|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
0802119247
| 9780802119247
| 0802119247
| 3.82
| 638
| Jan 01, 2009
| Nov 20, 2009
|
it was ok
|
This large and expensive book is an interesting example of “history” as commodity. It takes an “important” subject- in this case, the history of commu
This large and expensive book is an interesting example of “history” as commodity. It takes an “important” subject- in this case, the history of communism- provides a great deal of data in an accessible form, and keeps its author's analysis slight. Indeed, the analysis manages to almost disguise itself as such so that most readers will not notice that it is intended to assure the targeted market- moderately educated, middle-class Westerners- that everything they've always believed or been told about the geo-political world around them is true- in other words, communism was a bad, utopian idea, that fortunately collapsed due to a combination of its own inner contradictions and the courageous stand of western defenders of freedom. The targeted reader learns facts, but more importantly, (s)he leans that (s)he is smart and rite. The biggest problem with Priestland's approach is that he attempts to write a history of communism as if it existed in a vacuum. The USSR, Priestland would have us believe, took the shape it did not in response to any threat from imperialism, or, for that matter, from any cultural forces and contradictions inherent to Russia, but simply because of the way different Soviet leaders concocted it. Any serious attempt to understand the communist project, or, for that matter, the capitalist project, in the twentieth century has to begin with an analysis of the ways in which the two systems acted upon one another, transforming and reforming each other in a myriad of different ways depending on the conditions and the culture that the two systems operated under. Priestland doesn't want to accept that the appeal of communism for hundreds of millions of people was not based on having read books and having become infatuated with utopian concepts but from their struggles under capitalism to survive and have dignified lives as workers. For Priestland, it was simply a dreamy ideology forced on the masses by a series of leader-thinkers. Priestland traces the roots of communism to the French Revolution and the Jacobins, because, he claims the Jacobins were the first to envisage that only an organized band of revolutionaries devoid of hierarchy could create a just and lasting society. This strikes me as an overly broad and arbitrary place to begin. Plato's Republic proposed that the ideal society would be one in which all goods were distributed equally and over-seen by a vanguard of philosophers. If we're going to trace communism so broadly as to attribute it to the capitalist Jacobins, why not go back to Plato? Some form of egalitarian social thought has been at work almost throughout human history. I think Priestland wants to connect communism and the Jacobins for two reasons. The first being that it gives him a historical “beginning” recent enough to make the length of his book manageable. Secondly, by associating Jacobism and communism, he gets to sully the name of both. The “democratic” west still wants to demonize the Jacobins because it wants its subjects to forget that for all of the horrific violence and contradictions of the French Revolution, it was the event that marked the beginning of the end of feudalism and the consolidation of capitalism in Europe. The “democratic” west, Priestland being one of its exponents, its agents, wants us to forget that capitalism ever had a “beginning” and that this beginning was revolutionary. Instead, capitalism is treated not as a force, but simply as the “natural” order, invaded by an “unnatural” competitor. Rather than being an organization fighting for the empowerment of the middle class over the aristocracy, the Jacobins are vilified as being the harbingers of one-party “totalitarianism,” and this is why Priestland links them to communism. Of course, the Bolsheviks did, in fact, model themselves to some degree after the Jacobins, but this was because they understood the Jacobins as an organization that had successfully led the revolutionary triumph of an oppressed over an oppressor class in a different historical epoch. Throughout the book, Priestland leaves unargued some debatable historical points. He describes the Bolsheviks' seizure of power as absolute, not addressing claims by respected historians of the Russian Revolution, such as Isaac Deutscher, that the Bolsheviks attempted to form a power-sharing government with the Mensheviks throughout Lenin's life. If Priestland can disprove these claims then he should feel free to do so, but to not acknowledge them seems inappropriate. Also, when Priestland is forced to acknowledge dubious practices by the Western powers he tries to white-wash the atrocities. For instance, he writes of the Chilean coup against democratically elected Marxist Salvador Allende that, “The Unites States' precise role is unclear...” when it has been blatantly proven that the coup was orchestrated by Henry Kissinger and the CIA. None of this is to say that the book does not contain interesting information, some of which flies against popular, western ideas about communism. Priestland demonstrates that it was not Stalin's desire to have communist states in Eastern Europe after World War II. Rather, he wanted the communist parties to enter into popular fronts so as not to enrage the West. It was the communists of the different Eastern European countries who did not want to share power, and pressured Stalin into helping them achieve it. It was not, then, a case of Russia building an empire for itself, but of local communists using the post-war milieu to empower themselves. Also, no one who reads the book can continue to think of communism as having been “monolithic” Priestland shows that the nature of communism varied greatly, not just between its European, Asian, African, and American manifestations, but from country to country within the “Iron Curtain,” with Marxism-Leninism being mixed with different national and regional cultures and traditions. Still, Priestland narrativizes these variations as if they all resulted from the personalities of different local leaders. The book predominantly treats the history of communism as the collective biography of the movement's “great men,” as if these cultures were simply the result of their leaders whimsies. However, Priestland does make occasional forays into what could be termed “people's history” and these sections were, I thought, some of the strongest and most interesting parts of the book. Sharing letters, reminiscences of workers, and opinion polls, Priestland is awkwardly forced to acknowledge that throughout most of their histories, the vast majority of those living under communism in Europe were fairly happy. They may have been cynical about their governments, and frustrated with the inefficient delivery of what were ultimately luxury items. But the basic necessities of life were assured, work was easy, and there was more time to read, educated oneself, and spend time with friends and family than there were in the luxurious but stressful advanced capitalist countries. The majority, Priestland concludes, truly believed their system, with all of its acknowledged short-comings, to be preferable to capitalism. The number and influence of anti-communist militants was small, according to Priestland, which made the harsh treatment of dissidents by the authorities not only inhumane but also deeply unnecessary. Some of the most interesting, and seemingly confused, portions of the book addressed the Gorbachev era and Perestroika. At first, I was impressed by Priestland's presentation of the changes coming not from the demands of dissidents but from a young, privileged clique within the Communist Party who declared that the system “wasn't working” because it could not provide the luxuries of the west, something Eastern European communist leaders had been haplessly promising their subjects since the Brezhnev era. (Although, of course, this “personification” of Perestroika as the work of Gorbachev fits nicely with Priestland's understanding of history as the work of “Great Men”- be they “good” or “bad”. Priestland characterizes Gorbachev as a narcissistic and impractical man, but still celebrates him as being ultimately on the “right side of history.”) Reading about the ways in which the Communist Party, whose leaders were now being wined and dined by the leaders of the West, now bent over backwards to describe and denounce the abuses of the Stalinist era to a population that was already aware of them, the ways in which Party leaders were encouraged to describe shame-facedly the lower standard of living of developing nations versus the imperialist countries (as if this was somehow a denunciation of the communist system itself rather than a natural product of uneven development) seemed to me a perfect historical example of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses. If the system tells people that the system is failing because it cannot efficiently provide luxury items, a formerly content population will now judge the system by its inability to provide luxury items and “rebel.” Intentionally or not, Priestland deflates the ludicrous myth, embraced by some “Trotskyist” historians such as Chris Harmon, that the fall of communism was some kind of “revolution from below”. Rather, Priestland fully acknowledges that the end of communism was brought about by privileged bureaucrats that, through the restoration of capitalism, transformed themselves into wealthy robber-barons. But then, bizarrely, he describes Gorbachev as a man who led a “revolution”. This, of course, is the only kind of “revolution” that can occur for Priestland- one of “democracy” over “totalitarianism”- the “right side” of history vs. the “wrong side.” Priestland's own account of post-Soviet Russia illuminates what is meant in the West by “democracy.” Since the fall of communism, there has been one election in Russia generally regarded as legit, in which Yeltsin narrowly won re-election over his Communist Party competitor after trailing the CP in the polls for most of the campaign. It is generally acknowledged that Yeltsin came out on top at the end only because American corporations bought up all the commercial time on Russian TV and would only run campaign commercials for Yeltsin. Since then, of course, there has been Putin... The two “characters” from the book that most mirrored each other for me were Gorbachev and Pol Pot, two men who simply believed every word coming out of their own mouths, even when the consequences of their ideas and actions had no correlation what so ever to their stated, desired effect. Each ended up leading what one could argue were the two greatest disasters for the communist world- the ghoulish embarrassment of Pol's “Democratic Kampuchea” and the over-throw of the USSR, the anchor of the communist world. (The horrors of Stalin's reign cannot, from the standpoint of communism, be considered disasters. These injustices helped establish the state that was, for decades after Stalin's death, one of the world's most powerful and upwardly mobile.) In his conclusion, Priestland asks if any system that engendered “monsters” such as Stalin and Pol Pot can be forgiven by history. He, of course, concludes that it can not be. But this is a conclusion reached by treating communism as if it existed in a void, as if it did not face constant threat from its ideological enemies, enemies that had developed nuclear weapons and seen fit to use them on civilian populations in Japan. This is the conclusion of an ahistorical history of communism that wants to forget that every social system at first articulates itself as sheer force and thus that every social system has its necessary, perhaps even foundational, horrors. American capitalism, for instance, was founded through the near extermination of Native Americans, some have claimed it the largest scale genocide in human history, and the kidnapping, enslavement, rape, torture, and murder of tens of millions of Africans and African-Americans. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Apr 2013
|
May 01, 2013
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0375760229
| 9780375760228
| 0375760229
| 3.88
| 1,018
| 1837
| May 14, 2002
|
really liked it
|
There's so much to hate about this “classic” that I almost feel a little queasy saying that, at the end of the day, I do think its a great work... of
