revolutionary movements could learn something by going back into this history, though frankly I'm not hopeful.

<7> Second, certain cases in the last few years where intellectuals have touched a nerve and sparked strong opposition and repression from the powers-that-be are also worth studying - perhaps my claim that, for the most part, the question of the engaged intellectual has been rendered moot goes much too far. Certainly these cases are in the shadow of 9/11 and its aftermath, including the elements of fascism that have modified postmodern capitalism somewhat, and where there are new declarations that some ideas are dangerous and need to be actively suppressed. Now, I would say that these modifications themselves proceed in a postmodern way, the most salient feature of which is that they for the most part do not play the role of politicizing the broad masses. So, for example, one of the headings under which Ward Churchill is attacked at the University of Colorado is that the taxpayers shouldn't have to pay the salary of someone who is challenging the official line on 9/11 or even simply raising questions about this line. This is in the context of the supposed question, "Why do they hate us?", where this is not really a "question," because there is no interest in the answers, which are abundantly clear and available to anyone who actually cared to be awake to the world just a little bit. This, too, is more than obvious to anyone who is reading this interview, but it helps to set the context in which it has become somewhat dangerous, and therefore once again somewhat meaningful, for intellectuals to raise certain questions and issues. Again, my point is that even this context is shaped by postmodernism, so that what comes of the "controversy" isn't a more developed discussion of "chickens that come home to roost" and the sorts of complicities that American imperialism creates in its citizens, but instead, "why are we paying this guy?" and "why do these people have jobs for life, anyway" and "why am I paying good money to send my kid to college to hear this stuff?" And not, of course, "why am I paying good money to help this university run farm systems for the NFL and NBA?" No, it would be unpatriotic to ask this question, which goes to the problem of what "citizenship" means in a postmodern society - the point being that it doesn't mean much of anything.

<8> But I also wanted to look at the case of Norman G. Finkelstein at DePaul University, which happens to be my own university. Professor Finkelstein was certainly in the public view, as much as any intellectual in the last little while, and he touched a nerve and his activity was suppressed. What are the lessons of this case concerning public intellectual activity? Without wanting to make this "about me," I have had occasion to think that it would seem that I have said and done things at least as radical as what Norman Finkelstein has said and done, and yet I am a tenured, full professor. There were a few attacks on me, and certainly I had a period of about three years, before I had tenure, where things were very difficult, but this did not seem, in the end, to really go beyond me and the department chair at the time, and the other attacks were rebuffed in a fairly easy way. I truly was miserable and even despondent, at times even suicidal, during those three years (to put it simply, I felt that I was spending all of my time fending off stupid bullshit that was rendering my life meaningless), but in the end it turned out that my tenure was never seriously in doubt. This fact probably influenced me too much in the lead-up to the Finkelstein tenure decision; I thought that, in the end, the administration would recognize that there was no way they could deny tenure to Finkelstein, that his academic record was too strong and it would be overwhelmingly clear that, if he was fired, this was for purely political reasons.

<9> So, what are the differences, why was Finkelstein fired, while I am a tenured professor at the highest academic rank? After all, before I had tenure, when I was only in my second and third years at DePaul, I had taken public stands in support of the Communist Party of Peru and its insurgency against the Peruvian government and the foreign imperialists that exploit that country. In the fall of 1992 I had even gone to Lima to try to help with the effort to prevent the Peruvian government from being able to summarily execute the captured leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzman. Along with my five companions from various parts of the world, I was arrested, detained, and deported. I might add that, in joining with this mission to Lima, the question "What would Sartre have done?" was certainly on my mind, and I would even say that my Sartrean sensibility was strong in me to the point where it was not a difficult decision to make, to volunteer for this mission.

<10> Now, this touched some nerves, but never anything on the scale as with Norman Finkelstein. The fact that I had been tenured and promoted on the usual schedule confirmed to me that DePaul was a remarkable place - I was fully aware that things would not have gone the same at most other colleges or universities, and that at many of them I would have been ridden out of town on a rail. Furthermore, some of the very same administrators who had been supportive of me in the period after I came back from Peru and when I went up for tenure three years later, were central to the decision against Finkelstein. There are two differences in our cases. The first of these I would put forward more as a hypothesis, namely that people are hesitant to deal with questions of overall, systemic change, especially if it gets into the R-word (revolution) and perhaps even more the O-word (overthrow). And one can understand this hesitation on many levels, and I am not saying that it is simply or only cowardice to avoid these terms or this perspective. Furthermore, the media quite studiously avoids giving any publicity to the idea that anyone is thinking about these things or, especially, trying to do anything about them in a way that is connected to forms of organization that others might think about supporting or joining. So, while there was a good article about my whole sojourn in a local, free newspaper (The Chicago Reader), the only coverage in the rest of the Chicago or other media just focused on the fact that a professor was arrested in a foreign country.

