LETTERS
Change our Name? Editors: I recall the socialist dictum explaining warfare as the highest expression of class struggle. Have your editors and contributors forgotten this or just don't know...
...The opacity is Jay's: "Habermas charges [Castoriadis] with failing to grasp the importance of intersubjective interactions that cannot be assimilated to a unified notion of selfinstitution...
...In March 1968, the staff of the philosophy and sociology department at Warsaw University condemned the communists' anti-Semitic campaign...
...Solidarity "wanted to reinstall an articulated civil society rather than absorb the state into a homogeneous network of self-managing councils...
...Nor did I say that the Polish Socialist party was anti-Semitic—quite to the contrary...
...This will to read into an author what perhaps existed before elsewhere yields strange results...
...To Jacoby, homeless people are the figures lying on the street she must confront on her way to work in the morning...
...The vast majority of homeless people do not sleep on the street: they sleep in some form of shelter, whether public or private...
...Because of their general, albeit critical and/or qualified support of the Gulf War (ignoring—as of the Spring issue—the many resulting deaths of innocent civilians, not to mention our disheartening experiences with jingoistic, superficial patriotism), I suggest that you change the name from Dissent to Assent...
...In fall 1990, acting as the Helsinki Committee, we urged the authorities to use the provisions of the criminal code against stirring up racial, ethnic, or religious hatred...
...In aiming at the autonomy of others, I aim not just at these specific other subjects but at an indefinite community of others in an indeterminate future...
...One may argue (superficially) that the myriad questions raised by this radical project—now suppressed under claims of efficiency, rationality, national security—would make society ungovernable...
...The fact that "anti-Semitism without Jews" developed first in England is no consolation...
...Practice" refutes Castoriadis, for "no workers' councils have yet to emerge spontaneously in . . . 1989-90...
...Brumberg's opinion on how best to incorporate the millions of Polish Jews into the new Polish state between the World Wars, presented in one sentence, is an insult to many politicians of Jewish and gentile descent who were trying to cope with the issue before the Nazis invaded with their "final solution...
...Like it or not, most prewar political parties were—I suggest looking up any history textbook, say Anthony Polonsky's Politics in Independent Poland 1921-1939...
...Jacoby's failure to recognize this is symptomatic of her impression of homelessness...
...Have your editors and contributors forgotten this or just don't know it...
...DAVID AMES CURTIS Paris, France q AUTHOR'S QUERY: For a biography of the late American socialist leader Michael Harrington, which is being written with the cooperation of the Harrington family, I would appreciate hearing from anyone who knew Harrington well or has correspondence or other materials that shed light on his life and career...
...Reagan's diminishing of the role played by the federal government in subsidized housing clearly aggravated the problem, but we must face up to the reality that as long as we see housing as a commodity and not a right, we ensure that there will be large numbers of people who are homeless...
...Does he include Jewish political parties, like the Bund, represented in the Polish Parliament before the war...
...Nor is it exhausted by "intersubjective interactions...
...Now that gun is removed...
...We learn from Mr...
...Nor do we learn why the Jewish population in the Polish territories—the Russian pale in effect incorporated the borders of the former Polish state—was so sizable in contrast to England, France, Spain, or Germany...
...Despite (?) his title ("Unorthodox Leftist"), Jay wants to tag Castoriadis a Marxist theologian: Castoriadis's "fundamental flaw" is a Lukacsian "agenda of redemptive politics...
...One cannot conclude autonomous society dictates "homogeneity...
...The High Cost of Housing Editors: In Tamar Jacoby's excellent and even-handed article about the homeless (Spring 1991), she neglects to pinpoint the simplest explanation for this tragic phenomenon: some people's labor is not worth what it takes to support him/herself...
...Instead of proclaiming that recent events irredeemably prove this project a "redemptive utopia," we should examine how to broaden it—and what still impedes it...
...Castoriadis supposedly believed "virtually all the discontents [people] suffer are a function of [the production process's] division into managers and managed...
...But the "only" anti-Semitic party Brumberg lists in the 1930s is the Polish Socialist party...
...Assimilation was advocated by many Jews, while Zionists proposed emigration to Palestine...
...This is simply false...
...Of the two remaining important political camps, Sanacja, which ruled the country from 1926 to the war—despite the opposition of the National Democrats—and the agrarian party opposed Nazism and the anti-Semitic riots of the middle-class...
