*I can forgive a lot for an assertion like this.
(...)
"People speak of “fashions” in philosophy only in the negative sense, in order to dismiss shallow opponents who always latch onto whatever is trendy. But there is a deeper sense of fashion in philosophy that demands our attention. The world is a mysterious place, and it is not made of propositions. It follows from this that a proposition that is fresh and liberating in 1965 can become the most banal academicism by 2005, if not sooner.
"For this reason, it is really quite important to be a trend watcher in philosophy, because trends give us a good sense of where the current boundary lies between fresh statements and platitudes. There is nothing superficial about, say, cheering Deleuze and Badiou in one decade and denouncing them in the next. Philosophy is historical because any statement can turn into a platitude once the surrounding conditions have changed, and philosophy is more about outflanking platitudes than about making eternally true propositions. I don’t believe we are capable of the latter— not because there is no reality, but because reality is not made of statements, and hence every statement is doomed to become an empty platitude someday.
"And incidentally, this has nothing to do with being a contrarian. Contrarians simply reverse whatever the mainstream is saying, and therefore are merely parasites on the mainstream. Yet real innovators cannot just reverse the mainstream, but have to dig a new stream where no one was expecting it. It takes a great deal of vision to do this, because it is all too easy to fall into the pre-existent trench wars of the time and place into which we are born."
