12/10/2024
What motivated the neocons above all was revenge against “the ’60s.” The problems of contemporary society, they claimed, were due to militant students, Black activists, and strident feminists, not, say, the ravages of advanced capitalism, and the necessary cure was a return to tradition, family, and moral values. Yet even as the Left was in , it had advanced on cultural fronts. There was real vitality in these multifarious debates, not least in matters of critical theory,which was heterogeneous, especially in the anglophone context. To come to terms with these ideas new and old, a bevy of reviews appeared, including Camera Obscura, Critical Inquiry, Diacritics,differences, New German Critique, October, Representations, Screen, Semiotext(e), Social Text, Telos, Third Text, Wedge, and Zone. In retrospect, though, the drift from politics to criticism was a bad trade,however limited the options then were. When a Social Text editor said to me that critical journals were the political parties of our time, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