There's so much to hate about this “classic” that I almost feel a little queasy saying that, at the end of the day, I do think its a great work... of a sort. Carlyle was a nineteenth century “liberal,” which then as now means basically a conservative. He was thus horrified by the French Revolution's “excesses”- both the, I would say, excess of random carnage it eventually gave way to, and its attempts at legitimately egalitarian reform. To his credit, Carlyle makes absolutely no attempt at objectivity. Indeed, this is that rare work of “history” that seems to proclaim objectivity a farce. In that sense,the book, published in the mid-nineteenth century, was quite ahead of its time. The writer presents himself as a man out of time, positioned on the streets of Paris as they were before he was born. A lone man trying his best to understand momentous events as they happen, and taking time out to sermonize about them. His language is that of a person on the street, employing slang, epithets, low humor, and yet it is prose of the highest caliber. I've heard Carlyle's style described as “proto-Joycean”, and at the very least this is a for-runner of stream-of-consciousness writing. Indeed, few books I've ever read struck me as such a personal encounter with their author. That being said, the author is a brilliant boar. His sympathies lie only with royalty, even though he acknowledges that the monarchy had failed and the time of absolutist feudalism had come to an end. He never acknowledges the atrocities committed by the reactionaries, as if the mass murders committed by the revolutionary government happened in a void. (There were horrific excesses committed by the Jacobins, but they were only fighting fire with fire.) And he's blatantly racist- his half page devoted to the Haitian uprisings is so offensive its comical. So, beyond its literary value, is there any reason to read this tome? I think so. It became, despite its eccentricity, the “official” history of the Revolution in the United States and western Europe. More than that, I think it the proto-type of all depictions of attempts at egalitarian social reorganizations since the French Revolution meant to assert the hegemony of the reaction. “Psychologize the sovereign!” “Atomize the oppressed!” “Pick an individual bad guy (in this case Robespierre) to root against!” But I have to say again, Carlye was a talented asshole. His, utterly manipulative, depictions of the royal family's last moments are devastating to read in exactly the ways he wants them to be. And his description of the execution of Robespierre shocked me. After simplistically vilifying the Sea-Green for hundreds of pages he acknowledges, after his agonizing death, that Robespierre was merely an overly-determined man in the wrong place at the wrong time- which is to say, a place and time of momentous change. Carlye was truly a conservative with a tragic sense of life- hateful of change, but also acknowledging its inevitability. I thought the last paragraph an astonishing little meditation on the relationship between writer and reader. I wish to respond to it personally. Yes, Carlyle, it has been a long, not entirely pleasant journey we have taken together. I tried to listen to what you had to say, but I disagreed with most of it. I can't honestly say I like you, then again I may never forget you. Farewell. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 2012
|
Jul 27, 2012
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1859843301
| 9781859843307
| 1859843301
| 3.84
| 1,399
| 1985
| Jun 01, 2001
|
it was ok
|
I have to start by saying that I haven't felt so much antipathy towards a book in a long time. But I want to present a thoughtful account of why I per
I have to start by saying that I haven't felt so much antipathy towards a book in a long time. But I want to present a thoughtful account of why I personally think it weak, especially sense, in the quarter century since its initial publication, it has been much discussed and celebrated. My evaluation of the book will also be, I hope, an evaluation of the book's historic moment. For I don't think Hegemony and Socialist Strategy could have earned the accolades, or even the notice, that it has received if it appeared at any other era than it did. The book was first published in 1985, and even the preface for the second edition was written in 2000, before 9-11 and the accompanying transformations of the political sphere. To elucidate the central argument: Laclau & Mouffe (L&M, henceforth) hold that pre-capitalist societies, including some contemporary “third-world countries” that have been under-developed by imperialism, naturally bifurcate into opposing camps because of the extremity of the oppression experienced at the hands of the royalists/ imperialists/ compradores. But, claim L&M, when societies experience “democratic revolutions,” such as those of the French and the American, societies become too complex to bifurcate into two, simplistically class-based camps. Democratic societies are objectively more complex, say L&M, than all societies that came before them. Even this early into L&M's thesis, I take profound issue. It strikes me as extremely ahistorical (and Euro-centric) to say that until the democratic revolutions of Western Europe and the United States, societies were so simplistically divided between the oppressors and the oppressed, that bifurcation along such lines was inevitable. Indeed, were not the complexities of many pre-industrial societies exactly what colonizers exploited to divide the resistance to them? The Colonial settlers of the Americas exploited the distrust that existed between different Native American tribes to make them form short-lived “alliances” with the Whites so as to attack the other tribes. And such antagonisms have existed in every society at every stage, and have countless times made resistance or revolution impossible. However, in every eon, there have been the occasional successful articulation of unity that lead to general insurrection. Look at the uprisings that characterize Chinese history at every historic step. Nothing about European democratic society is unique for not easily bifurcating. Such articulations of unity are always rare and difficult, there are always a multitude of antagonisms amongst the masses to be over-come, yet there is also no stage in history that shows itself to be fully immune from such senses of unity. L&M follow their logic and say that Karl Marx came to political maturity in a newly democratic western Europe. He therefore witnessed the birth of a society more complex than he could fully comprehend. He had to, according to L&M, impose the codes of pre-democratic Europe onto the democratic Europe he found himself in. L&M think Marx coped with the complexities of the new society by inventing the theory of class-struggle, by imposing a bifurcating narrative- proletarian v. bourgeoisie- on a society far too nuanced to accord to that model. Despite their criticisms of Marx, L&M think highly of the early socialist movement. The depressions of the late nineteenth century made the decline of capitalism seem eminent and natural. Leaders such as Kautsky had faith that socialism could be achieved through the proper engagement in the democratic process. As long as the struggle for socialism was carried out under the banner of democratic reform it had, for L&M, liberatory potential because it allows more people to engage in the democratic process, instead of scrounging to survive. According to L&M's historical narrative, when capitalism recovered from the economic crisis in the early years of the twentieth century, Marxist leaders sought to re-convince themselves of the inevitability of the socialist transformation. Kautsky rationalized the non-transformation of society by saying that there was a profound gap between the consciousness of the proletariat and its historical role. Thus, Marxism began to become more and more theoretical. To get the proletariat to act “correctly” they would have to be made to understand a theory of how things were going to be, not how things were in the present. And this theory was apparently only understood by the intellectual element- the vanguard. L&M posit that as much as Kautsy and the “vanguard” liked talking about the future, they were already living in the past. They claim that by the beginning of the twentieth century, European and American capitalism had already achieved a degree of complexity where there no longer was, in the sense that Marx understood it, a working class. For L&M, capitalist democracy provides workers with methods of becoming politically engaged in society and raises living standards to such levels that workers are no longer merely workers but also politically engaged consumers. Their interests are thus, L&M claim, no longer fully oppositional to that of the capitalist state. The relation is rather an open articulation that cannot be expected to take any one form or direction. Here, I must interject some of my deepest objections to L&M's method and project. For all of their interrogations of the “presumptions” of the Marxist tradition, L&M's work rests on a litany of simplistic presumptions. First of all, they presume without argument or defense that the methods of political engagement open to workers in western capitalist societies are legitimate and empowering. What happens to their argument about the integration of the working class into the political process if we do not consider the political process legitimate? On a deeper level, even the sub-title of the book, “Towards a Radical Democratic Politics” presumes that, even if we consider western style representational democracy legitimately democratic, that we consider this a “good” in and of itself. What if one objects to democracy as a principle? And of course, this has been a legitimate subject of philosophical debate since Plato. That democracy is “good” and that western European style representational democracy is in fact democratic are never questioned by L&M. They seem to hold such questions as unthinkable. The authors point out that in a revolutionary crisis, as conceived by Marxism, every individual struggle, for example, that of peasants being forced to grow crops for royalists and being left with too little to eat, has two identities. It has its individual nature as a struggle, but it is also part of the totality of the crisis. The peasants must be made to feel that their struggle is interrelated with, for instance, the struggle of industrial workers for better wages and working hours. This has been termed by Marxists as “class consciousness.” L&M point out, seemingly thinking it a more radical statement than it is, that class unity is not literal but symbolic- sense the struggles of peasants are not identical to those of the workers, the struggles of women not the same as those of male workers, those of some minorities are different than those of the working class of the dominant race, etc. We must say, of course, that in the Lacanian sense that L&M are using “symbolic,” class is indeed symbolic as all social knowledge, including that of the “self,” is a linguistic displacement. “Class” is just another way of rationalizing the trauma of being, and on some level, it is an arbitrary one, like all other designations. However, it should here be pointed out that L&M seem to posit the identity of “peasant,” or “woman” as if they are not themselves symbolic. As if there could be a discourse of “the woman” that is fully authentic! This is doubly odd as much of post-structuralist discourse, the tradition that L&M claim to come from, has attempted to prove the arbitrary nature of precisely these types of “foundational” designations and the binaries on which they depend. So we can say, along with L&M, that every revolutionary crisis is never fully natural but the result of competing political discourses that unite different groups under the banner of one interest over another. This is not a radical claim. It was an idea fully developed by the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s. Gramsci remained an orthodox Marxist-Leninist because he thought that the interests at stake were inherently class interests. L&M, again supposedly radically, claim that the interest at play in hegemony is not necessarily class based and can come from any social situation where an antagonism exists. They feel that this claim fully denounces Marxism as a theory. I think that a Marxist could respond to L&M's claim of the arbitrary nature of the hegemonic subject- that it need not be class based- by saying: “Okay. So what?” One can recognize that there may in Marx be a somewhat out-dated, and indeed even simplistic and over-totalizing concept of class without throwing out the notion of class struggle. The