<11> But I would say this was a secondary difference with Finkelstein, and that the key difference, the real reason why our cases worked out so differently can be summed up in one word, namely "Israel". Israel is the difference, though we then have to look at related factors that did more of the actual dirty work, namely the Israel lobby in the United States, the pact between the U.S. Government and the government of Israel, and specific nefarious actors such as Alan Dershowitz and David Horowitz. Although I am sure that some of the key actors against Finkelstein at DePaul are ideologically opposed to Finkelstein, and that whatever else they said about his record was in that context, in the end I have come to the conclusion that the forces arrayed against Finkelstein while he was at DePaul, and therefore I would say the forces arrayed against DePaul itself, are bigger and more powerful than the institution itself.

<12> There was a big conference (or forum) held at the University of Chicago back in November [2007], on the subject of "academic freedom at DePaul," about which I feel very ambivalent. This was held at the Rockefeller Chapel, a setting that has its own set of strange resonances, and there were perhaps 1800 people there at some points during the day. Undoubtedly many attended as much for the speakers, who included Noam Chomsky, as for the subject discussed. I found it difficult to bear, the large screen behind the speaker's table, with the large words "Academic Freedom at DePaul University" on it (though I should mention that the conference itself was set up by DePaul undergraduate students, and they did a brilliant job) - this at a school, the University of Chicago, that otherwise is completely unaware of other universities in the city of Chicago, including DePaul, so that it seems they have only taken momentary notice of DePaul to tell us how insignificant we are. The fact that this was a lively intellectual scene, with a point of real concern, and with excellent speakers who made excellent arguments, was counterbalanced by the fact that none of this was going to have any effect on the Finkelstein decision at DePaul, and probably not on the related decision concerning Mehrene Larudee, either. Two of the speakers, one from the University of Chicago, the other from Columbia, referred, though perhaps in an oblique way, to the forces arrayed against Finkelstein and the inability of DePaul to stand up to these forces. Perhaps, they both said, this was because DePaul is a "small" school. What they could have said instead, and should have said, is that DePaul is not a rich school, like theirs. Because, of course, DePaul is not "small," it is the largest Catholic university in the United States, and I assume it has far more students than either the U. of C. or Columbia. The speakers claimed, and they might be right in a certain sense, that nothing like the repression of Norman Finkelstein has occurred at their schools. But I'm not sure about this, because in fact these schools never hired Norman Finkelstein in the first place, nor have they hired him now that he has been fired from DePaul. When John Mearsheimer from the U. of C. said that Norman Finkelstein had, in his view, certainly done enough scholarly work to receive tenure at DePaul, again, he was saying something that is completely true and yet it also made me wince and think, "okay, here we go ..."

<13> There's a lot more to be said about this case and the particular scene of this conference, perhaps especially as concerns the role of the Catholic Church in all of this, but let's get back to the main point. In some sense, the Israel lobby and Alan Dershowitz made Norman Finkelstein into more of a public intellectual, at least for a period, than he might have been otherwise. You could see this as a boneheaded strategy on their part, in that they violated the usual rule about intellectuals who are making deep criticisms and presenting alternatives, by giving so much publicity to Finkelstein. On the other hand, you could interpret this case as having to do with the only possibility for being a public intellectual in this society any more, namely in the case that a nerve is touched. In the Ward Churchill case, the "nerve" is very specific to September 11, 2001 and its aftermath. In the Norman Finkelstein case the nerve again has its specificity, namely that singular phenomenon, the State of Israel. This is not my assertion; the State of Israel regards itself as singular, as having a sovereignty unlike that of any other nation state. What bears further analysis is the violent and yet also "theoretical" assertion (in theory and practice through a practical alliance of fascistic Christian fundamentalist forces and neo-conservatives) of the unconditional sovereignty of the United States in the post-September 11 period, and the way this is intermingled with the longstanding mythology of the unconditional sovereignty of the State of Israel. But what I am saying as regards the specific question of the public intellectual is that these are very particular conditions in which a nerve is touched and a set of intellectual questions (including academic freedom and the freedom of inquiry more generally) comes more into the public view - only for the purpose, however, of allowing powerful forces to exert themselves, forces quite a bit more powerful than DePaul University itself. In fact, I would even go so far as to ask if the viability of the University itself was on the line in this case, and in any case I can imagine that the pressures on the University, especially on its president, were enormous, including financial pressures having to do with tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps the University of Chicago and Columbia University can sneeze at this sort of pressure (though, again, how many "Finkelsteins" do they have?), but DePaul certainly cannot.