...I could go on, but there seems to be little point in carrying on a lengthy polemic with someone whose claim to objectivity is "not to deny the anti-Semitic attitudes among some Poles...
...The problem of the organization of society remains in its entirety, as Solidarity's recent breakup confirms...
...Homeless people are people, and calling them "the homeless," as if "homeless" were a noun and not an adjective, allows Jacoby to avoid the awful discomfort of acknowledging that homeless people are not a species apart from her own...
...q Contra Brumberg Editors: I find it regrettable that you chose to publish as badly informed an article as Abraham Brumberg's "Polish Intellectuals and Anti-Semitism" (Dissent, Winter 1991...
...Marx's productivism is imputed to Castoriadis—who argued people's cultural activities and sexuality are as important...
...Of course the Bund was not anti-Semitic (you can carry self-hatred only so far), and furthermore the Bund was not "represented in the Polish Parliament before the war...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Jay reduces ideas to "antecedents...
...I now think this is not so much a debate on the anti-Semitism of Polish intellectuals as about the attitude one should take toward Polish and Jewish nationalism...
...Some of the intellectuals Brumberg criticizes are exactly those who are attacked by anti-Semites as Jewish...
...Contrary to her suggestion, homelessness in this country is not a new phenomenon, beginning only a decade ago following wholesale deinstitutionalization, nor is homelessness a condition from which only the mentally ill suffer...
...The logic of the system requires that at any given time a certain number of people will be homeless...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...I think every intellectual must oppose extremists on both sides...
...The anti-Semitic record of the prewar National Democrats is well established...
...Autonomy is not a norm anyone invented alone...
...Caton for a history of homelessness in this country...
...The tendency to reduce what one does not understand to what one thinks one already knows is indicative of the sorry state of creative emancipatory thought today...
...Certainly, as Jacoby's article suggests, we need to do a better job of treating those of us who are mentally ill, but we also need to do a better job of housing those of us who are homeless...
...The label won't stick...
...But Castoriadis said this split had spread throughout social life and was not simply an economic phenomenon to be remedied automatically by workers' councils...
...Jay "explains" Castoriadis's views: "Once this split is overcome, the organization of society will become transparent to those who collectively organize it...
...In spring 1990, the editorial council of the Warsaw University Weekly condemned an openly pro-Nazi publication...
...But when Poles stopped talking about building "civil society" within a communist state and began talking self-management, the regime put a gun to their head...
...JOSH WOLF New York, N.Y...
...Although deinstitutionalization undoubtedly increased the numbers of people who are unable to find or to pay for homes, these people's plight is not a new one...
...Brumberg that Jews formed a "sizable portion of the nascent intelligentsia in Poland...
...People suffered from homelessness in precolonial England, and the colonists brought the condition here when they settled (see Homeless in America, edited by Carol L.M...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Self-institution" signifies not "suprapersonality" but "collective anonymity" irreducible to (inter)subjectivity...
...No "intersubjective" essence could preclude autonomous individuals from entertaining relations with their society such that that society is put into question whenever, by democratic means, they feel the need or desire to do so...
...Brumberg equates opposition to antiSemitism with opposition to the Catholic Church though the church condemned the "sin of anti-Semitism" ex officio...
...I do not deny the anti-Semitic attitudes of some Poles...
...MAURICE ISSERMAN History Department Hamilton College Clinton, New York 13323 q To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...I am afraid that Professor Kurczewski has still a lot to learn...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...q 446 • DISSENT...
...Furthermore, by referring to these people repeatedly as "the homeless," and by speaking of the "homeless problem," Jacoby denies them not only agency but humanity...
...For instance: I did not—and in one sentence at that—offer a solution on how "best to incorporate the millions of Polish Jews into the new Polish state between the World Wars," if only because the problem was not how to incorporate them (they had been there for centuries, as Kurczewski himself points out) but how to treat them like equal citizens...
...It is scandalous that there are anti-Semites in Poland, but it is also scandalous to use the "mechanics" of anti-Semitism to say that Poles or Polish intellectuals in general are anti-Semitic...
...o SUMMER • 1991 • 445 Letters Understanding Castoriadis Editors: Martin Jay (Summer 1990) rightly praises Cornelius Castoriadis's Political and Social Writings as "remarkably acute and prescient analyses of the crisis of communism...
...If the supply side of the equation were greater than the demand side, if there were more units of livable housing than households, housing could not be the profitable business that it is...
