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Agon: The Iliad
Drafted as the foundational first chapter of Volume One, the last to be written, of Jameson’s monumental Poetics of Social Forms. A richly rewarding study of the Iliad, located within the ‘immense transition’ from the great imperial cities of the Bronze Age. The logic of agon—a multi-sided struggle—as governing principle of the great poem.
Thinking the Unthinkable
Exploration of the oeuvre of Ci Jiwei, one of the most original social theorists of the contemporary Chinese world. Diagnostics of national consciousness, from Maoist utopianism to a nihilism numbed by consumerist hedonism. Might rising living standards—and the ‘equality of conditions’ already achieved by the Revolution—engender a Polanyian semi-democratization, in the Party’s own interest?
Theory of Needs
Marxism is premised on the possibility of a political economy structured to meet human needs, rather than generate private profit. Could a New Deal capitalism in principle be capable of satisfying them? Is it even possible to disentangle ‘real’ needs from socially constructed ones? Translation of two texts from a 1942 seminar on the question of need.
Always Allegorize?
For Fredric Jameson, allegory exposes the contradictions that ideology obscures: capturing the multiplicities of modernity and forging an interpretive mechanism for the cultural critic. From transforming the text to terraforming the planet, insights into the method of a leading Marxist theorist gleaned from his most recent—and most playful—work.
The Vanishing Library
Twice consumed by fire and set to be rebuilt anew, in what sense can Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s library at the Glasgow School of Art still be said to exist? Freudian derealization, Cartesian doubt and Gaelic allegory summoned by a resident scholar’s memories of reconstructed timbers and their smouldering remains.
An Afternoon with Althusser
Notes on a conversation in the summer of 1977, when the philosopher made an impromptu visit to the NLR office. Wide-ranging discussion on Althusser’s relations with the PCF, the condition of Marxism, the Chinese and Russian revolutions compared; Trotsky, Sraffa and the problems with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.
The Idea of Hope
Reflections on continental philosophy from both sides of the Rhine, tracing complex inter-relations between post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School. Problems of subjectivity and nature, social determination and individual responsibility. Philosophical contexts of critical theory—and German Idealism as laboratory for system-building and experimentalist thought.
Thinking Otherwise
Politico-philosophical profile of Jacques Bouveresse, close friend and colleague of Bourdieu, examining the relation of his large, idiosyncratic body of work to the French philosophical traditions it explicitly disavows. Can thinkers as divergent as Wittgenstein, Musil and Kraus be mobilized to provide a coherent and countervailing ‘Kakanian’ tradition?
The Juridical Economy
Art as the uncanny double of law in the work of Kant, Schiller and Hegel, and its confrontations today with the law in avant-garde practice, as the juridical category of the person either expands beyond even the corporation, dismissed as ‘artificial’ by Hegel, to new fictive forms, or contracts to captive sub-human shapes.
Badiou and the French Tradition
How to locate an energizing philosophy of activity and production, and of fidelity to past revolutionary ruptures, in relation to the line that runs from Sartre, Althusser and Lacan to Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze? A critical interrogation of the return to philosophical tradition, from metaphysics to ethics, in Badiou’s major systematic works.
A Structuralism of Feeling?
Frédéric Lordon’s work combines an elite business-school training with a radical Regulation Theory background, highly effective polemics against the hardening economic and neo-imperial orders in France and the Eurozone with an ambitious social-philosophical agenda. Alberto Toscano investigates.
The Decline of Decadence
From Nietzsche to Lukács, decadence was a matter of cultural disintegration and social atomization under pressure of capitalist modernity, but such talk has dwindled. Malcolm Bull asks whether the private languages of conceptual art are decadent or undecadent. And is the market a substitute communicator of shared values?
Socialism as a Regulative Idea?
In The Structure of World History, Kōjin Karatani attempts a radical reconstruction of historical materialism, from early nomadism to post-capitalist society. Mauss, Hobbes and Marx mobilized as companion thinkers of exchange; Kant as ethico-political prophet. Rob Lucas queries the speculative history of one of Japan’s leading public intellectuals.
Marxism and Subjectivity
Transcript of Sartre’s 1961 Lecture at the Istituto Gramsci in Rome, previously unpublished in English. A sustained philosophical riposte to Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and argument for a concept of subjectivity as process, vividly illustrated in concrete situations.
All Played Out?
Christopher Johnson detects the patterns of a hidden philosophy of history, threaded through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s most famous works. Might its seeming pessimism—a sequence of downward turns from the Neolithic to the present—hold out the possibility of alternative outcomes, virtual destinies?
Levelling Out
Beyond existing arguments about equality, might the praxes of permanent and passive revolution offer a way to conceptualize a more expansionary levelling? Drawing on motifs from Nietzsche, Babeuf, Marx and Gramsci, Malcolm Bull traces the contours and consequences of extra-egalitarianism.