<14> Speaking of comparative pressures, I am still thinking about the fact that DePaul was the first Catholic university in the United States (and at this stage I assume it is still the only one) to have a Queer Studies program. This, I am sure, was not the most pleasing thing for many Catholics and for many in the Church hierarchy both nationally and internationally. I have no idea of what the discussions were in terms of the hierarchy, and perhaps there weren't any, I really don't know. Obviously, Queer Studies is a perfectly legitimate field of inquiry, but still it is interesting that no nerve was touched in the formation of this program (it was a news story nationally in some venues, and Jay Leno had a joke about it in his monologue) at the largest Catholic University in the U.S. (so that, in this at least, we are not "small"), or at least it can be said that this was nothing like the uproar, mainly initiated from outside of the university, around the Finkelstein case. So, again, I would say this instance of touching a nerve occurred in circumstances that can be defined narrowly.

<15> Even so, who has heard of Finkelstein? Perhaps more have heard of Chomsky, but what do they know about what he is saying, other than that he is someone out there saying something, perhaps something controversial? This hasn't come up before now, but this might be the place to mention that I divide my time between Chicago, where I live when school is in session, and a town of about fifty-thousand people in the middle of Kansas. Although I sometimes wish for more intellectual stimulation in our small city, I also feel privileged to be around many people here who do not have the class background or pretensions or sense of entitlement one often finds in academia. In particular I have a group of friends I ride bikes with and play chess with (they are different groups, actually), and I do often depend on them for a sense of perspectives outside of the intellectual and academic worlds. Now, one of my bike buddies is somewhat connected to the intellectual world - he's a journalist who edits the Land Report, which is the quarterly journal of the Land Institute. So he had a heard a little bit about the Finkelstein case, and has some sense of the context - of course he hears a lot more about it from me, as we ride fifty or sixty miles around the Kansas countryside. As for most of my other friends in Salina, Kansas (my non-Land Institute friends, I guess I should say), they aren't aware of this stuff at all, and this even includes a couple of my chess buddies who seem to get a lot of their information from the Fox News Channel. All I am getting at is that I don't know what it means to be a "public intellectual" if there is no larger public for intellectuals, and if the term "intellectual" has either been given an overwhelmingly negative resonance, or if the term has been rendered fundamentally meaningless as far as most people are concerned.

<16> We need to investigate further the idea that there is no real "public" in our society because there is no sense of "citizenship" or of being a "citizen" that has much meaning in our society. This was already true in our pre-September 11 society, it was already the case that the category of citizen had largely been replaced by that of "consumer" (as Fredric Jameson argued in Postmodernism), but it bears examination that, if anything, this notion that has been even further deepened (again an example of the paradoxical deepening of superficiality) in the post-September 11 world, where we have a seemingly unending war in motion and yet the highest patriotic duty is to consume, and Americans are barely aware that there is a war, other than that, more recently, they are "tired of it." Their tiredness is not very political (if at all), it's more like that of a kid who is tired of one video game and wants to try another.

<17> Was there a movie back in the day called, Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? There's something there that is expressive of an idea such as Marcuse's "great refusal." Although I think that many of Marcuse's ideas remain quite relevant (and again speaking of engaged intellectuals who might be compared with Sartre), this is a good example of where we see the effectiveness of the strategies of an imperialism gone postmodern. I would also go back once again to Mark Crispin Miller's superb book, Boxed-In, which is about the "culture of television," which is to say what increasingly counts for culture and what happens to culture in the age of pervasive television. This has even gone through several leaps since the publication of the book in 1988, with not only the development of "ambient TV" (where everywhere you go there is TV, like in the student center of a university or the mall-style food courts that are now in some high schools, or in the dentist's office while you get your teeth cleaned, or in the check-out line in the grocery store, or increasingly in motor vehicles), but also of course the little one and a half inch squares upon which young people spend most of their time fixated (which drives me crazy in general and which makes life as a cyclist very dangerous in particular). One would think that, to be a public intellectual in this "culture," one would need to get in there and be one of the talking heads, but I don't think this works very well.

