Research has suggested that Westerners tend to be unrealistically optimistic and Easterners tend to show more emotional
dialecticism (e.g., not only less optimism but also less pessimism; Chang et al., 2001).
Structural
dialecticism, which Badiou comes to associate primarily with the thought of his mentor Althusser, (6) serves only as a way station in the more comprehensively dialectical trajectory (the historical) charted by Badiou's ongoing project and, I want to suggest, Rushdie's first work of fiction.
Brian Russell Graham's new book, The Necessary Unity of Opposites: The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye, contributes to this increase in interest and argues that Frye's thought is unified by a
dialecticism heavily influenced by William Blake's Orc/Urizen cycle.
(32) He argues the following: that the conceptual binaries (self/other, inside/outside) at work in a colonial situation are less stable than--and inherently different from--those found in European
dialecticism and, for that matter, certain strains of postmodernism and post-structuralism.
Nevertheless, Parr's own approach is still characterised by this critical
dialecticism. The broad terms of his argument are those of the Habermasian critique of instrumental-calculative reason and its colonisation of the common life-world; the nuance in his argument is that of the Bakhtinian notion of the inherent struggle between the 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal' tendencies in language (p.
A longitudinal study is required, however, before the relationships among relativism,
dialecticism, and different levels of integration in the social learning process can be fully understood.
The fault line in Marx's theory is that it simply undermines the permanent nature of
dialecticism in any society.
reject the noncommittal path of discursive
dialecticism and
See his criticism of MacIntyre's
dialecticism in Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 326ff, as well as his more recent reflections on Nicholas of Cusa's theological hierarchies in Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 105-137.
