I'm one of those editing bloggers that immediately changes the post after clicking "publish post", so this version is a bit different (fuller analysis of tension b/t theory and praxis) than the post published at 12:40.
PS: Yes I now have a disciplinary inferiority complex.
I don’t know if this helps but I read your explanation of critical theory as applied to law and the introductions to the stuff you said you had trouble understanding and I thought the new critical stuff was easier to understand than what you said. Perhaps you have condensed what you are talking about to familiar code words that are understandable to the agreeing choir you are preaching to but don’t convince us atheists. I am learning that concepts are not in the words themselves but that the words are just vehicles.
What you said about pervasive racism and the law has been repeated endlessly. I am a Southern White man and I want to say that my experience does not validate your commonplace explanation for the way things are. Thus no mater how many times I read them they have no power to convince.
You would have to come up with something new that would add to what I already think. You don’t. Of course the explanation some people give is that being White makes me a defacto racist. I consider this attitude itself dehumanizing.
The supposedly hard to understand stuff comes with less baggage, is creative, new and thus is hard to grasp for both of us. This makes it intriguing. Yet it is written in lucid prose and promises some reward for the effort to understand it. Since it is new they don’t take shortcuts in explicating their opinions. The only trouble is my lack of time and energy to learn it.
I think of my own experiences with Black people and I see the racism problem and other problems of dehumanization as soluble only on a piecemeal basis one human to another. I see little reason to apply boilerplate critical theory to problems. I think you are on the right track.
I just don’t know what you mean when you act like there is some act or attitude that you could assume, some philosophical position you could support that could save the world. You would go down in flames rather than deviate from them. It seems you are already learning the opposite. Congratulations.
Oh this is a really old post, I read it and so will comment anyway.
Commenting by HaloScan