<18> In addition to asking ourselves what it means when the "public square" has become the rectangular screen, there is also the fact that the content of most television is not conducive to intellectual reflection or critical thinking. Please don't get me wrong, I am not simply against television. But the main places where something "intellectual" might happen are with the dramatic series and some of the comedy series (especially the animated ones) that either do a good job of encouraging critical reflection or of providing sometimes very insightful and incisive satire. I am thinking of shows such as the X-Files, In the Heat of the Night (which is an interesting one because it was probably overlooked by most intellectuals, even those who would consider television in this critical way in the first place, because it had police officers and detectives as its main characters, and perhaps even more because it was set in the Deep South - but this show dealt with questions of race and class in a very sophisticated way, and the performances by Carroll O'Connor and Howard Rollins were often brilliant), and The West Wing, and of course The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Now, I do wonder how much of the subtlety in these programs is understood (on any level) by the "average viewer," but I tend to think there is at least something there that is transmitted, and maybe one of the best things an engaged intellectual can do these days is to formalize some of the insights of these programs, in a "mass line" kind of way: in other words, "from the masses and back to the masses in a way such that theory could become a material force." Doing this sort of thing is fun, of course, and I can discuss programs such as these endlessly (though I wish I had more people to discuss them with), but in the face of the overwhelmingly mind-numbing and –destroying character of much television, and of the passivity-encouraging character of the medium itself, one has to honestly wonder if one is simply spitting into the wind, or at best taking a pleasurable intellectual holiday. Still, I think this is worth trying, simply because it seems like at best we have a few vaguely-tenable strategies for intellectual work.

<19> But as for the talking head circuit, it's hard to see anything good coming out of that, even if one manages to get onto one of these programs with Bill O'Reilly and the like. Perhaps it would be better if we just devoted ourselves to asking, in a loud and obnoxious tone, "Who the hell are these people?" I mean O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and similar characters - and that is what they are, characters, playing roles in a parody of a morality play. I suppose what I am saying is that we have to start challenging people to use their heads a bit more, to wake up and smell the bullshit. But then I suppose that does take us back to the more "classical" role of the engaged intellectual. I've been working some on dealing with "bullshit" as a technical term, as set out in Harry Frankfurt's famous essay. I would add to this that perhaps one of the things that is needed to break through is something of a repeat of the Free Speech Movement, since certain vulgar terms seem irreplaceable when describing certain persons and situations - at least these terms might get someone's attention and also then raise the point that there are deeper realities to struggle with than the fact that someone used a curse word. But then, unfortunately, it is also incumbent upon us to take political stock of something that Frankfurt says right at the beginning of his essay (and that he doesn't really explore in a political or systemic way), namely that bullshit is pervasive. That by itself could be taken as emblematic of postmodern capitalism, at least if we explore the forms this pervasiveness takes, and the sources of this pervasiveness. So then, as a matter of grappling with the truth (and the theory of truth, which is part of what I am attempting to do in this recent work I'm doing), which might be called the "intellectual" part, and then "getting it out there" (which is the "engaged" part), we might ask a perfectly sound theoretical question, namely, what is the opposite of bullshit? How do we negate bullshit, in theory and practice? As for the models that we have for doing this, I don't see that we have to decide on any one of them, it's just better if all kinds of intellectuals are trying to do this from all kinds of perspectives and with all kinds of strategies.

<20> However, the "pervasiveness" problem extends beyond just the fact that there is no shortage of elements in the current system to attempt to negate (and neither should we hesitate to say loudly and repeatedly that the whole thing is bullshit). A threshold is crossed at some point where bullshit is so much the medium of anything that might be a more "public" form of expression that there is no longer any place from which to try to speak truth to power. That's a dismal situation, not unrelated to Adorno's "fully-administered society," and also to what he called the "spell" that we are under in the age of the culture industry, except, if anything, this has gone even farther than Adorno anticipated. But, as they say, there it is, and we won't get anywhere by ignoring it.

<21> Okay, I should get on to the next question, but there always seems to be something else to be said, and perhaps what I am doing with this idea of a negation of bullshit, which in this recent work I am calling by the name of "home truth," is to some extent engaging in a strategic ignorance of the pervasiveness of bullshit, even a strategic naïveté, where I would still like to engage people as if we could discuss the state of the res publica, the public matters. Perhaps there is a strategic role for pretending that there is some sort of civic space out there, even if we know there isn't, and perhaps the strategies of this pretending are what is left to us of intellectual engagement today.

