- Table View
- List View
Mapping Ideology
by Slavoj Zizek Michele Barrett Theodor Adorno Louis Althusser Nicholas AbercrombieFor a long time, the term "ideology" was in disrepute, having become associated with such unfashionable notions as fundamental truth and the eternal verities. The tide has turned, and recent years have seen a revival of interest in the questions that ideology poses to social and cultural theory and to political practice.Including Slavoj i ek's study of the development of the concept from Marx to the present, assessments of the contributions of Lukács and the Frankfurt School by Terry Eagleton, Peter Dews and Seyla Benhabib, and essays by Adorno, Lacan and Althusser, Mapping Ideology is an invaluable guide to the most dynamic field in cultural theory.
Marx and Lincoln: An Unfinished Revolution
by Robin Blackburn Karl Marx Abraham LincolnKarl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War. Although they were divided by far more than the Atlantic Ocean, they agreed on the cause of free labor and the urgent need to end slavery. In his introduction, Robin Blackburn argues that Lincoln's response signaled the importance of the German American community and the role of the international communists in opposing European recognition of the Confederacy. The ideals of communism, voiced through the International Working Men's Association, attracted many thousands of supporters throughout the US, and helped spread the demand for an eight-hour day. Blackburn shows how the IWA in America--born out of the Civil War--sought to radicalize Lincoln's unfinished revolution and to advance the rights of labor, uniting black and white, men and women, native and foreign-born. The International contributed to a profound critique of the capitalist robber barons who enriched themselves during and after the war, and it inspired an extraordinary series of strikes and class struggles in the postwar decades. In addition to a range of key texts and letters by both Lincoln and Marx, this book includes articles from the radical New York-based journal Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, an extract from Thomas Fortune's classic work on racism Black and White, Frederick Engels on the progress of US labor in the 1880s, and Lucy Parson's speech at the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Living in the End Times
by Slavoj ZizekThe underlying premise of the book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its four riders of the apocalypse are the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, the imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property, the forthcoming struggle for raw materials, food and water), and the explosions of social divisions and exclusions. Society's first reaction is ideological denial, then explosions of anger at the injustices of the new world order, attempts at bargaining, and when this fails, depression and withdrawal set in. Finally, after passing through this zero-point we no longer perceive it as a threat, but as the chance for a new beginning. or, as Mao Zedong might have put it, "There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent." i ek traces out in detail these five stances, makes a plea for a return to the Marxian critique of political economy, and sniffs out the first signs of a budding communist culture in all its diverse forms--in utopias that range from Kafka's community of mice to the collective of freak outcasts in the TV series Heroes.
An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln
by Abraham Lincoln Friedrich Engels Karl Marx Robin Blackburn Raya DunaevskayaKarl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War, with Marx writing on behalf of the International Working Men's Association. Although they were divided by far more than the Atlantic Ocean, they agreed on the urgency of suppressing slavery and the cause of "free labor." In his introduction Robin Blackburn argues that Lincoln's response to the IWA was a sign of the importance of the German American community as well as of the role of the International in opposing European recognition of the Confederacy. The International went on to attract many thousands of supporters in over fifty regions of the US, and helped to spread the demand for an eight-hour day--enacted by Congress in 1868 for Federal employees. Blackburn shows how the International in America--born out of the Civil War--sought to radicalize Lincoln's unfinished revolution and to advance the rights of labor, uniting black and white, men and women, native and foreign-born. The International contributed to a profound critique of the capitalist robber barons who enriched themselves during and after the war. It inspired an extraordinary series of strikes and class struggles in the postwar decades. In addition to a range of key texts and letters by both Lincoln and Marx, this book includes Raya Dunaevskaya's assessment of the impact of the Civil War on Marx's theory and a survey by Frederick Engels of the progress of US labor in the 1880s.
Lives on the Left
by Akira Asada Francis Mulhern Giovanni Arrighi Noam Chomsky Luciana CastellinaThe extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers.Lives on the Left includes interviews with Georg Lukács, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Jiri Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, João Pedro Stédile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi.New Left Review was founded in 1960 in London, which has remained its base ever since. In fifty years of publication, it has won an international reputation as an independent journal of socialist politics and ideas, attracting readers and contributors from every part of the world. A Spanish-language edition is published bi-monthly from Madrid.
Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double
by David Fernbach Jacques RanciereThese essays from the 1970s mark the inception of the distinctive project that Jacques Rancière has pursued across forty years, with four interwoven themes: the study of working-class identity, of its philosophical interpretation, of "heretical" knowledge and of the relationship between work and leisure. For the short-lived journal Les Révoltes Logiques, Rancière wrote on subjects ranging across a hundred years, from the California Gold Rush to trade-union collaboration with fascism, from early feminism to the "dictatorship of the proletariat," from the respectability of the Paris Exposition to the disrespectable carousing outside the Paris gates. Rancière characteristically combines telling historical detail with deep insight into the development of the popular mind. In a new preface, he explains why such "rude words" as "people," "factory," "proletarians" and "revolution" still need to be spoken.
