I can't call to mind either a specific usage of Dennett's that Rorty
might have chided him for, or Rorty chiding him for it - "hysteria"
seems rather foreign to the language of _Consciousness Explained_,
which is rather resolutely un-psychoanalytic. However, checking the
index, I see that there is a brief discussion of "hysterical
blindness" in the context of blindsight and related phenomena. The
term isn't Dennett's own, though, and he seems simply to take it as
the accepted name for the phenomenon.
Some discussion recently in certain districts of blog-land of the
subject of "populism", which I think Zizek may have described as
hysterical. In the populist scenario, the "people" address the "elite"
as if the latter were capable of changing everything - as if they
alone were the "subject of history", to use an old-fashioned
terminology - and make "hysterical" demands that are hysterical not
because they are unreasonable in and of themselves, but because they
posit a relationship between the demander and the demandee that is an
utter distortion of the real state of affairs, without any
acknowledgement of the complicity of the "people" itself in the
injuries for which it demands redress. "Hysteria" here would be a
refusal of direct agency, and the potential for culpability that comes
with it: for the hysteric, only the other can act and assume the guilt
of action, and every act of the other *is* a priori guilty, reeking
with all of the hysteric's disavowed guilt.
Dominic
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