<22> JR: You identify yourself in various writings as a radical philosopher, a Marxist, a Satrean, a Maoist – among several other things! Could you talk a little bit about your own intellectual and political development? What events, figures, or intellectual and cultural currents were formative for you critically and politically?

<23> BM: Yes, well, I probably have way too many "identifications," but I can't help it, perhaps it is a strategy for coping with the bad things in the world that I also allow myself to be fascinated by all of the many and varied interesting and beautiful and ethically and politically powerful phenomena out there. There's so much going on, and I generally let myself experience as much of it as I can, even though I also recognize that there are limitations to this approach, one is continually in danger of being spread too thin. I do accept, even if not in an absolute way, the "scholar/theorist distinction," and I am certainly on the side of theorist, even though I try to ground the more specific things I am saying in scholarship and I appreciate what the scholars do. (In fact, in general I think the theorists appreciate the scholars far more than the scholars appreciate the theorists, and this is a problem.) But, just to shift frames a little, I think King Crimson is great, I think the Kronos Quartet and the Arditti Quartet are great, I think the John Coltrane Quartet is great, and I don't see why I wouldn't listen to and learn from all of them. If anything it seems like this is a time where such a thing is not only possible but necessary - even if there are also moments where one might immerse oneself in just one thing and try to get the sense of that thing that a "proper scholar" would have. But for me - and I am not saying that everyone else should or could do it this way - there will always be that point where I back up and relate that more specific thing to the larger questions, meaning the traditional questions of the Western philosophical tradition (the true, the good, the beautiful, the human condition and the meaning of life - if there is any), and, even more (and what is for me the framework for continuing to develop these traditional questions), the project of understanding the world in order to change it, and even then that even deeper level of engagement where one joins in with efforts to indeed change the world.

<24> In Marxism, we need the sort of thing Paul de Man did with the critique of organicism, showing that a romantic sense of wholeness is achieved, at least in some significant part, through tropological strategies that operate on the level of rhetoric. At the same time, we need to grapple with the sense of ecological and social interconnectedness that we find in the work of figures such as Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. It may even be that the latter is the far more pressing task of the moment, even while I think it could also be disastrous if we rush headlong, in the name of practical exigencies, into a "new wholeness" while forgetting the work of deconstruction. Now, it may be that Derrida and Berry have little, if anything, to say to each other, indeed that's almost certainly the case, but I think any Marxism or any radical social theory that will be worth a flip these days had better find a way to converse with and learn from both, and many others as well. So, perhaps my "eclectic" identifications are in part a matter of temperament, but there is some basis for opening theory to the world in this way as well, I hope. If one goes to the common etymological root of both theory and theater it could be said that there may be characters or events that are relatively minor, but that still play a crucial and ineliminable role in the unfolding of the drama.

<25> As for my own philosophical and political development, perhaps I've told a certain story to myself and about myself so often that now it has to be true, but the things that seem as if they were especially formative for me were a certain sense of Christianity that I received and even immersed myself in when I was quite young, really from at least the age of six and up through my high school years and beyond, and then of course "the sixties," which I did not participate in directly, but which somehow touched me on some level, I don't want to say "near the core," but more in a way that was formative of the core. Looking back, perhaps I saw the figures and events that, for example went from civil rights and Martin Luther King, Jr., through Malcolm X, to Black Power, the Black Panther Party, and figures who were in the news such as Stokely Carmichael or Eldridge Cleaver in terms of Biblical prophets or the early Christian apostles, and the events themselves as being not only of "Biblical proportions" (when in fact some of the events were of far greater proportion than some Biblical events) but of having that Biblical sense of a drama unfolding, a struggle that may "win through," and a struggle where, if it does not win through, the consequences will be truly and deeply tragic. I think there is a little bit of existentialist sense in the deconstructions of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, and that we can say that, in fact, since these Biblical times of the sixties we have indeed been living with the tragedy of the failed struggle to create meaning out of the meaninglessness that a capitalist world system gives us.