fact that the working class does not have a naturally privileged revolutionary role, and that class is ultimately just another way of articulating an, at the ultimate instance artificial, concept of unity does not change the fact that class is an effective articulation of revolutionary unity. The fact that the most dogmatically conservative Stalinist might be made uncomfortable by L&M's suggestions about the arbitrary nature of the hegemonic agent does not mean that Marxism as a body of thought need be threatened by it. L&M consistently seek to reduce the latter to the former, with little argumentative rigor. Indeed, given the ways that racism, in particular, has been an instrumental weapon of atomization of the masses in American society, class would seem an especially potent unitary mantra in America. L&M posit that white-collar employees are not working-class, but this is an illusion that only holds during the times of “comfortable capitalism,” such as the years when the book was written. As all politics is ultimately just the “game of hegemony” for L&M, they describe two different ways of playing the game. The “authoritarian” way- the Leninist way- relies on a vanguard that represents the working class. The working class remains only a subject of reference. Their presence is thereby made impossible. Instead, their participation is fully symbolic, and every moment in history becomes only a fragment of a larger narrative of a future that never comes. Again, I say this is a simplistic and context-less way of looking at Leninism. For one thing, what is “Leninism?” L&M discuss it as if it has only one form- that of the monolithically bureaucratic. But societies as radically different as those of Cuba, the DPRK, and Vietnam could all be described as being led by Leninist governments, and anyone who knows anything about any of those countries understands that the cultural traditions of the relative countries have shaped the way their respective states have developed at least as influentially as anything Lenin ever posited. There is no one “Leninism!” And what are L&M to say to one who holds the participatory bodies of a vanguard party such as that of Cuba to be closer to direct democracy than western representational democracy. L&M consistently hold that any such view is simply non-sensible and unworthy of reply. L&M then describe the “democratic” method of partaking in hegemony. They hold that entities such as the British Labor party were created by a more advanced working-class than that of the Russia of 1917 and therefore that such entities, which ultimately endorse capitalism, are actually more working class in nature than vanguard parties. So, through this more legitimately democratic participation in discourse, the working class is not represented but must present itself in the political sphere. As not all problems can be reduced to class issues, such as the struggle for gay equality, this present class of worker/consumers must then attend to the needs of a given community- such as the gay community, by acknowledging its presence in the discourse- and the discourse is thus transformed by the new presence within it of the gay community. The workers, in becoming consumers and having their interest tied to that of the state, become the state, and the state in turn begins to acknowledge more diverse struggles. To describe the landscape of democratic hegemony, L&M return to Lacan and his concept of the suture. The suture is the process by which a subject copes with the unknowability of the other by filling in the mystery of otherness with the subject's own discourse- one's own presumptions about being. The other, for Lacan- the mother, becomes knowable as lacking (devoid of phallus) as opposed to terrifyingly mysterious. Hegemony sutures in that it fills in the unknowability of the political, which is in turn tied to the unknowability of the floating discursive signifier. This suturing is never all together successful, however. If it were, there could be no play of meaning, and therefore no hegemonic operations. Discourses always try to present themselves as a totality. Indeed, claim L&M, contingency is only articulatable because the totality of discourse is always trying, in vain, to reassert itself. While I acknowledge that any discourse can give way to the impulse to claim that it answers all questions, I think L&M overstate the danger of this impulse. A healthy discursive practice is possible within almost any discourse. Marxism can, and sometimes does, fall into the trap of claiming that it answers all questions, but it does not have to do so to function as a discourse. A position within the totality of any one discourse L&M call a “moment.” An “element” is a difference that is not articulated so as to make the totality seem possible. L&M call the excess which hegemony cannot suture, and which makes a multiplicity of discourses possible, the “field of discoursivity.” “Antagonisms” are, for L&M, the limits of the experientially social- the situations in which the other prevents a subject from being wholly itself and vice-versa. Any negated difference, any element reduced to a moment, has the potential to become a site of antagonism, and it is just these moments of antagonism that call for a hegemonic articulation in a democratic sphere, so as to re-assert, at least momentarily, the totality. When different contents- such as skin collar, dress, and language, all function to suggest one fact- i.e. membership in a subordinated group- the differences between the contents become elements through the process of “equivalence.” The identity created through equivalence is purely negative- it is based purely on what the subordinated group is not. Relations of subordination can become sites of antagonism only when their identity is negative. Positive identities of subordination, such as “slave” or “surf” cannot become sites of antagonism because a “slave” is not in any way denied a state of being. There is nothing contradictory about a state of slavery. A slave's “slave-ness” is not in any way denied by the master. Quite the opposite. At first, this struck me as a truly bizarre claim- as if slavery could not give way to revolt. However, I think L&M mean that situations like slavery give way to bifurcations that are not actually antagonistic. They do not require a hegemonic articulation to maintain the discursive totality because such relations will give way to revolt. What I do think L&M overlook, however, is that slavery is a by-product of democracy! It was most common in western society under Greek and American democracy! While it may be true that slavery leads to bifurcation, not the antagonistic discourse defined by L&M, its status as a democratic institution problemitizes further L&M's claim that representational democracy is uniquely complex, and cannot lead to bifurcated struggles. Nonetheless, L&M maintain that representational democracy gives way to relations of subordination that are fully excluding of the subordinated party exactly because the subordinated is supposed to have the freedoms owed to all people under humanist democracy. This creates a contradiction- the subordinated is made into what (s)he supposedly cannot be under democracy. This creates a crisis for the discourse of democracy that hegemony will have to address, so as to bring the subordinated party into the discourse. Therefore, L&M declare, any legitimate leftist, who wants to see more liberties, must embrace liberal democracy because it leads to a multiplicity of political spaces, and thus struggles. The Bolshevik model insists on Jacobin bifurcation, and the stifling of alternative struggles. This ignores the ways in which struggles not directly addressed by socialism, such as gay rights, have taken root and made great gains in Cuba, and through the participation of its vanguard party, but I have already made this point. L&M say that for the democratic system to maintain health, no discourse within it can seek to view itself as central or foundational. There can be no determinate antagonism. L&M acknowledge that there is always the potential of a “master antagonism” presenting itself in democracy, and this is why contemporary democracy has a tendency to bifurcate... into the “democratic” and the “totalitarian”... Let us ignore L&M's clumsy, circular finish. L&M's vision of radical democracy is highly akin to Habermas's deliberative democracy- as L&M acknowledge in their preface. And my question for both is how is a system that allows liberation only through participation not itself monolithic. L&M, unlike Habermas, at least acknowledge that their system is totalizing, but could their be a system more terrifyingly invasive than one that demands that every subject sacrifice its difference so that the system can incorporate it, thereby diversifying democracy? At the end of the day, the thing that fascinates me most about this slight work is the way in which it captured the intellectual imagination of western Europe and the U.S. in the 1980s- through to 9-11. I think the book is an interesting time-capsule of its era, one that turned out to be closer to a moment. L&M base their arguments on what they feel to be the unique complexity of western democracy. They feel that the working class has become a consumer class that has helped shape contemporary capitalism through the creation of the well-fare state, through insisting on a “humane capitalism.” What L&M could afford to ignore in 1985 is that workers did not create the capitalist well-fare state. It was provided by the ruling class so as to disincline the workers towards the appeals of revolutionary socialism. L&M apparently did not foresee that once the Soviet bloc fell, the well-fare state would be completely destroyed. They were writing in a moment where the victory of capitalism in the Cold War seemed eminent. And humanity had to feel some relief simply at any end to the Cold War. It had, after all, subjected the world to a bifurcation that threatened to destroy it through nuclear war-fare. The New World Order promised peace and freedom from bifurcation, but it was yet unclear the monstrous and brutal form this new uni-power would take. L&M's ahistorical analysis of western capitalism is thus revealed as the utopian moment of neo-liberalism's nascent, utopian self-regard. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 2011
|
Dec 27, 2011
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1844675874
| 9781844675876
| 1844675874
| 4.03
| 1,099
| 1937
| Jan 17, 2007
|
really liked it
|
Mao's early philosophical writings are fascinating and key if one wants to understand the intellectual evolution of Marxist (and post-Marxist) thought
Mao's early philosophical writings are fascinating and key if one wants to understand the intellectual evolution of Marxist (and post-Marxist) thought in the second half of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Politically, Mao's primary innovation was the idea that the proletariat would not be universally the class to lead the communist struggle. Mao expanded upon Lenin's notion of uneven development, the notion that different countries and cultures resist imperialist finance capital in different ways based on their level of development (or under-development) and that their revolutions would take myriad forms, to claim that different classes would be the most forward-looking and correct at different points of revolutionary development. The notion that the proletariat would inevitably be the most revolutionary player in class society struck Mao as metaphysical and idealistic. Rather, Mao thought, at different moments and in different cultures and situations the workers, peasants, students, or some other group might be the most revolutionary voice. Mao also introduced the political notion that the most reactionary voice during the course of a communist revolution might be that of the communist party itself. These different forces had to be, Mao held, in constant interaction, constantly testing the contradictions between the different classes and groups, because only then would the most revolutionary voice in any given situation have at least a chance of coming out on top. Philosophically, Mao's writings break even more dramatically with Marxist orthodoxy. Mao rejected Hegel's (and Marx's) concept of the negation of negation, the notion that eventually society would evolve to a point where all social contradictions would be resolved. For Mao, being itself is contradiction. He writes that even if the Earth were to explode, the cosmos would still be filled with contradictory forces. Contradiction is never simple for Mao. There are, in any situation, more kinds of contradiction