i love the phenomenon in theory/philosophy where sometimes in the process of debunking someone else's argument, a writer will end up producing a text that's way more important and enduring than what they were responding to, often for reasons that are unrelated to the original reason they wrote it. some of engels' best writing on dialectical materialism is in anti-duhring, a whole book in response to a then-famous hack philosopher who is only remembered today for how hard engels tore him down. foucault first articulated the concept of biopower as a method to critique the fact that people talking about the history of the state's orientation toward sexuality were just talking about laws about sex, as if law was the only method by which power operated
it's like if a hundred years from now, one of the most-cited texts in discussions of political economy was a quote tweet dunk thread responding to a post about chatgpt or the tiktok ban or something