<26> All of that remains in some weird way both very much present to me and yet also in a sense irretrievably lost. I have said that, for some of us, the sixties (or even 1968, specifically, or even one month in 1968) seem like yesterday and yet also a million years ago. Unfortunately, and I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in saying this, I think we will be in a lot of trouble if we only remember 1968 "as if it were yesterday." If we absolutely have to choose, it would probably be better if we just see the sixties as a "closed chapter," even if a great one. The same dynamic is in play for Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution and Mao and the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution, though, for myself, I only learned more about these things later into the 1970s. Of course, for me, and perhaps this speaks to being a very young observer of the sixties (I turned fourteen in May 1970) rather than a participant (though some of this goes to periodization, and by 1972 or so I was actively attempting to add my voice to those who were trying to stop the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and Southeast Asia, as well as to other causes), it was just as much the music as anything, and especially everything that went from earlier Motown to the more "mature" work of Stevie Wonder (Talking Book, Innervisions, etc.), for instance, and from the early Beatles to the late Beatles, and those extraordinary bands of the late sixties, from the Jefferson Airplane to King Crimson. An appreciation of Bob Dylan came later for me, in the mid-seventies - I was aware of him, of course, but I didn't really appreciate him, I was too caught up in the idea that he was a "good songwriter (but I was less interested in "song form" at that point) but a bad singer." In connection with Blood on the Tracks and an essay by Allen Ginsberg, I came by about 1975 to think that Dylan was not only not a bad singer, but indeed one of the greatest singers, or at least at times he could be. But, again to go to the problem of periodization (in other words, when did "the sixties" really begin and end?), by 1972 I was also listening to John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and Beethoven and Stockhausen for that matter, influenced in this direction by the broad-minded rock musicians of the time who were also listening to them and trying to reflect that listening in their own music. And clearly that sort of dynamic influenced greatly the way I try to approach the world and theorizing about life, the universe, and everything. I would just call it by simple terms such as openness and connectivity - qualities in music, for example, that I came by the late seventies to associate with figures such as John Cage (discovering Cage when I was in college was a very important thing for me, and I still love Cage and will always love him) and Cecil Taylor, and, more recently, with figures such as Bjork and Jim O'Rourke. To be sure, this sense of openness and connectivity was also mixed up with and increasingly motivated by a sense of injustice and the world and the idea that something else is possible.

<27> Let me just say a little more about Christianity in concluding my response to this question - and I know that I have a bad habit of giving very long answers to short questions, this is probably an occupational hazard of being a philosopher, or perhaps it's because I'm from South Carolina, and the expression "mouth of the South" does not exist without justification.

<28> First, for what reason I do not know, my sense of Christianity when I was growing up was in some sense heavily "Jewish." I liked Moses and the prophets, and I saw Jesus and the early Christians in the context of their struggles. I was always repulsed, almost instinctively, though I'm sure in reality the Civil Rights Movement somehow influenced me on this, by the aryanization of Jesus, and the bizarre attempts to separate him from the Jewish people of his day. Of course I understand all of this in a more systematic and historically-informed way now, but even when I was seven or eight years old I knew there was something screwy about the people who would say that Jesus was not really Jewish or that "the Jews" had killed Jesus.

<29> Second, my relationship to Christianity was affected by some sense of social class, and undoubtedly this also relates to my rejection of the "cleaned-up," respectable, white, upper middle-class Jesus. Now, I did in fact grow up in the middle class (more specifically, the "middle middle" class), and I grew up with many material advantages and opportunities and to some extent with a middle-class sense of entitlement. However, my parents were both from the working class, and indeed the lower working class (my paternal grandparents had been millworkers in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and my paternal step-grandfather in fact died of brown lung disease, while my "real" grandfather had died of tuberculosis when my own father was eight-years old). My father was the first person from either side of my family to go to college, and, even then, when he did go to college, it was to the Citadel, the military college of the South (in Charleston), and he majored in business, instead of history, which might have been his preference if he could have just gone on what was intellectually appealing to him. I guess I would say that I grew up in a middle-class milieu, but it was not the "solid" middle class, and my parents, for all that they might even have been almost desperate at times to really be in the middle class, did not have a background in middle-class culture to transmit to me or my siblings. I am very thankful for that, even if it also means that I never feel entirely comfortable in many academic settings (and quite uncomfortable in some of them - though in fact there are many who experience a similar anxiety or alienation or at least the sense that they will never really fit in). Growing up in Miami, Florida, especially with the sixties unfolding all around, I felt increasingly uncomfortable in the more solidly middle-class and upper-middle class Presbyterian churches my family belonged to. I still remember, from almost forty years ago, Sunday School lessons on how terrible were the Black militants and the student protestors and the women who would no longer accept their properly subordinate roles, how this was the decline of Western civilization, and I still remember thinking that the crew Jesus ran with looked a lot more like the rebels in the streets than like my very establishment-looking and Cadillac-driving Sunday School teacher. I also remember lessons the main point of which seemed to be that the most sacred things are private property and a supposedly natural hierarchical social order. My big "mistake" at this stage of things was actually reading the Bible, and taking it seriously, and what I read in the Acts of the Apostles didn't square with these complacent (but also defensive) teachings from the establishment. I wonder if my understanding would have been different if I had come from a more solidly middle-class background, though clearly the generally rebellious atmosphere of the sixties probably played the larger role.

