Blasphemy Tanka for James Baldwin

 Blasphemy Tanka for James Baldwin

In James Baldwin's tale,
    Go Tell It on the Mountain,
        a note for Jesus:
    ". . . tell that puking bastard to
kiss my big black ass." It's there!

REFERENCE: James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953; New Dell Edition, 1970), p. 163.

— Ralph Dumain, 7 & 11 August 2011

Is Critique Secular?

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Critical Horizons by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. (The Townsend Papers in the Humanities; no. 2)

As if Judith Butler weren't already disgusting enough. Anti-imperialism as an absolute for the (pseudo-)left is rotten politics. And of course academic politics is nothing but unscrupulous careerism anyway.

Edis, Taner. Is Critique Secular?, The Secular Outpost (blog), December 6, 2010.

I'm glad to see someone besides myself denounce the intellectual alliance between postmodernist westerners and apologists for Islam.

Gourgouris, Stathis. “De-transcendentalizing the secular,” The Immanent Frame (blog).

Unequivocal defense of secularism and rejection of identity politics, coupled with an interesting analysis of the relation between transcendentalism and theism (Descartes, Kant), but decoupling a necessary relation between secularism and the Christian West.

Mahmood, Saba. “Is critique secular?”, The Immanent Frame (blog).

“This line of thought urges you to choose: either one is against secular values or one is for them.” This is actually the case, though Mahmood denies it. A noxious example of the dishonest Counter-Enlightenment collusion between postmodernism & religion.

Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. “What the Danish Cartoon Controversy Tells Us About Religion, the Secular, and the Limits of the Law,” Religion Dispatches, January 7, 2010.

Rotten to the core.

Thomassen, Lasse. Review: Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Critical Horizons, Vol 12, No 1, 2010, pp. 103-107.

On the Danish cartoons; the book under review is apparently another horrid example of the meeting of postmodernism and religion.

Yager, Colin. “Is Critique Secular? Thoughts on Enchantment and Reflexivity.”

A completely confused mess. Thoughts on Habermas, Taylor, Romanticism, with too much dallying on Byron. Bankrupt.

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