“Two Against Freud”: trying to get Robert Pinsky to talk to Gilles Deleuze. What Freudian psychology contributed to the discourses of poetry and philosophy in the seventies.

This is one is without my usual clarity of focus and argument. Somewhat rambling, unable, ultimately, to hold meaningfully together the divergent energies of a famous conservative poet and a famous radical philosopher. But the seventies were my first decade, and I know from deep memory, the source of intuition, as well as films like Coffy and books like Michael Hardt’s The Subversive Seventies, that these two conflicting impulses — to revitalize the radical energies of the sixties, and to assess their consequences dispassionately — characterized the decade, gave it, at least in the white world I knew, its unique quality of quietude and sad irony.