<30> Finally, my teenage years in Christianity came to a kind of abrupt conclusion, though I don't know that this chapter in my life is entirely closed or if it will ever be. Clearly I still think about it a good deal, and none of my experience or rumination upon my experience has ever made me envy friends or acquaintances of mine who say things like "I never grew up with any of that stuff." Perhaps, if nothing else, growing up with that stuff, at least in the way that I did (and, I'm sure, in different ways that others grew up with this religious stuff as well), gave me a sense of cosmic questions of life and death, and that the question of justice is this really deep and world-historical thing, and that the change that needs to come in this world involves in some sense the redemption of humankind. From the time I was about fourteen until I was a little more than seventeen (in fact I can say that it was until I was seventeen and about four months), I had hoped to become a minister. However, when I was sixteen I finally left the Presbyterian church that I found so "establishment" and smug, and also bland, and joined a Methodist church I had heard about, where the preachers were influenced by liberation theology, were militant opponents of the Vietnam War, were attempting to build a more racially-diverse congregation in what had been just another white, middle-class church, and who were just plain cool people. (The assistant pastor also had long hair, which thrilled me, in part because the length of my hair was always a heavy point of contention with my father, even until I was thirty-five years old, if you can imagine that.) Unfortunately, that church came apart over the anti-war activism of the pastors, and the pastors themselves were reassigned, somewhat put out to pasture - I guess there's an irony there.

<31> It all happened one very hot morning at the end of the summer of 1973, when the ministers had been in Washington D.C. the week before, at a large anti-war march. They both preached against the war that morning, and the assistant pastor gave an especially fiery sermon where, at one point, he slammed his fist on the pulpit and said, "And goddamnit, they have to end that war!" You could have heard a pin drop, it was unreal. Within a few weeks of this everything at the church changed, and everything had changed for me, too, and I left the church. I still sort of believed in God for a little while after that, but that was it between me and organized religion. For a few months I went through some of the usual "Nietzschean" anti-religion stuff, the sort of thing that inspired a few Jethro Tull albums where one feels betrayed by God or the church or religion, that they didn't deliver on their promises. But I was inspired by liberation theology in the eighties and I have come to think that there are certain epistemological questions, mainly the role of commitment in belief and the idea of believing in an undetermined and uncertain and even quite unlikely future, that are captured by at least some sense of a religious perspective. So, I keep grappling with Judaism and Christianity, and also I find some aspects of Buddhism intellectually interesting, even if I share Slavoj Zizek's skepticism of (what he calls) "Western Buddhism." And, to conclude this long answer, there is still a sense in which the dynamics of my work are governed by a complex multiplication of Christianity and the sixties, even if this is also filled out and made even more complicated by Kant, Marx, Sartre, Derrida, and many others.

<32> JR: In considering the topic of contemporary "public intellectuals" in relationship to your own work, what lessons do you think Sartre offers us today? (I'd like to come back to your views on Zizek later, a figure you have referred to as reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre in some respects.)

<33> BM: There is still a great deal to be understood from Sartre, I think, even if sometimes "with" him in a way that cuts "against" him, so to speak. Sartre's model of the engaged intellectual evolved, for one thing, so there is no single model, there is just this very interesting philosopher who tried to lend his voice to the voices of oppressed peoples and to those who were taking on the imperialist social system. As his many detractors never fail to point out, he made many mistakes (though apparently in France there has grown up, around the so-called "New Philosophers" - most of whom weren't any great shakes as intellectuals doing actual philosophical work - and figures such as Bernard Henri-Levy, the idea of "the thousand mistakes of Sartre," and I think it is not nearly so many), but, on the other hand, we might wonder if there could even be a revolution if there were not revolutionaries who are willing to go out and "boldly screw up" from time to time. Obviously, there's a point beyond which simply screwing up turns into something else, though unfortunately it is often not obvious where that point is, exactly.

