This is getting dull, but the editor insists:
I particularly enjoy the "more academic than thou" approach. An oldie but a goodie.
Attempts at labelling people in academia are very trite. Whether he calls me a half-baked "post-modern Nietzsche" or God only knows what else is pretty irrelevant. (Yes, note the mixed contextual frame of reference in that sentence - so annoying to analyse such discourse, isn't it? Where's the trusty label now?)
Lest you think I am not academic enough, panove, I offer you the following similarly styled attack: For someone who works at a magazine dealing with ethnicity, Storck seems pretty unaware of the last fifteen years of debate on nationalism and ethnicity - at least as it has transpired in the English language context. You do not have to go back to Nietzsche for my ideas. Take a look at Benedict Anderson's book "Imagined Communities" of 1991, for example, or anything on nationalism by Hobsbawm in the past ten or fifteen years. Take a look at Verdery's analysis of the use of the nation concept by Romanian intellectuals or Holy's book on the Czechs for that matter. These authors propose these same ideas and try to find explanations for the existence and maintenance of national sentiment, a sentiment which is in no way primordial and which does not simply come about by chance.
It's strange that he just refuses to see that by saying that nations don't exist, I am destroying the very foundation for stereotypes - not supporting them as he says. This is all old stuff by now, and any student of ethnicity and nationalism ought to be familiar with it.
The personal insults regarding my intellect aren't worth responding to. I know that some people will find me a moron and a lunatic. Realities work that way. Anyway, since we agree with each other on almost everything else, I might as well agree with him that I am an imbecile also.
