Serious Irony

I stumbled into what I feel is an important and relevant book called The Art of Being Free by Mark Reinhardt. In a unique process of "ironic" reading of three classical theorists, de Toqueville, Marx and Hannah Arendt, the author freely interrogates each against the other in a non-scholarly but very political, democratic and "artful" method, teasing out the important contributions as well as inconsistencies of each of these important and at times frustrating figures. I found this form of criticism compelling and Reinhardt's ability to build an argument using bits and pieces much like my own theoretical wanderings. As he puts it, unless we synthesize and utilize these bits and pieces "a usable past will otherwise go to waste, or will get reified, fetishized, made the basis of nostalgic and ultimately doomed attempts to recover worlds gone by." In other words, the conservative project!

I posted on some of the musings around de Toqueville and am finding them pertinent in this moment of Rand Paul and Tea Parties. I am thrilled we ( the fragile polity?) finally get to talk about property and freedom straight up. Maybe it will even get to some serious treatment of Ayn Rand.In any case the book highlights the difficulty de Toqueville had in employing the art himself, grounding his humanism "ironically" in Christian moral tradition and struggling to balance the aristocratic fear of the masses with Enlightenment emancipation.

Marx gets similar treatment. The author points out the contradictions around transcendence and historical determinism that The Old Man struggled with. The reading humanizes Marx, something like what Howard Zinns play does, and brought out new insights about his thought on politics, freedom and action.

The reading of Arendt started clear but then veered into "Arendtian political space" and it's relation to the anti AIDS movement ACT UP. I didn't really get it. I have always been drawn to and conflicted by her approach to anti-totalitarianism and oddly de-politicized text The Human Condition. Still valuable and again, extremely relevant at this crazy juncture and Rienhardt helped pinpoint some of the troubling aspects of her approach to the "art".

I have been randomly picking out these titles in my study of democracy and politics, Rethinking Liberal Equality, Democracy's Children, Sublime Object of Ideology, David Harveys latest, and find them all referring back to Mouffe and LaClaus Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Debord is also getting some renewed attention. Instincts and fate?