The Total Art of Stalinism
by Boris Groys Charles RougleFrom the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists' goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Hegel Variations
by Fredric JamesonIn this major new study, philosopher and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson offers an innovative reading of a book that forms part of the bedrock of modern Western thought: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.Whereas other writers have interpreted the Phenomenology as a rigidly closed system, Jameson discovers it to be a more fluid, open-ended work. Hegel's mind is revealed to be a less systematic mechanism than normally thought, one whose ideas never solidify into pure abstractions. The conclusion of the Phenomenology, on the aftermath of the French Revolution, is examined as a provisional stalemate between the political and the social--a situation from which Jameson draws important lessons for our own age.From the Hardcover edition.
Citizens to Lords
by Ellen Meiksins WoodIn this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood lays out her innovative approach to the history of political theory and traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Her "social history" is a significant departure from other contextual interpretations. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political discourse but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. From the Ancient Greek polis of Plato and Aristotle, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and the Empire of St. Paul and St. Augustine, to the medieval world of Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Citizens to Lords offers a rich, dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have stamped their imprint upon history and the present day.
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
by Slavoj ZizekIn some circles, a nod towards totalitarianism is enough to dismiss any critique of the status quo. Such is the insidiousness of the neo-liberal ideology, argues Slavoj i ek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? turns a specious rhetorical strategy on its head to identify a network of family resemblances between totalitarianism and modern liberal democracy. i ek argues that totalitarianism is invariably defined in terms of four things: the Holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the socialist revolutionary project; ethnic and religious fundamentalisms, which are to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; and the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought. i ek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Revolution at the Gates
by V. I. Lenin Slavoj ZizekThe idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn't he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-century?Lenin, however, deserves wider consideration than this, and his writings of 1917 are testament to a formidable political figure. They reveal his ability to grasp the significance of an extraordinary moment in history. Everything is here, from Lenin-the-ingenious-revolutionary-strategist to Lenin-of-the-enacted-utopia. To use Kierkegaard's phrase, what we can glimpse in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming: not yet Lenin-the-Soviet-institution, but Lenin thrown into an open, contingent situation.In Revolution at the Gates, Slavoj i ek locates the 1917 writings in their historical context, while his afterword tackles the key question of whether Lenin can be reinvented in our era of "cultural capitalism." i ek is convinced that, whatever the discussion--the forthcoming crisis of capitalism, the possibility of a redemptive violence, the falsity of liberal tolerance--Lenin's time has come again.
The Emancipated Spectator
by Jacques RanciereThe theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?From the Hardcover edition.
The Impostor
by Xavier De La Porte Jade LindgaardHow do we explain what Perry Anderson calls "the bizarre prominence of Bernard-Henri Lévy," easily the best-known "thinker" under sixty in France? "It would," he continues, "be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversal of national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded this crass booby in France's public sphere, despite innumerable demonstrations of his inability to get a fact or an idea straight. Could such a grotesque flourish in any other major Western culture today?"This book, based on a careful investigation comparing BHL's words with his deeds, seeks to explore the remarkable persistence of this celebrity pseudo-philosopher since he burst onto the scene in 1977. Delving into his networks in the spheres of politics, the media and big business, Lindgaard and de la Porte reveal what the success of this three-decade long imposture tells us about the degeneration of contemporary French intellectual and cultural life.About the series: Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writing inaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when in the words of one of them, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was "running up like parchment in the fire." From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century. In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it's time to revive the tradition. Verso's Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.
Liberty and Property
by Ellen Meiksins WoodThe formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment have all been attributed to the "early modern" period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. Assessing the work and background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day.
Ernest Gellner
by John A. HallErnest Gellner (1925-95) was a multilingual polymath and a public intellectual who set the agenda in the study of nationalism and the sociology of Islam. Having grown up in Paris, Prague, and England, he was also one of the last great Jewish thinkers from Central Europe to experience directly the impact of the Holocaust. His intellectual trajectory differed from that of similar thinkers, both in producing a highly integrated philosophy of modernity and in combining a respect for nationalism with an appreciation of the power of modern science. Gellner was a fierce opponent, in private as well as in public, of such contemporaries as Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Charles Taylor, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. As this definitive biography shows, he was passionate in the defense of reason against every form of relativism--a battle that his intellectual inheritors continue to this day.
Polemics
by Alain Badiou Cecile Winter Steve Corcoran Bruno Bosteels Ray BrassierFollowing on from Alain Badiou's acclaimed works Ethics and Metapolitics, Polemics is a series of brilliant metapolitical reflections, demolishing established opinion and dominant propaganda, and reorienting our understanding of events from the Kosovo and Iraq wars to the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution.With the critical insight and polemical bravura for which he is renowned, Badiou considers the relationships between language, judgment and propaganda--and shows how propaganda has become the dominant force. Both wittily and profoundly, Badiou presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, and questions what constitutes political truth.From the Hardcover edition.