than one can be aware of, and these different contradiction act on each other and transform each other's nature, making different contradictions, at different moments, the principal contradiction of a given situation. This, of course, does away with the traditional Marxist notion that the economy will universally be the principal contradiction in the last instant. Mao thought that any contradiction could become primary, and that if the situation did not exist in a society for a contradiction to be resolved it could always become antagonistic- a violent, potentially revolutionary contradiction. Mao thought that antagonistic contradictions would become less necessary and frequent in the age of socialism, but not be eliminated completely because socialist society, being new to the world, would have to figure out ways of resolving contradictions through trial and error. Sometimes, especially early on, such experiments would fail and contradictions would still become antagonistic. This was all fine and good, from Mao's cosmic perspective, because the nature of being was for all things to transform each other, at times violently, but for society still to evolve through the process of contradiction. It seems to me that this notion of all things acting upon all things, and all things changing because of it, could mean that communism could itself transform into capitalism, and then transform back to communism. My only issue with the book is Zizek's strange introduction. It's filled with a lot of fear mongering about contemporary China, which Zizek discusses as a "more evil" capitalism than western capitalism. Zizek, unfairly I think, thinks Mao the unintentional architect of the Chinese Communist Party's ongoing tactical embrace of capitalism, claiming that the hyper-individualism of the cultural revolution fostered a capitalistic national mentality. While I think China's post-Mao transformation was, perhaps, thinkable within Mao's thought, I also think he fought against such tendencies, and Zizek's claims about the cultural revolution are, I think, irresponsibly speculative. Zizek criticizes Mao's dismissal of the concept of negation of negation. He envisions Mao as a man in love with war as such. He won't let capitalism or Confucianism die, just so he can continue to wage war against them. This terrifies Zizek, by his own admission, but he also recognizes in this outlook the spirit of a true revolutionary who is always, to some degree or another, a war-lord. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 2012
|
Nov 19, 2012
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
184467052X
| 9781844670529
| 184467052X
| 3.93
| 1,570
| 1965
| Jan 17, 2006
|
really liked it
|
The essential task that Louis Althusser devoted his philosophical career, and this book most pointedly, to was rescuing what he understood as the scie
The essential task that Louis Althusser devoted his philosophical career, and this book most pointedly, to was rescuing what he understood as the science of Marxism from the philosophical musings of the young Marx, which Althusser believed constituted neither Marxist science nor philosophy. Althusser felt this was an imperative task, as he hoped that what he deemed to be Marxist science could transform humanity's relationship to ideology. Marxism would only be allowed to perform this heroic service, however, if it did not itself devolve into an ideology. When Althusser was writing these essays, in the early 1960s, he was witnessing a self-reassessment on the part of the global communist movement as a response to the revelation of Stalin's crimes. Western Marxists were turning to the work of the young Marx in order to insist that the spirit of Marx's philosophy was ideologically humanist. It was this tendency that Althusser felt the need to counter. Althusser called for an authentically Marxist study of Marx's early writings which were, Althusser fully acknowledged, indeed humanist. He claimed that the "western Marxists" were enraptured with the idealist notion of the author or philosopher. If humanism haunted the work of the young Marx, then, for the western Marxists, its seed must still be at the root of the mature works such as Capital, because, for them, nothing could transcend the idealist totality of the oeuvre, the ever present, metaphysical "human-ness" of the author's stamp. Rather, insisted Althusser, the work of the young Marx had to be subjected to the Marxist principles of ideological development that stated that the meaning of an ideology does not depend on its relation to "truth" but rather its relation to the social structure in which it developed and therefore, to understand an ideological position, one would have to look at the social conditions facing the thinker, and therefor the context of the thinker's intellectual development, as (s)he was writing any one piece. Texts can, for Althusser, point to a future, but all must be confronted within their singular present. (In this way Althusser, I think, lays the groundwork for Foucault's "death of the author" through the tenants of Marxism and structuralism.) Althusser called the cultural framework in which a concept exists its "problematic." The problematic of a thought determines what is possible within a system of thought. The problematic of Marx's early thought, when he was still a humanist liberal, was that of nineteenth century Germany, which had never experienced a revolution of any kind, including a bourgeois one. The German bourgeoisie, including Marx, could only think in the codes of servitude, which is to say the religious obscurantism of Hegel. Marx's earliest writings were thus Feurbachian- attempts to free the Hegelian Spirit from alienation through transcending what Marx and his German brethren viewed as its alienated form- religion. Althusser thought Marx could only escape this line of thought by getting out of Germany, which he luckily did in 1843, leaving for France in the hopes of glimpsing the spirit of the French Revolution. Instead of freedom, equality, and liberty, Marx found only a more intense workers struggle. This radicalized the young Marx, and he began writing about politics and socialism. For Althusser, however, these early socialist writings were still not truly Marxist. Indeed, they remained profoundly Hegelian. They rested on a simplistic notion of the proletariat superseding the bourgeoisie. Hegel viewed History as relentlessly marching towards its completion, the totality of absolute spirit manifested in a society that had evolved to the point of transcending all alienation. Marx's early political writings spoke of worker's struggle, but only as a simplistically messianic displacement of one stage of society by a less alienated stage of society. Marx remained, Althusser claimed, stuck in an essentially religious, idealist line of thinking, not yet truly starting from a materialist foundation. He was commenting on struggle, not partaking in it. According to Althusser's narrative, as Marx became more involved in activism and organizing, his thinking began to be increasingly based on the reality of the worker's struggle. Marx began, in other words, to develop the materialist dialectic which Althusser argues borrows only terminology from Hegel, but breaks fully with Hegel's philosophy. For Althusser, the materialist dialectic looks for social change to come not as a result of shifts in universal social consciousness but in contradictions in actual social being. Althusser posits, following Lenin and, most directly, Mao, that these contradictions are never universal but are localized and unique. (I must say here that it seems to me that Althusser's reading of the “mature Marx” invests somewhat unfairly in the texts the latter discoveries of Lenin and Mao as if these discoveries were “inherent” to the thought of the materialist dialectic.) Again following Mao, Althusser says that ruptures, be they scientific, political or philosophical are never the result of a simple, predictable dialectic between competing forces (proletariat vs. bourgeoisie) but instead come from complex networks of contradictions that boil into overdeterminations which make change necessary. For example, the Russian Revolution became necessary because Russia was pregnant with two revolutions. It was a feudal society existing in a capitalist world where a working class was already starting to rebel under the banner of socialism. Althusser defines the role of theory as being an aid to understanding the possibility of an epistemological break- when one kind of thinking turns into another, such as when Hegel's idealism is transformed into dialectical materialism. Such breaks make possible the creation of new types of knowledge. Theory is a specific practice that acts on general concepts. It is the means of production of knowledge. Dialectical materialism, for Althusser, is the mode of theoretical inquiry by which ideologically driven political activity is examined and turned into scientific arguments. Althusser dissects the theoretical process into three stages, or, in his terms, “generalities.” Generality I is the process by which a theoretician critiques inherited ideological concepts in order to elaborate the theoretician's own concepts. Generality II determines a theoretical approach by determining what will be studied and how it will be studied, and it is imperative that this “study” be carried through in social practice- through tests in social organizing, agriculture, etc. (Again, Mao's influence on Althusser is here apparent.) Generality III arrives at a scientific hypothesis. Like all new kinds of science, Marxist science had the potential to create new possibilities for philosophy, although Althusser did not think a legitimately Marxist philosophy had yet presented itself. (Later in his career, Althusser would attempt to practice Marxist philosophy with his notion of the capitalist construction of the the individual.) Instead, what passed for Marxist philosophy, the work of Western Marxists such as George Luckaks, was in fact a kind of Hegelian thinking. Western Marxism denies the distinction between Generality I and III. It denies, in other words, that knowledge is a practice. Thought is self-creating knowledge for the Hegelians, for whom the totality of social being is constantly revealing itself. The Western Marxists threatened, then, to turn Marxism into just another ideology. Althusser never mentions the great irony that the Western Marxists, in trying to “humanize” Marxism, were in fact proclaiming that thought could make itself true- the purest intellectual manifestation of the Stalinist disaster. It was rather Althusser's line of thinking that would, at least potentially, lead humanity to a healthier relationship with ideology. In the final essay, “Marxism and Humanism” Althusser admits that any society, including a socialist or even communist society will always rely on ideology to frame its world outlook to all of its subjects. Ideology will always function, to some degree, subconsciously. But, Althusser hopes, if the essential nature of ideology is socially acknowledged, then it could be transformed into an instrument of deliberative social action. Ideology could mold humanity towards egalitarian social tasks. If rulers, socialist or otherwise, failed to understand that ideology is inescapable and acts on all, including the ruling strata of any society, then those rulers could fall into the trap of thinking they could simply use ideology as a tool (as Stalin did, though Althusser does not mention this). Humanism, Althusser finally admits, could have its uses for Marxism, but only if humanism is recognized as an ideology. Marx was able to arrive at a whole new way of thinking only by rejecting humanism for materialism. To understand humanity, we must, presses Althusser, reject “man.” Marxism could, however, healthily adopt aspects of humanist ideology the same way socialist societies adopt aspects of capitalism while critiquing them. Humanist ideology may be able to point to questions for Marxism to tackle, but humanism cannot itself answer those questions. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 2012
|
Nov 20, 2012
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0816631409
| 9780816631407
| 0816631409
| 3.63
| 298
| 1997
| Dec 07, 1999
|
liked it
|
This is an interesting, if rather troubling work of interpretation. Badiou here radically reinterprets Deleuze’s philosophy as something very differen
