The question comes down to this: Do we read these theorists, repulsive warts and all, and learn what we can from them? Do we keep our differences with them, in other words, but engage with them anyway?
Or do we decide that these differences saturate their texts so thoroughly that reading them becomes unbearable? I’m asking the inverse of the question that led to the redefinition of the American literary canon in the late 20th century. The most difficult version of that question is: Do we exclude writers from the theoretical canon on the grounds that they were, by our standards, racists and misogynists?
Where do we forage in our history if, on those grounds, we exclude Hesiod, Aristotle, Saul of Tarsus, Augustine, Aquinas, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Voltaire, and those arrogant Germans I’ve mentioned? The intellectual commons looks pretty barren if we’re fenced off from all those ideas. Now transpose from the key of philosophy and literature to that of politics, through which contemporary movements have congregated on campuses. At Yale, the demand is to erase the monumental memory of Sen. John C. Calhoun, a force behind slavery and secession.
At Princeton, the demand is to do the same with the physical memorialization of Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. president who segregated federal offices in 1913.To my mind, these are ways of forgetting the past — repressing and mutilating it rather than learning from it, or, as the shrinks would say, working through it.
This nation was built on slavery and its offspring, racism. To think that we can ignore this fundamental fact is to pretend that we can escape the past, in keeping with that old frontier thesis — if we just light out for the territory along with Huck Finn, why, we’ll slip the yoke of a civilization predicated on barbarism. That way lie boyish beginnings and a model of the American Adam, but nothing else worth thinking with, or about.
I say keep Calhoun enshrined and teach the history of the Ivy League universities.
Remind students that every Ivy League endowment, with the possible exception of Cornell, was connected either to the slave trade or to the Atlantic economy that could be constructed as a result. As for Wilson: If we can acknowledge and teach the centrality of slavery and racism in 19th-century American history by keeping Calhoun on our minds, we can acknowledge and teach the centrality of imperialism and racism in 20th-century American history by keeping Wilson on our minds.