'Some writers’ names become associated with whole ways of knowing. Their
designation makes the conversion from an individual noun to a system of
thought, even if that system is not always very systematic. “This is
why,” writes Clifford Geertz, “we tend to discard their first names
after a while and adjectvise their last ones” – Foucauldian, Freudian,
Marxist, Kleinian and so on. Really big names are transmuted to eponyms.
They become what Barthes referred to as ‘author priests’. By contrast
the rest of us academic artisans are little more than clerks or at best
apostles. The implication is that academic authors fall into either the
rare breed of intellectual giants or mere typists transcribing the
obscure trivialities of life and translating them into terms that are
already set.'
Les Back