This is an interesting, if rather troubling work of interpretation. Badiou here radically reinterprets Deleuze’s philosophy as something very different than what Deleuze or his more traditional commentators had ever proclaimed it to be- a neo-idealist thought that radically reimagines, rather than rejects, Platonic idealism. Badiou openly does this so as to show that Deleuze, whether he knows it or not, is a problematic, if not utterly failing, neo-idealist. To Deleuze’s deeply flawed idealism, Badiou contrasts his own, clearly superior, neo-Platonic philosophy. Badiou anticipates that readers will find his Deleuze hard to recognize, and might object that his method is rather self-serving. He doesn’t really apologize so much as to say that Deleuze has it coming. There is, perhaps, a degree of truth to this. Deleuze’s interpretations of earlier, canonical philosophers are brilliantly inventive, but hardly slavishly loyal to the spirit of the authors he is discussing. Deleuze takes concepts introduced by earlier philosophers and rearranges and reinvents the philosophies he writes about, rather like a jazz musician improvising around and recreating a tune. It is true, and perhaps methodologically questionable, that Deleuze does not acknowledge his own creative process when discussing, for instance, Nietzsche but surreptitiously impregnates an old philosophy with his own. Badiou’s method is much more above board. Indeed, as always, I greatly enjoyed his challenging yet almost conversational writing style. Yet, if Deleuze shows through his writing the way that one system of thought almost subconsciously begets another, Badiou seems to me to be offering a problematic at best, perhaps intentionally distorted presentation of his subject- Deleuzean philosophy- just to show how Badiou better addressed questions that Deleuze denied even having an interest in. Badiou claims that what he sees as Deleuze’s many epigones underestimate the role of Deleuze’s concept of the univocity, or oneness, of being in his oeuvre. Indeed, for Badiou, Deleuze’s commitment to a renewed concept of oneness is the key to his thought. Everything, for Badiou’s Deleuze (henceforth BD) is always already contained, in the One-All. That is to say that for BD being occurs the same way in all of its manifestations. Deleuze’s “epigones” like, Badiou complains, to talk about their hero’s supposed love of multiplicity, and Badiou of course acknowledges the important role of multiplicity in Deleuze’s work. In fact, he sees the role of multiplicity in Deleuze’s and his own works as being one of the main things that links the two thinkers. However, Badiou understands Deleuze’s multiplicities as only expressions of the One. We beings are but momentary manifestations of Being. Multiplicity is of the order of simulacra- the world of beings. Rather than the radically desiring subjectivity often ascribed to Deleuze, Badiou argues that thinking, in Deleuze’s work, chooses its subject, not the other way around. Badiou will allow that for BD, one must, as in the work of Kierkegaard, choose to be chosen, accept the terrifying responsibility of thought that the One offers some beings. Indeed, rather than an ecstatic subjectivity, thought demands a rarified ability to overcome the self and submit to the process demanded by the machinations of the One-All. BD’s concept of Being can be characterized as a double movement from the one to the All and from the All to the one. The philosophical intuition of Being is an adventure, a quest, in which one subjectively reproduces the movement of Being through this intuition. The results of this quest are the senses of meaning that collectively form the simulacra known as beings from the non-sense of Being. As previously mentioned, one of the major ways that Badiou will criticize Deleuze’s thought in this work, and make a contrast with his own, is in their extremely different attitudes towards Plato. Badiou correctly assesses that Deleuze assails Plato for denigrating simulacra to the ideal and its manifestation thereby establishing a hierarchy of being that would negate univocity. If Deleuze has indeed theorized a truly univocal sense of being, Badiou challenges, by what name should we refer to a One that contains all multiplicity? Much of Badiou’s critique of Deleuze, or rather BD, shall hinge on Badiou’s claim that one name can never suffice for the One. It requires, Badiou thinks, a name for the One, and another for the multiplicity(ies) that manifest it. Badiou will argue that Deleuze consistently uses pairs of names, although he tries to hide this both from himself and his readers by presenting his terminology as a set of binaries rather than double-names. Badiou goes on to examine such Deleuzean binaries as virtual/actual, time/truth, chance/ eternal return and fold/ outside. The binary “virtual/ actual” is BD’s primary double-name for Being. It is not surprising, then, that Badiou’s discussion of it is where he makes his central critique of Deleuze, and where he contrasts Deleuze’s work most specifically with his own. BD holds that univocity does away with the need for philosophical grounding in the Platonic sense. The One-All is such exactly because it grounds itself/ is groundless. It simply is, and it is everything. Badiou holds that it is imperative for philosophy to rethink the meaning of grounding, as it is necessary to revisit and reconsider Plato. “Virtual/ actual”, Badiou maintains, is a very ground-based concept, and one that is imperative to BD’s univocity. It is only ground that can connect singular beings to the One, as formal manifestations of Being. Whether BD is willing to admit it or not, BD uses the virtual as the ground of the actual. The virtual is the ground for problems to which actualities serve as solutions. The virtual grounds a double determination- that of a problem (Being) and a multiplicity of problems (beings). Deleuze maintains that the virtual and the actual must be thought as two parts of a whole, as “unequal halves that do not resemble one another.” Deleuze also insists that the virtual and the actual are both merely images. But if the virtual is an image, Badiou complains, then it too is merely simulacrum. And, indeed, Deleuze simultaneously asserts that “the virtual is fully actual… one cannot discern the two parts [the virtual and the actual]...” The actual, then, is indiscernible as such. The actual cannot be grounded by the virtual, Badiou concludes, without the actual either becoming a meaningless blur or by the actual tearing itself away from the virtual, which would negate univocity. To put it simply, Badiou is saying that Deleuze does in fact rely on philosophical grounding in a Platonic sense, but does so clumsily. Badiou makes the radical claim that Deleuze is in fact a neo-Platonist like himself, he just won’t admit it. Both philosophers are trying to rethink and reaffirm the univocity of ground. The difference between them is that Deleuze prioritizes the virtual- the Idea as the totality of a virtual multiplicity. Badiou, on the other hand, affirms multiplicity, but negates the virtual. The ground of the multiple for Badiou is the empty set- the mathematical expression of nothingness. Badiou then moves on to focus on the Deleuzean binary (double-name for the One) “time/truth”. Deleuze claimed to have little use for the concept of truth, but Badiou is unconvinced. Badiou senses an alternative concept of truth at work in the philosophy of BD- that of the false. Truth, for BD, is the power of narration to manipulate time. The past, which is available to the present only as narrative, is the product of time, a process by which the actual gives way to the virtual. Time is the becoming virtual of the actual, the process by which the object takes its place in the One, the truth of the false, of narration. For Badiou, this too reveals the secret Platonic core of BD’s thinking. As with Plato, the Real is only such through its relation to the idea, the virtuality, that it manifests. Badiou, of course, has never denied his use for the concept of truth. And he uses BD’s concept to illustrate his own. If for BD truth is the narrational power of memory, then for Badiou truth lies in the commencing power of forgetting. Truth, indeed, is commencement- the Event, which establishes a new world that cannot yet be described, and which reveals to the subject new possibilities. Badiou’s discussion of Deleuze’s concept of eternal return is, to this reader, his least idiosyncratic and most faithful to a more traditional reading of Deleuze. As was established in the discussion of “time/truth”, the true only becomes such through returning as the virtuality of memory. Eternal return is never the return of the same. The object returns as part of the One narrative, and narrative is never identical. It is constantly being reinterpreted and thus rewritten, transformed into something different. What returns is difference and this is the only truth. Badiou’s discussion of “fold/outside” relies primarily on an interpretation of Deleuze’s book on Foucault and The Fold, neither of which I have read. Perhaps due to my ignorance of this part of Deleuze’s oeuvre, I found this discussion the most interesting in the book. According to Badiou, Deleuze uses Foucault’s thought to elaborate his own notion of thinking as a disjunctive synthesis- one in which the synthesized elements never meet up. For BD’s Foucault (yes…) truth is always severed in two, divided into visibilities (which correlate fairly closely, it seems to me, to the concept that Deleuze refers to as the actual) and statements (which I read as roughly corresponding to Deleuze’s concept of virtuality). Thinking requires, for BD, a plunging into the disjunction while maintaining a fidelity to univocity. The trick is to at once think over the disjunctive crevice and think of the crevice as such. BD takes the geographical metaphor so far as to say that one can, by tracing the fault lines of the crevice, see the trace of the original univocity of truth. This is where the concept of the fold comes in. BD’s fold is the process by which that which is external to being becomes internal. The fold is the act of thought tracing the fault lines between visibilities and statements, actuality and virtuality, and discovering the hidden connection, the univocity of truth. Through the fold that is thought, the disjunction becomes a modality of oneness. Badiou cannot embrace the concept of the fold because he is committed to a philosophy that allows for radical transformation. The fold implies that thought can only serve as an apprehension of an established world. There is, for BD, only the one world and the one thought to capture univocity. What Badiou can embrace is the notion from Deleuze’s book on Foucault that to think is to plunge into the void, the crevice in every truth. But the disjucture does not, for Badiou, reveal a hidden oneness but rather the site least defined by the state-of-things. It is where, Badiou hopes, the empty set that is for him the mathematical foundation of being can reveal itself and the transient nature of all worlds be revealed. Badiou concludes by characterizing Deleuze as a pre-Socratic thinker- one for whom philosophy is a physics. (This is very strange as he has based most of his critique of Deleuze on the notion that he is an unintentional Platonist.) Plato, Badiou claims, freed philosophy from physics. He transformed philosophy into a meta-thought that does not have to refer to the already-there. Philosophy can therefore think towards a new world, if not a new physics. My biggest reservation about Badiou’s reading of Deleuze is how much stress he puts on the notion that the One-All cannot be named with one term. It seems to me that in Difference & Repetition Deleuze does offer a one-word name for univocity: difference. And difference can be this name precisely because Delezue, as he himself proclaims, is not an idealist. Univocity is, as I read Deleuze, closer to Althusser’s materialist concept of the world as a totality of infinite contradiction than to a Platonic notion of a grounding idea. The world is one because there are no ones, no beings, only becomings of becoming. So Badiou’s notion that univocity can only be described by referring to both Being and beings seems to me misplaced when discussing Deleuze. Somewhat ironically, I think the anti-communist Deleuze may have been more of an Althusserean materialist than Althusser’s commie-hypothesizing heir, Badiou. In his introduction, Badiou discusses how after putting their political differences aside, the two men corresponded before Deleuze’s suicide. Deleuze told Badiou that he found his ideas interesting, but saw no correlation between their two philosophies. Badiou, by his own admission, barraged the older man with letters trying to convince him of the similarities between their projects. Shortly before taking his own life, Deleuze sent Badiou a letter basically saying, “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” which Badiou takes as a kind of validation. I always enjoy reading Badiou, and this book was no exception. But here I was left with this rather unphilosophical evaluation of Badiou: “What an asshole…” ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Dec 31, 2016
