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Frankenstein is Dead

I really admire Richard Day’s work, which may seem a strange thing to say given my critique of parts of his work started all this. Let me explain. In my oral presentation (the one Day says he liked much more than my written paper), I drew on Nietzsche to argue that every person (and thus every political thinker) is multiple. That is, each of us is a tangled mass of many different wills and desires. And each of these wills is running in its own direction, some even directly conflicting with others. So in the oral presentation I offered a critique not of Day’s work as a whole, which I mostly agree with, but only of one particular will or desire in Day’s work, what I called his “will to supersede.” It’s a clunky term, but what I was getting at was that there is a distinct desire present in Day’s book, Gramsci is Dead, to lump a whole multiplicity of different political ideas and practices into one homogenous mass and declare that mass superseded, dead, or past its “sell-by date.” As I say in the paper, the most spectacular example of this is Day’s Frankenstein monster: “(neo)liberal and (post)Marxist theory and practice.” In his response to my written paper we have a new amalgamated monster to run away from, “business as usual.” This monster seems to include everything that does not conform to the sensibilities of the protagonists of the most ‘vibrant’ social movements as Day understands and articulates them.