Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "students"

I'm halfway through this, and have had more of Heidegger than I signed up for, but it has introduced me to Levinas and helped me to understand the puzzling emergence of identity politics on British and North American campuses. It turns out to be standard generation-gap stuff. My generation of baby-boomers rejected Heidegger's naziness and took up Levinas's concern for the Other and the idea of attenuating the boundaries between Self and Other. And we have become the Establishment, against which the new generations can rebel by reasserting a concern for group identity, with a newspun sense of entitlement to special privileges that the non-academic world does not grant to the groups with which they identify. I wonder what they make of Camus these days.