|
Mar 06, 2017
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
085345213X
| 085345213X
| 3.92
| 1,648
| 1968
| 1971
|
I love this guy. Hard to think of any piece of writing thats influenced the way I think about the world more than "Ideology and Ideological State Appa
I love this guy. Hard to think of any piece of writing thats influenced the way I think about the world more than "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses". When I read Althusser, I have a real sense of interacting with someone I really understand. Given that he was a pathologically self-doubting psycho who died in a mental ward, I'm not sure thats a good sign.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jul 30, 2011
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
0061316865
| 9780061316869
| 0061316865
| 4.16
| 4,752
| 1969
| Sep 06, 1972
|
It seems to me that Wittgenstein is trying, with this very late work, to answer the questions raised in his Tractatus in the terminology he employed i
It seems to me that Wittgenstein is trying, with this very late work, to answer the questions raised in his Tractatus in the terminology he employed in his mid-period, that of the language games of the Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. With On Certainty, finished two days before the author's death, I think Wittgenstein arrives at surprisingly Kantian conclusions. Wittgenstein begins both this work and the Tractatus with an inquiry into that of which he can be certain. In the Tractatus he asks himself what he truly knows. In On Certainty he asks himself what he can and cannot be said to doubt. To doubt everything, Wittgenstein proclaims in the later portion of the text would not actually be doubt at all. To doubt everything would be to no longer be able to act or think because one would no longer believe even in the meaning of the words one uses to express doubt. The language game of social existence could not continue under such circumstances, and doubt is actually a product of the language game, one might say one of the game's subgenres. (Does not Descartes, in doubting even his own existence, not ultimately validate that existence, and even insist on its primacy?) So one cannot doubt the rules of the game themselves (which is to say “everything”) but one most certainly can doubt within the rules of the game. To see if a proposition can be doubted, says Wittgenstein, look to what supports the proposition's truth-claim. In almost all instances, he holds, it will only be other propositions. Language games rely on themselves as proof. Even mathematics Wittgenstein holds to be a kind of language game-asserting the certainty of its conclusions by insisting on the validity of its own rules. Within a language game, what is true is what is comprehensible according to the rules. Therefor, something can be doubted if said doubt does not make other propositions impossible, (which is to say that the vast majority of propositions can be doubted) but the doubt deployed will (in the vast majority of cases) only end by affirming the rules of the game. (Wittgenstein does here acknowledge, which I don't think the young author of the Tractatus would have, that there are very rare instances when a doubt changes the rules of the game, for instance a momentous scientific “discovery”- something interestingly akin to a Badiouian Event. At any rate, for Wittgenstein, unlike Badiou, the game of meaning simply keeps reinventing itself and imposing its rules on us, even in cases of major changes to the way the game is played. I do think this avowal by Wittgenstein of the possibility of changes to the rules, while valid, gets him in some philosophical trouble. How can the rules not be doubted if doubt can change the rules?) Wittgenstein distinguishes between “knowledge”, that to which one must subscribe if one is to continue to believe anything, i.e to continue to play the language game, and “certainty” a term that he thinks, if we were to live completely honestly, we would abolish. “I am certain” should, ideally, be replaced with “I believe I know”. Belief is the ultimate justification for knowledge, and there is no ultimate justification for belief, except perhaps for faith, which is spiritual, not scientific, mathematical, or philosophical. Wittgenstein's distinction between “knowledge” and “certainty” strike me as similar to that of Kant between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. As with Kant, we must, in On Certainty, think about the world in a way that enables us to keep thinking and acting in the world, whether or not said thinking corresponds to the reality of the world-in-itself. There are major differences between the two ontologies, of course. For Kant, it is the nature of the human mind and senses that determines the shape of our experience, of our phenomenal world. For Wittgenstein, it is the rules of the particular language game that a person is taught to play that determine how a person thinks and acts. He describes a war of cultures as a contest between different language games, each trying, futilely, to persuade the other of its correctness. (Kant's nature versus Wittgenstein's nurture) Whenever I read Wittgenstein, I sense a repressed fear and, yes, uncertainty. But the nervous energy is palpable in this last work, written as the philosopher literally lay dying. Faced with the immediacy of the absolute uncertainty of death, I think the man clinged to philosophy as both a comfort and an outlet for his dreadful suspicion that life may, in fact, be but a dream. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Oct 2015
|
Oct 15, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
184467584X
| 9781844675845
| 184467584X
| 4.01
| 442
| May 07, 1794
| Jan 17, 2007
|
really liked it
|
Fascinating anthology of speeches by the most controversial leader of the French Revolution. Zizek's introduction, while only 30 pages long, is one of Fascinating anthology of speeches by the most controversial leader of the French Revolution. Zizek's introduction, while only 30 pages long, is one of the most impressive pieces I've read by him. The short format forces the author to actually stay on point, something that does not come easily to him. Zizek posits the Terror that Robespierre became, somewhat unfairly, the face of as a prime example of what Walter Benjamin would have called "divine violence," sometimes translated as "sovereign violence." In unleashing the Terror, the Jacobins (and here a flaw in Zizek's reasoning should I think be pointed out- the Jacobins did not "invent" the Terror- it was the invention of the masses of the French oppressed who took brutal and situationalistic action against their oppressors- the Jacobins had to react to and "sculpt" such terror- they had to decide whether, in the most dramatic of circumstances, to side with the oppressed or the former oppressor) took upon themselves the rarest of tasks- that of the emancipatory sovereign. Detaching themselves utterly from the Lacanian "Big Other" they took upon themselves decisions that could not be morally evaluated by anyone- even themselves- as they were decisions that did not serve their own self-interest, but that of the "people"- the unknowable mass. To act in the name of the unnameable is to say that WHATEVER OUTCOME is permissible, even if this results in the annihilation of the sovereign itself. This is, for Zizek, authentically divine (revolutionary) violence. One of the things that most strikes me when studying the French Revolution is to think of how established powers- like France (or the United States)- today frame revolutionary movements- be they socialist-in-intention (like Vietnam) or merely independent capitalist (like Iran)- as if the villainy the established powers claim to find in such movements is rooted in the ideology of the revolution. You would think that if the French Revolution- which established one of the first modern capitalist states and established such "still controversial" advances as universal male suffrage and the abolition of slavery- could take to such excesses (if we are to believe a "historian" such as Carlyle) as using its enemies skin for textiles, the modern capitalist states would have the historical memory to understand that most revolutions have their bloody excesses. But that, I suppose, is to ask for honesty from governance. Reading his speeches, I was dumbfounded as to why Robespierre has been rumored to be an awkward speaker. His eloquence struck me as sublime, as did his courage. The last speech he ever gave was a defense of his life, not a defense for his life, as it is sometimes misinterpreted as being. He said that he lives for the people, and will die for them if they become corrupt. He believes, perhaps to a pathological degree, in his own virtue. But he also knows he's happy to die in a world where living means embracing the corrupt. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 2012
|
Jul 29, 2012
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0631146601
| 9780631146605
| 0631146601
| 4.11
| 2,487
| 1935
| Jan 08, 1991
|
These studies and the work they gave rise to, Philosophical Investigations, are commonly understood as a refutation of the author's previous major wor
These studies and the work they gave rise to, Philosophical Investigations, are commonly understood as a refutation of the author's previous major work, Tractatus Logic-Philosophic us. I didn't read the Blue and Brown Books as a refutation, as much as a correction, of the system of thought at work in the Tractatus. That earlier work, as I read it, contained some troublingly bizarre implications and assumptions. It at times seemed to me that Wittgenstein was implying that linguistic information, being understood, could not be refuted- as if our ideas about things never change, or as if a statement could never be doubted- as if lying (on one hand) or misunderstanding (on the other) were not common occurrences, and if we shouldn't then, take such situations into consideration when interrogating the nature of communication and knowledge. The Blue and Brown Books brilliantly address such concerns about the line of thought at work in the Tractatus. If we are to understand the workings of language, Wittgenstein argues, we must not ask “what does 'x' mean?” but rather “how does 'x' mean?” Signs, Wittgenstein asserts, can only operate according to the rules a linguistic system imposes. Unfortunately, the rules of our grammar have the effect of misleading us as to language's real nature. Our grammar constantly operates metaphorically. The metaphors are so omni-present that we speakers have come to take them as literal identifiers. The statement “I think of 'x',” implies that the sign is a translation of something in our heads that exists analogously to the sign. We users of language are thus led to believe there must be an intermediary step between thought and expression. Thus, grammar leads us to believe that we can apply a term such as “similar” to what our very language designates as different. To use a simple example, Wittgenstein points out that what language designates as “different” colors- torqouis, ocean, blue-green, are commonly considered “similar” in that they are sub-categories of “blue.” This implies that there is a unifying concept of “blue” that exists in thought prior to expression. Language then, seeks to express the “thought”- the static, abstract truth that precedes it, and this manifests itself in the metaphysical impulse in philosophy. In place of this inherently futile project, Wittgenstein prescribes replacing our concept of “thought” with the expression itself, the sign. Our statements, rather than attempts to give socialized form to some inner, spiritual truth, some inference to knowledge, are rather descriptions of knowledge. Words describe what can be known by revealing themselves. Of course, words have no concrete, changeless meaning. They demonstrate their meaning within their contextual use, just as the move of a chess piece across a board has one special significance within its context within an individual match. Thought, the use of language, can describe the way it functions but it can never explain why it functions the way that it does. The question remains, however, how language, which demonstrates its functionality through its very implementation, can be used to intentionally