Eric Lott
Just when you thought you were safe from tenured radicals, Russell Jacoby has returned. To proclaim his interest once again in flushing other tenured radicals down the drain. Here he is in the Nation (hat-tip to Vijay Prashad) fulminating against Eric Lott’s new book, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual:
I must say I’m now interested in checking out Lott’s book, just to find out whether Jacoby has quoted only the most stringently theoretical lines. I say this because I have heard Lott speak on quite a few occasions, and he was also a contributor to one of the books I edited, and I can think of very few who can match the wit and eviscerating guile of his formulations. I also believe, by the way, that Bob Dylan got the title of his 2001 album from Eric Lott’s previous book, Love and Theft. Let’s also remember that Jacoby is precisely the target of Lott’s criticism, and his own anti-theoretical rantings had become pretty familiar by, say, 1990. Still, I liked reading his review-essay. All I’m saying is that there’s a limit to how much you can enjoy, even when moved by sixties nostalgia, the act of licking stale vomit.There is nothing wrong–indeed, there is everything right–with English professors like Lott appraising, criticizing and savaging the work of other professors and writers, but there is everything wrong about doing it in the name of a righteous revolution that consists of unreadable articles in New Literary History. Lott serves trays of holier-than-thou academic leftism with extra helpings of causes and clotted language. To revive an old label, Lott’s work smacks of “infantile leftism,” but when Lenin used the term he was referring to new political parties, not professorial posturing.
P.S. Louis Proyect has a thoughtful critique, which I have just read, of Jacoby’s tired but also bad-faith leftism. [P.S. posted on March 26, 2006, PM]
