They absolutely don't understand irony at all.
Take, for instance, the recent controversy concerning Slavoj Zizek (I'm not the biggest Zizek fan in the world and I'm not going to defend the guy too much, but still): it's very obvious to me that he appropriates right-wing lexicon and positions not because he's embracing the far-right, but because he's being ironic. The comments he made last year concerning the Syrian refugee crisis were not aimed at the refugees themselves, but at superficial leftists who insist that the refugees hold some kind of metaphysical qualities which will enable them to redeem the West. Of course, American leftists didn't get what he was saying and immediately labeled him as a "right-deviationist".
Talking to Americans about philosophy is almost like walking on eggshells. Everything - literally everything - comes down to creating a logical model and shoehorning everything into that model; if something is discovered to be outside that model, the thing to do is immediately shun it, attack it, or insist it can fit by playing semantics. No wonder very little intellectual culture emerges from the US compared with elsewhere.
Take, for instance, the recent controversy concerning Slavoj Zizek (I'm not the biggest Zizek fan in the world and I'm not going to defend the guy too much, but still): it's very obvious to me that he appropriates right-wing lexicon and positions not because he's embracing the far-right, but because he's being ironic. The comments he made last year concerning the Syrian refugee crisis were not aimed at the refugees themselves, but at superficial leftists who insist that the refugees hold some kind of metaphysical qualities which will enable them to redeem the West. Of course, American leftists didn't get what he was saying and immediately labeled him as a "right-deviationist".
Talking to Americans about philosophy is almost like walking on eggshells. Everything - literally everything - comes down to creating a logical model and shoehorning everything into that model; if something is discovered to be outside that model, the thing to do is immediately shun it, attack it, or insist it can fit by playing semantics. No wonder very little intellectual culture emerges from the US compared with elsewhere.
+Julia Riber Pitt I have been severely dismayed and really very shocked indeed by the paucity of the American intellect. There were people with whom I had kept up a long discourse for years because I thought they could understand my irony, only to find out much later that they had been taking me for a very, very stupid person. Then later, you have to go over every transaction you had with them, and kind of realize this was the equivalent of being played by a narc.
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