mislead about things other than its own nature. Wittgenstein's radical response is that lying isn't altogether possible in the sense of completely misleading another person. A lye never completely misleads precisely because it is understood by the addressee, whether or not the addressee believes the statement to be true. No matter what the speaker's intention, they have necessarily revealed themselves to the addressee through the gesture of meaning that they perform. The speaker has made her/his “move.” To truly mislead the addressee, the speaker would have to adopt a private language- another inherently self-defeating project. Still, the fact remains that the term “lying” can be successfully implemented. What can we be referring to by describing a statement as a lye other than the way we feel when we make a statement we consider to be “untrue” as opposed to what we feel when we make a statement we consider to be “true”? Such feelings, and the gestures and tonalities that sometimes accompany them, Wittgenstein calls “modes of expression.” But these “feelings” these “truths behind the lies” can only be conveyed through more words. What, then, of the private- the emotional and sentimental? Where is their place in thought? Of these topics, it appears, we must remain silent. I rank the Books as a masterpiece of philosophical execution. They are magnificently inventive in their models. But I am not convinced that they are so groundbreaking. In switching his focus from the irrefutability of the understood to its implementation, it seems to me Wittgenstein presents a different perspective on the philosophical landscape of the Tractatus than an actually new landscape. Also, Wittgenstein essentially argues that meaning is composed of arbitrarily applied signifiers that attain meaning only within the systematic play of context. This sounds, to me, a lot like the ideas expounded in Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published twenty years prior to the writing of these studies. However, in providing a clear and level-headed response to the question, “If language is the source of all knowledge, can thought still conceivably precede expression?” in the form of “conceivably, but not necessarily,” Wittgenstein provides a model of how to approach the subject that makes unnecessary the theoretical bickering over how to follow the implications of Saussure's work that characterized much of the “structuralist vs. post-structuralist” controversies. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 2011
|
Jul 30, 2011
|
paper
| ||||||||||||||||
1844676943
| 9781844676941
| 1844676943
| 3.51
| 150
| Jan 01, 2008
| Jun 22, 2011
|
really liked it
|
I found this to be not only an interesting work on Wittgenstein, but one of the most enjoyable pieces by Alain Badiou that I've had the opportunity to
I found this to be not only an interesting work on Wittgenstein, but one of the most enjoyable pieces by Alain Badiou that I've had the opportunity to read. What impressed me most was the philosophical precision with which Badiou interrogated Wittgenstein's "Tractatus." As Bruono Bosteel's introduction explains, Badiou has recently attempted to define two traditions that he feels serve a foundations for philosophy precisely by attacking the philosophical tradition: sophistry and anti-philosophy. Those who Badiou labels modern sophists, such as Derrida, replace the philosophical distinction between truth and error with the distinction between speech and silence. For sophists, the problem of though is not to uncover truth, but simply to persuade the other that what is being said is believable, that what is being said can be said in a meaningful fashion. Language functions for the sophists the same way the Church (God) did for medieval thinkers and the subject did for the philosophers of the Enlightenment- it is that which cannot be transcended and which therefore provides the philosopher (sophist-in-disguise) who sides with it an absolute foundation for their thought. Sophistry attacks philosophy's sense of purpose, but it actually serves as a necessary compliment to philosophy. For, without the sophistic challenge to truth which philosophy must overcome, philosophy could delude itself into imagining itself the producer of truth, imagine that it makes a thought true just by thinking it. For Badiou, philosophy can only discover and enunciate new truths that emerge from political, scientific and artistic revolutions- which he calls Radical Events. Ironically, without the sophistic challenge philosophy runs the risk of devolving into sophistry. Anti-philosophy, on the other hand, appeals to notions of the unsayable- to truths that are so intense and transcendent that they cannot be conveyed- they can only be felt, lived. Anti-philosophy thus resists both philosophy, which Badiou defines precisely as the articulation of newly unleashed truths, and sophistry, which insists that nothing exists outside of the the articulateable. Anti-philosophy also provides philosophy with necessary support, exactly because the great anti-philosophers succeed in suggesting the inexpressible. The anti-philosopher feeds off of the uncertainly created by Radical Events. At times, the work of an anti-philosopher can itself be a radical event. And it is during such events that philosophy again becomes necessary. Badiou offers Nietzsche as the paradigmatic example of an anti-philosopher. He also considers the Wittgenstein of the "Tractatus" to be an anti-philosopher, but the later Wittgenstein to be a mere sophist. This is because the "Tractatus" clings to a notion of the "mystical"- a state of being that can be felt, but not known. Badiou begins his interrogation of the "Tractatus" by noting the profoundly religious ambitions of its author. For Wittgenstein, happiness can be achieved only by living according to sense. That is to say, one must strive for certainty in expression. Wittgenstein's demands on thought are so stringent that they feel more like those of a master architect than a philosopher. For this reason, Badiou characterized the "Tractatus" as an "archiaesthetic" work. It seeks to show even what cannot be shown b showing what can be shown so comprehensively and, at once, precisely. That which is revealed through its inexpressibility in the archiaesthetic work is, for Wittgenstein, the Mystical, God. What is at stake in the archiaesthetic act, the quest for clarity, is a life lived according to sense- which is to say happiness, or non-sense, which is to say negation of the divine, a life not worth living. Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is the most depraved form of non-sense. It seeks to pass itself off as sense! The metaphysical tradition, at least sense Plato, has sought to convey the ungraspable through expression- i.e. idealism. The call and response of skepticism and metaphysics dare to ask "how is it that something is known?" and then attempt to answer the question. Both are unacceptable for Wittgenstein because the initial question is non-sensicle. The question is, for Wittgenstein, an assault on the Divine. In contrast to this tradition, Wittgentsein seeks to create a work where language sows its own limit, answering all answerable questions, and therefor points us to the unknowable, the Divine, so that we may live ethically. It is interesting to note that the only way to live or think valiantly is to remain silent about what can not be expressed. The unexpressible is the ethically paramount. This implies that, for Wittgenstein, what can be expressed is of little or no ethical substance. Wittgenstein writes that, "of what one can speak, one can speak clearly." But how is this so? If someone addresses me in a very clear articulate way does this guarantee that I have been spoken to "clearly?" Could not the speaker be lying or simply be mis-informed? For Wittgenstein, it does not matter. The only important thing in to live according to sense, and if a statement is sensible, it does not matter if it is factually true or not, nor, it seems, would the repercussions of a non-truth in the world. The world, the expressible, is not the site of ethics. In and of itself, the expressible is without value. Badiou characterizes this aspect of Wittgenstein's thought as an "ontology of the virtual"- that which is not true, is not of the world, is granted sense. In this, Badiou feels, the "Tractatus" instigates the "Linguistic Turn" in philosophy. And with his ontology, Wittgenstein throws his lot in with all anti-philosophers and sophists- the deposition of the binary "true/false" in favor of "sense/non-sense." At this point, Badiou begins his assault on the "Tractatus", his defense of philosophy. There is real drama in the ensuing duel. Badiou's criticisms focus on two points. First, Wittgenstein's understanding of the "sensible" pre-supposes a very conservative, even close-minded, outlook on the world. Secondly, for Wittgenstein's denunciation of metaphysics to hold water, much that would generally be considered forms of thought must be exiled from the category. Wittgenstein's rejection of "non-sense" is so severe that it give an artificially simplistic idea of the "sensible" or, to put it in more Badiouian terms, the "possible". This implies that what is possible is fully knowable at any one point in history, which Badiou asserts is not a tenable position. The phrase "worker's state" was non-sensicle before the Paris Commune because its signified had not yet been proven possible. But "worker's state" became sensible and its sense changed drastically in the aftermath of the October Revolution. What is sensible corresponds to what is possible and what is possible is constantly being expanded and/or altered by political, scientific, and technological upheavals, i.e. Radical Events. Badiou also points out that Wittgenstein's use of "sense/ non-sense" is problematic in that it labels all of philosophy as "non-sense" when for millenia readers have found sense in it. This is particularly problematic for Wittgenstein who claims that skepticism is absurd because it asks one to render doubtful what one has already understood as valid. However, Wittgenstein's is a philosophy (or anti-philosophy) of knowledge, not of history. But the political and technological are far from being the only subjects that Wittgenstein must insist are irrelevant. The mathematical concept of infinity states that what "can be" (and thus what is potentially sensible) cannot be quantified and therefor cannot be measured. Thus, one could never rule out the possibility that there could be "sense" to "non-sense". Badiou states that such mathematical concepts prove that being can be articulated without being experienced, and thus that there is validity to idealism. Wittgenstein's only recourse is to insist that math is not thought, but merely an observation- 2+2=4 (or "simple proposition") proven to be correct, rather than a conjecture about what can be known ("thought"). Badiou then moves in for the kill. Wittgenstein's concept of sense relies on the irrefutability of the understood. Objects have names and the acceptance of these names is an operation of non-thought which is foundational to thought. So naming can never be thought. How then, Badiou asks, does the poem function? Is not poetry simply the act of naming in a new way, at times even the act of announcing something new to be named (an artistic Event)? If poetry is naming in a new way, and Badiou asks us to accept that it is, then Wittgenstein must say that the poetic, which is to say the aesthetic, is non-thought. How then can the Tractatus, the archi-aesthetic work which seeks to reveal the unexpressible through the perfect, comprehensive expression of the expressible, qualify as thought? If the name is the foundation of the understood, and if new names (and name-ables) can come into being then the understood is elastic, and language can convey a being of which it has no objective experience. Metaphysics is valid. The entire book is Badiou's attempt to solve a profound philosophical problem- to refute a great anti-philosophical work. The "Tractatus" is a great, beautiful crisis- an Event. It requires that new truths be named- which is to say new philosophical systems formed. For Badiou, the new truth that the Event that is Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn leave behind, what the crisis uncovers, is Badiou's own philosophy. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 2011
|
Aug 12, 2011
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0942299523
| 9780942299526
| 0942299523
| 4.10
| 614
| 1927
| Nov 14, 1991
|
I still enjoy re-reading Panofsky. In a bizare twist, I randomly met his granddaughter in a Wallgreen's.