<34> But in a way Sartre's model was just that he put himself out there, as did Simone de Beauvoir and others of their circle. I suppose the real difficulty is that, in France in Sartre's time, there seemed to be an "out there" in which to put oneself, and so we might not get as far in developing a model of the "public intellectual" that would work for the U.S. today by simply asking "What would Sartre do?" - even though I'm all for still asking this question. But, frankly, I do not really know what the alternative is, I think the system has done a good job of especially rendering the idea of a philosopher into something beyond meaningless - every person in this society who works in philosophy has the experience on a regular basis, sometimes every day, of answering the question, "What do you teach?", only to simply have the word repeated back, in a way that seems just clueless. "Philosophy" - as if this is just a collection of simple sounds, some random syllables. It doesn't help that there is a culture of know-nothingism that really doesn't want to know what philosophy is, or what a philosopher does. It's a dismal situation that I also associate with a certain "postmodern" turn in society, and it is interesting to reflect on a certain confluence here of right-wing fundamentalist Christian know-nothingism with a more hedonistic postmodern "there is nothing worth knowing" (except perhaps some things on the purely instrumental plane, directed toward having more fun) attitude. In either perspective there is nothing important about the world, and both expressions are fundamentally cynical.

<35> Just as I think that protests have largely been rendered ineffective (except perhaps when they really overflow the accepted bounds, as with Seattle in 1999), and yet I support the protestors and sometimes manage to get out on the street myself, I also still think radical intellectuals should "put themselves out there" as best we can. But clearly we are going to have to find another way, or perhaps another way will find us - though it helps to have intellectuals who are open to being found.

<36> On a somewhat different plane, there is still plenty of theoretical work to be done in Sartre's philosophy, and in his more journalistic and polemical texts, and in his literary works (though I haven't done anything with the latter, lacking sufficient proficiency with the French language and seeing others who are vastly more qualified on this score). Perhaps the biggest project that remains to be done in Sartre's later philosophy is to bring together the framework of the Critique of Dialectical Reason with the writings and activism against colonialism. I've tried to contribute to this project a little bit, but it really needs to be the subject of a big, comprehensive book - I am encouraged that some of the students of Thomas Flynn (Emory) and Robert Bernasconi (Memphis) are taking up this question, and I wish them well in their endeavors. It still remains, even, to get a complete picture of the whole of Sartre's project with the Critique, with an integration of the two volumes and the book-length "introduction" to the "Critique proper," Search for a Method. The debate still continues, of course, over whether the second volume by itself is capable of integration. In addition, I would love to see an English translation of the series of dialogues that Sartre had with "Pierre Victor" (Benny Levy) and Philipe Gavi–named for Mao's famous slogan of the Cultural Revolution, "It is right to rebel." At least in the English-speaking world there has yet to be an extended discussion around this work. (As I understand it, there are some legal questions concerning the possibility of a translation, having to do with Sartre's adopted daughter and literary executor, Arlette Elkaim. I wish these barriers could be surmounted.) [Editor's note: portions of these dialogues are now available in English and online at www.marxists.org, having been translated by Mitch Abidor in 2007.] Then, speaking of categorical imperatives such as Mao's, I find it fascinating that there is not a big book on Kant and Sartre (at least in English). It seems to me that what Sartre said about the categorical imperative in "Existentialism is a humanism" can still function within the parameters of a broadly Kantian perspective - the fact that there is ambiguity and difficulty in weighing obligations that seem to have equal claims upon us does not cancel the fact that there are obligations. Furthermore, it seems to me that Sartre's whole perspective on "ontological freedom," and the idea that "in choosing myself I choose the world, and then I am responsible for this world, all of it and without end" exists fundamentally in the Kantian universe of discourse (as does Derrida's quite similar sense of responsibility) - and that is a good thing. Lastly (but as you see, I have no trouble enumerating some rather large Sartrean projects, and I'm sure there are many others), it would be useful to have more engagement between Sartre and the ideas of structuralism, especially the ideas of Althusser and Levi-Strauss. There is more here than just some supposedly cut-and-dried "humanism/anti-humanism" debate, though I am of a mind to speak up a bit for humanism. It would also be good if the more recent debates in continental philosophy around Althusser, Deleuze, and Badiou were encouraged (I was going to say "forced"!) to recognize more the role of Sartre in setting certain problematics and continuing to contribute to their development.

<37> Could work on these themes in Sartre also reinvigorate a sense of engagement? I don't know, but it couldn't hurt. It couldn't hurt to have more discussion of whether a Kantian term such as responsibility still has a meaning in the world today, and, if it does have any meaning, surely this is a matter of the effectivity of the term - or, as Derrida put it, "responsibility to responsibility," and "a promise has to promise to be kept" - "through new, effective means of organization."

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