SOURCE: “Only Words,” in The Nation, January 31, 1994, pp. 135-37.

In the following review of There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too, Scialabba commends Fish's “dazzling facility” but disagrees with his views on affirmative action.

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden wrote—nothing political, anyway. And neither does philosophy, as Richard Rorty has recently shown. You’d never know it, though, from the last decade or so of all-out cultural polemics. The sky is falling, warns the right, and it’s the fault of tenured radicals and trendy artistes. Racism, sexism and imperialism remain unsmashed, complains the left, and it’s the fault of the dominant cultural/ideological formations and of the literary/artistic canon that underwrites their hegemony. Along with several grains of truth, a certain amount of chaff has found its way into the arguments on both sides, as Rorty has pointed...