In the mini-debate that has developed with Bill Benzon, on Terence Blake’s post, “PLURALIST CRITIQUE OF CRITIQUE vs NAIVE LACANIANISM” at AGENT SWARM, virgilio rivas interjection, here, elicited the following response from me:
“… As to what Bill Benzon calls the “geopolitical”, I feel that there is some potential there to rethink the ‘philosophical’, not necessarily as mere replays of ‘multicultural’ truisms or stereotypes, even though a delineation of such understandings might be necessary, but rather as a rethinking of the animating logic behind them.”
Bill Benzon’s post, here, produced the following response from me:
“I agree that “everything produces cultural effects”. I agree that “treating culture as a homogeneous substance” with an unproblematic correspondence to national designations can be reductive. But national designations are an index to all kinds of information: in biology, they can classify ancestral genetics and specify the geographics of the zoological. We know that the kangaroo is an “Australian animal”. We know that a song with Japanese lyrics is likely to be from Japan. The ideology of nation, in the most general sense, is itself a cultural complex: ancestry, language, customs, etc.. It draws upon this rhetoric of ‘rootedness’, as well as the various political and religious experiments that have occurred for millennia. Nationalistic configuration is not the only means of categorising human groupings, but it has been an extraordinarily powerful schematic. It is a cultural layer that is promoted incessantly. It would be rash to ignore its effects.” [ republished from somewhere here ]