<nettime> A Leftist Platonist?

[ed phillips <artlore@sirius.com>]

Dear Mark,

I enjoy your provocations, criticisms, and your strong point of view.
However, it's clear that you have not read Adorno, Benjamin or Heidegger
closely. I don't beleive it is necessary to read them. Yet, If you are
to criticize them, you must display some working knowledge of their
writings.

Adorno and Benjamin were, indeed, fellow travelling leftists. Heidegger
was on his own romantic, right-wing revival of "blood, soil, and yes,
authenticity." An idiosyncratic figure worth exploring. Not as
followers, but as critics.

The introduction of Heideggerianism into leftist and yes, Frankfurt
School, inspired leftist critical theory was an affair of a later
generation. Enter the French.

(one side note: your critigue of the dogma of "liberation from
repression" reads like carbon-copy late Foucault. No criticism: the
"liberation from repression" is a dogma or discourse, in my view as
well.)

Really, the right wing Platonist,  Allan Bloom does a better job of
describing the mongrel pedigree of the contemporary leftist. He read a 
tremendous amount of Heidegger and even hung out with Derrida and the
ELS crowd in Paris sipping wine and pulling on cigarrettes.  He jokingly
told me that Derrida was "just a cheerleader for Heidegger."
Some accuracy there.

I quite enjoy Leibniz and even Plato, nor am I hostile to reason.
the thought of a kind of left wing Platonism is fascinating and might
serve as a good counterbalance to the strength in Washington D.C. of the
the Right Wing Straussian Platonists. 

please continue
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