Vision Circle

Cornel West on...himself?

I'm working on an article on Detroit techno, and am rereading some of Cornel West's stuff. In Prophetic Reflections he tackles a range of topics through transcribed speeches and interviews, and short essays. In one of the interviews, West is asked about an intellectual concept (the concept of "life-world") best attached to a German social theorist by the name of Jurgen Habermas. West thinks the concept is a much watered down version of a richer set of ideas posited by Marxists, and that the only reason folks are talking about it is because Habermas has juice at the moment.

[Habermas] has become such a celebrity that he can drop a number of terms from a number of different traditions and they take on a salience they often do not deserve. More fundamentally, his encyclopedic knowledge and his obsession with the philosophic foundations of democratic norms also satisfy a pervasive need for left-academic intellectuals--a need for the professional respectability and rigor that displace political engagement and this-worldly involvement. At the same time, his well-known, but really tenuous, relation to Marxism provides them with an innocuous badge of radicalism. All of this takes place at the expense of an encounter with the marxist tradition, especially with Gramsci and the later Lukacs of the Ontology works. In this sense, Habermas unwittingly serves as a kind of opium for some of thye American left-academic intelligentsia.

In one albeit convoluted sentence, West describes what is both best and worst about black public intellectuals such as himself, Michael Eric Dyson, and Manning Marable.