Proletarian Nights
by Jacques RanciereProletarian Nights, previously published in English as Nights of Labor and one of Rancière's most important works, dramatically reinterprets the Revolution of 1830, contending that workers were not rebelling against specific hardships and conditions but against the unyielding predetermination of their lives. Through a study of worker-run newspapers, letters, journals, and worker-poetry, Rancière reveals the contradictory and conflicting stories that challenge the coherence of these statements celebrating labor.This updated edition includes a new preface by the author, revisiting the work twenty years since its first publication in France.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat
by Steven LukesThe Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat is a brilliant fictional journey through Western political philosophy by one of our most original thinkers. Professor Caritat, a middle-aged Candide, walks naively through the neighbouring countries of Utilitaria, Communitaria and Libertaria, in his quest to find the best of all possible worlds. Cut loose from the confines of his ivory tower, this wandering professor is made to confront the perplexed state of modern thinking in this dazzling comedy of ideas.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Anti-Nietzsche
by Malcolm BullNietzsche, the philosopher seemingly opposed to everyone, has met with remarkably little opposition himself. He remains what he wanted to be-- the limit-philosopher of a modernity that never ends. In this provocative, sometimes disturbing book, Bull argues that merely to reject Nietzsche is not to escape his lure. He seduces by appealing to our desire for victory, our creativity, our humanity. Only by 'reading like a loser' and failing to live up to his ideals can we move beyond Nietzsche to a still more radical revaluation of all values--a subhumanism that expands the boundaries of society until we are left with less than nothing in common.Anti-Nietzsche is a subtle and subversive engagement with Nietzsche and his twentieth-century interpreters--Heidegger, Vattimo, Nancy, and Agamben. Written with economy and clarity, it shows how a politics of failure might change what it means to be human.
Towards a New Manifesto
by Max Horkheimer Theodor AdornoA thrilling example of philosophy in action, Towards a New Manifesto reveals the fathers of critical theory, Adorno and Horkheimer, in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas.A record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to writing a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto, this conversation ranges across its central themes--theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom--in a register found nowhere else in their work. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded resulting in a thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world.
Less Than Nothing
by Slavoj ZizekFor the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel's absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similarities. Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new period of transition. In Less Than Nothing, the product of a career-long focus on the part of its author, Slavoj i ek argues it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables i ek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with key strands of contemporary thought--Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics, and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Genes, Cells and Brains
by Hilary Rose Steven RoseOur fates lie in our genes and not in the stars, said James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. But Watson could not have predicted the scale of the industry now dedicated to this new frontier. Since the launch of the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project, the biosciences have promised miracle cures and radical new ways of understanding who we are. But where is the new world we were promised?In Genes, Cells, and Brains, feminist sociologist Hilary Rose and neuroscientist Steven Rose take on the bioscience industry and its claims. Examining the rivalries between public and private sequencers,the establishment of biobanks, and the rise of stem cell research, they ask why the promised cornucopia of health benefits has failed to emerge. Has bioethics simply become an enterprise? As bodies become increasingly commodified, perhaps the failure to deliver on these promises lies in genomics itself.
The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People Volume 2
by Jacques RanciereFollowing the previous volume of essays by Jacques Rancière from the 1970s, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, this second collection focuses on the ways in which radical philosophers understand the people they profess to speak for. The Intellectual and His People engages in an incisive and original way with current political and cultural issues, including the "discovery" of totalitarianism by the "new philosophers," the relationship of Sartre and Foucault to popular struggles, nostalgia for the ebbing world of the factory, the slippage of the artistic avant-garde into defending corporate privilege, and the ambiguous sociological critique of Pierre Bourdieu. As ever, Rancière challenges all patterns of thought in which one-time radicalism has become empty convention.
The Rebirth of History
by Alain Badiou Gregory ElliottIn the uprisings of the Arab world, Alain Badiou discerns echoes of the European revolutions of 1848. In both cases, the object was to overthrow despotic regimes maintained by the great powers--regimes designed to impose the will of financial oligarchies. Both events occurred after what was commonly thought to be the end of a revolutionary epoch: in 1815, the final defeat of Napoleon; and in 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union. But the revolutions of 1848 proclaimed for a century and a half the return of revolutionary thought and action. Likewise, the uprisings underway today herald a worldwide resurgence in the liberating force of the masses--despite the attempts of the 'international community' to neutralize its power.Badiou's book salutes this reawakening of history, weaving examples from the Arab Spring and elsewhere into a global analysis of the return of emancipatory universalism.
Concept and Form, Volume 1
by Alain Badiou Yves Duroux Alain Grosrichard Knox Peden Peter HallwardEdited by a small group of students--including Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault--at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, the Cahiers pour l'Analyse appeared in ten volumes between 1966 to 1969. The journal was conceived as a contribution to a philosophy based on the primacy of concepts and the rigor of logic and formalization, as opposed to lived experience or the interpretation of meaning. The Cahiers published landmark texts by the most influential thinkers of the day, including Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, and Lacan, and were soon recognized as one of the most significant and innovative philosophical projects of the time.The two volumes of Concept and Form offer the first systematic presentation and assessment of the Cahiers legacy in any language. The first volume translates a selection of original Cahiers texts.