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Dear Sirs,
Having read Professor Bernard Cullen's Internet Discussion Review (2001) of my paper ‘The rebirth of the idols: the Freudian unconscious and the Nietzschean unconscious’ (Ahumada, 2001), I must say that I found there a postmodern rebuttal in lieu of a review.
Which is a good example of a moral issue. Given that, in his own words, Professor Cullen finds my paper offputting, I ask whether he was in a position to accept being its moderator/reviewer. Instead of accepting and acknowledging his bias, he chooses to play his own agenda and proceeds to put my paper down. I surmise he should in any case have satiated his postmodernist urges in a paper of his own. Ought not the role of the moderator/reviewer demand an equitable rather than a partisan stance?
Space does not allow me to detail the manifold distortions and inaccuracies in his summary, such as raising adversarial opinions into authorities, his putting in my mouth that Nietzsche was ‘proto-fascistic’ (words uttered by a participant rather than by me, in what to my mind amounts to a simplistic statement on a complex issue), or his volunteering that I add insult to injury in my consideration of Laplanche's Cartesian biases. Furthermore, he muddles the roles in his nimble jumping into the boots of editor and judges and putting into question my paper's pertinence for the International Journal—an opinion belied by the passion in the discussion.
To profit from a partisan posture under the cloak of moderator/reviewer is itself of a piece with postmodernism, where rhetoric substitutes for logic. I take it, however, that Professor Cullen can claim venerable enough antecedents: both Nietzsche and Foucault define themselves as philosophers with a mask.