...The number of homeless has increased because the degree of competency required for self-support in our technologically sophisticated culture has risen...
...JACEK KURCZEWSKI Judge, Tribunal of State Republic of Poland Professor, University of Warsaw Abraham Brumberg Replies The saving grace of Professor Kurczewski's letter is his assurance that while "anti-Brumbergian" he remains firmly "friendly to Dissent...
...To prove Castoriadis's "yearnings for total social redemption" (from what...
...Does he mean Poland under alien yoke until 1918, independent Poland in 1918-1939, the anti-German underground during World War II, communist Poland, or the New Poland...
...Even in a "condensed version of a longer study" obvious errors of fact appear, as well as errors of judgment and omission...
...In turn, I assure him that my friendly feelings toward Dissent do not make me anti-Kurczewskian...
...The mentally ill, along with many physically disabled, are only the most dramatic examples of this rough economic fact...
...Jay concludes recent events prove "fatal" to Castoriadis's "utopian vision...
...0 Recognizing Homeless People as People Editors: Tamar Jacoby's article "Thinking About the Homeless" (Dissent, Spring 1991) addresses a number of important questions about the relationship between homelessness and mental illness...
...Brumberg discusses comments made by Lech Walesa without mentioning the president's condemnation of anti-Semitism...
...its meaning must first be instituted...
...Brumberg writes that "[i]n the twentieth century almost all political parties in Poland incorporated anti-Semitism into their political programs...
...Jay, who cites Castoriadis's The Imaginary Institution of Society, skipped page 111: "No society will ever be totally transparent...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...As to the general thesis of the article that Polish intellectuals (or the Polish intelligentsia) are "reluctant" to examine their own anti-Semitism, let it suffice to say that it is as wrong as any generalization is likely to be...
...Unfortunately, Jacoby's language and the structure of her argument reveal that her understanding of the meaning and the causes of homelessness in our society is severely limited...
...We need to use our language to reflect this understanding, confronting ourselves daily with the fact that homeless people are just that: homeless people...
...And perhaps most important, we need to do a better job of recognizing that homeless people are "us...
...KENNETH R. BURLEY Maryville, Tenn...
...Rather, I regard his letter as yet another sad example of how some Polish intellectuals simply refuse to acknowledge unpalatable facts, and how silly are their efforts to explain them away...
...But Castoriadis's notion of a possible autonomous articulation of self-instituting activities relates to his advocacy of explicit self-governance in society at large and in a variety of intermediate institutions (e.g., the workplace...
...Castoriadis does not, to quote Jay, take events on "faith" as "harbingers of the final struggle...
...Any approach to ending homelessness must recognize first off that as long as housing is distributed primarily along the lines of supply and demand, there always will be people who are unable to find homes...
...Identifying Castoriadis's main theme as "socialism or barbarism," he remarks that Castoriadis "inherited" it "from Engels via Luxemburg: only genuine socialism is the alternative to barbarism...
...Her understanding and her prescriptions go nowhere near addressing the needs of non—mentally ill homeless people...
...We don't learn, however, that Jews were also a sizable portion of Polish society in general . . with their own self-government for centuries...
...However, this was then a leading political force...
...DENISE NOE Atlanta, Ga...
...Misrepresentations accumulate...
...Dissent just no longer fits...
...I do hope that by challenging 444 • DISSENT Letters Brumberg I will only be accused of being an antiBrumbergian while I remain friendly to Dissent...
...To Jacoby, homeless people are "victims," objects of institutional and governmental actions rather than agents in their own right, except when guilty of unapproved behavior...
...He thereby ignores Castoriadis's originality: for Castoriadis, these terms constitute a present contending alternative, not dichotomous future outcomes...
...Or, perhaps Acceptance or Social Critique...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...In a book recently published by a colleague who interviewed children of the Holocaust living in Poland, I've found the following observations: [A]mong Jews who take an anti-Polish stand I feel like a Pole of Jewish descent, while in a purely Polish milieu . . . prejudiced against the Jews, I consider myself a Jew of Polish descent . . . [W]hen I need neither to attack nor to defend I consider myself a Pole of Jewish descent (Malgorzata Melchior, Spoleczna tozsamosc jednostki...
...Castoriadis's fresh insight was that socialism must establish new relations between institutional creativity and already "instituted society" — not collapse them for purposes of "recognition...
...Unfortunately, his own analysis is flawed...
Vol. 38 • July 1991 • No. 3
