Demotion Of Philosophy Poem by gershon hepner

Demotion of philosophy into linguistics,
like that of baseball into steroids and statistics,
has made semantics triumph over Aristotle,
which is like driving Mickey Mantle to the bottle.
Discourse has been downgraded, therapeutic
its rationale and nouveau hermeneutic,
while baseball manages to stay alive,
upstaging with the home run the line drive.


Inspired by Pankaj Mishra’s review of Zadie Smith’s “Changing My Mind” (“Other Voices, Other Selves: Zadie Smith looks at books, movies and her own history, ” NYT, January 17,2010) , which also inspired “Zadie, Polonius, Franz”:
Reflecting on Kafka’s ambivalence about his ethnic background, she writes: “There is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common with Jews? ’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.” This may sound a bit melodramatic. But then — as Salman Rushdie and other practitioners of postcolonial postmodernism have stressed — ambivalence, doubt and confusion are essential to forming dynamic new hybrid selves. Smith seems to bring to this now entrenched critical orthodoxy the particular weltschmerz of today’s bright, successful but sad young writers. This is most evident in the collection’s final essay, a long and passionately argued panegyric to David Foster Wallace in which Smith diagnoses the central dilemmas of her own increasingly lost generation. These are dilemmas, she argues, that Henry James, who assumed awareness leads to responsibility, never encountered: “the ubiquity of television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse and philosophy’s demotion into a branch of linguistics.”


1/18/10