I still enjoy re-reading Panofsky. In a bizare twist, I randomly met his granddaughter in a Wallgreen's.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jul 30, 2011
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||
0872864286
| 9780872864283
| 0872864286
| 4.42
| 6,363
| Jan 01, 1979
| Apr 01, 2004
|
it was amazing
|
I'll say that this, my first dip into the Neruda universe, affected me more than any encounter with 20th century poetry I've yet had. But I also haven
I'll say that this, my first dip into the Neruda universe, affected me more than any encounter with 20th century poetry I've yet had. But I also haven't had many. I'm still at a "greatest hits" level when it comes to poetry, especially modern poetry. Before Neruda, I would have said Yates was my fave 20th century poet, much more than Eliot, but Neruda eclipsed them by a lot. There's a line in the editor's introduction that compares Neruda's style to red wine. The comparison really stuck with me as I read the poems. They're natural yet dark, the elements imbedded in them, even deteriorating, but becoming richer to the senses for the decline. He's writing about his experiences with love and revolution, yet it seems more than universal- positively elemental. The poems are arranged on a, more than less, chronological level. I found it a bit depressing that the last poems, such as "The Egoist," found the man self-critical for his withdrawal from the world. I felt a bit angry at him for withdrawing, as he had so much power to engage, but also angry at him for being angry at himself. He had given so much of himself to progress, and, in the early 1970s, was sensing early on the decline of the Left's advancements in the world. Perhaps he could not help but take these set-backs personally. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 2013
|
Feb 03, 2013
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1844677761
| 9781844677764
| 1844677761
| 3.84
| 141
| 1896
| Aug 21, 2012
|
liked it
|
Lissagaray was a participant in the struggle to defend the Commune. He narrowly escaped capture after the fall of Paris and spent the next few years w
Lissagaray was a participant in the struggle to defend the Commune. He narrowly escaped capture after the fall of Paris and spent the next few years with the Marx clan writing this book, which reads not so much like a history in the academic sense as much as a partisan memoir of the struggle. The author's passion and pain is both what makes the book memorable and also not the most enlightening read about the nature of the Commune. Lissagaray was a fighter and journalist during the insurgency and he observed first hand the disastrous machinations of the various attempts at a revolutionary government. The majority of the text is devoted to Lissagaray's tortured hindsights on all the missed opportunities and missteps that led to the movement's demise. These are occasionally interrupted by proclamations about the courage of the Parisian masses and the magical sense of camaraderie that, according to Lissagaray, overtook the rebelling proletarians. But we get no real portrait of life for the common person under the first attempt at a socialist government. The last hundred pages or so are quite visceral. As we all know, the story does not end happily, but we subjects of capitalism still don't hear that much about the mass slaughters of revolutionaries that took place in the aftermath of the Commune. It was a political genocide, claiming far more lives than the terror of the Jacobins. One thing I did learn is that the uprising was initially in no way limited to Paris. The workers of all the major cities of France took up arms. It truly was a national, socialist revolt. The smaller cities, however, fell quickly due to the lack of organization that would eventually doom mighty Paris. The assistance of Karl and Eleanor Marx with the production of this text has made it one of the "official" Marxist statements on the Commune (along with Karl's actually more laudatory article, "The Civil War in France," written while the Commune was still in power). One can see how Lissagaray's focus on the negative, the doomed nature of the improvised insurrection exactly because of its improvised nature, helped to influence the Leninist obsession with preparation and order in the face of revolutionary opportunity. Given the carnage that was the Communards' reward, one can see how no one would ever want to duplicate their experience. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Aug 2015
|
Sep 01, 2015
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0231081596
| 9780231081597
| 0231081596
| 4.26
| 3,650
| 1968
| Apr 15, 1995
|
really liked it
|
This is one of the most difficult texts I’ve ever challenged myself to read. There’s no way I could have gotten through it without a lot of help from
This is one of the most difficult texts I’ve ever challenged myself to read. There’s no way I could have gotten through it without a lot of help from commentaries and on-line synopsis. Two commentators, in particular, helped me through the tome: Joe Hughes’s reader guide did a good job of contextualizing Deleuze’s arguments in relation to those of his predecessors- particularly Kant and Husserl. Even more helpful was Benjamin D. Hagen’s wonderful blog, Sketching a Present, which offers a (very) slow reading of Difference and Repetition’s particularly impenetrable opening two sections. I hope Hagen considers completing his slow-reading as a book, although it would probably have to be 1000-plus pages. Obviously what understanding I might have of this book owes a great deal to Hughes and Hagen. Of the most noted French post-structuralists, the one I am generally most familiar with is Derrida. The similarities and differences between Deleuze and Derrida fascinate me. Both seek a radical critique/ reinvention of metaphysics and the concept of being, yet the similarities seem to me to pretty much end there, surprising for two thinkers so widely associated with one another. Derrida’s is a metaphysics of absence- the subject is reduced to the trace- the signature of a being that is never fully present to itself. Yet in insisting on absence and/or spectral presence, Derrida’s is still a metaphysics that revolves around subjectivity. The ever-reinterpretable traces of individuality may be all that defines a subject, yet such traces are tantamount. Deconstruction is inversing the canonical metaphysics of presence, but by doing so it is playing by inversions of the old rules. At first glance, Deleuze’s metaphysics is more conventional than that of Derrida. For Deleuze, presence is as primary as it ever was for Kant or Husserl, some might claim more so. Yet for Deleuze, subjectivity is nothing more than an incidental byproduct of a presence that is always in flux. It is a Deleuzian chest-nut to say that his presence is a becoming rather than a being, and it seems to me just so. The subject is a momentary manifestation of a churning world. The insecurities of such a manifestation do not concern Deleuze the philosopher, although those of Deleuze the momentary manifestation do, it seems to me, sometimes make themselves known through his writing. If Derrida is rebelling against the history of metaphysics, Deleuze is trying to rewrite the history. Any book as bold and influential as Difference & Repetition is going to develop a cult proclaiming its otherworldly perfection- it’s every perceived flaw being a secret source of wonder. I am not such a cultist and there were a few things about Difference & Repetition that I found quite frustrating which I truly believe to be results of weakness on the part of Deleuze rather than on myself as a reader. Simply as a well ordered and coherent presentation of related ideas, the book is a train-wreck. Similar complaints are often levied against the works of Derrida, Heidegger, and indeed philosophy itself. But Deleuze seemingly cannot complete discussion of any aspect of his (exceptionally rich and complex) argument without switching to another, barely related branch of reasoning. Descriptions of key concepts are spread out, seemingly at random, in every section of the book. Some are not fully fleshed-out until the Conclusion. Indeed, it seems to me almost impossible to have any understanding of any part of the text until one has read the whole thing, gone back, and tried to put the broken parts Deleuze offers back into some kind of systematic whole (as I have attempted to do below). Compounding the problem is Deleuze’s insistence on renaming key concepts willy-nilly. I’ve heard Deleuze’s most ardent supporters claim that his refusal to adopt a consistent vocabulary is reflective of his concept of being as ever-changing. I’m going to call bullshit on that. Even according to Deleuze, the subject is a momentary manifestation of being. One momentary manifestation has to communicate with another and that requires some attempt at consistency. For me, the constant changes to designations-of-concepts was just sloppy philosophizing. Some of Deleuze’s crudest detractors have pointed out that Deleuze’s discussions of biology and physics are not scientifically sound. Deleuze’s defenders content that the philosopher does not mean his utilization of scientific motifs to be taken literally but metaphorically, and I agree with that. I do, however, wonder if the metaphors deployed do not invite such criticism since it is clear at times that Deleuze’s understanding of the science he is using as illustration is shaky at best. It would have been better, I dare say, to explicate a philosophical argument with philosophical language. None of this is to say that Deleuze is not a gifted writer, but merely an undisciplined one. I enjoy Derrida’s prose but one can tell that he was always striving for literary effect. Reading Deleuze, it seems like he was always writing off-the-cuff, trying to get the ideas in his head on to paper. Sometimes the resulting prose is quite sparse and utilitarian, but other times, particularly when he lets the personal shine through, it is sublime- revealing the deepest poetic instincts. Now, for an attempt at a synopsis: Difference and Repetition is, above all else, a critique of representation as it has operated within the history of western philosophy. In the book's conclusion, Deleuze states that the central goal of philosophy through that history has been to make representation as infinite as possible- to leave as little as possible outside of philosophical illumination. Representation, as we know it, requires a degree of stasis, actually rather a lot of it. Philosophical, and indeed prosaic, representation have traditionally revolved around identities. These figures of representation are not entirely static of course. They interact with other identities and effect the others while in turn being affected by them. Difference, we can say, has traditionally been subordinated to identity, treated as a byproduct of the latter. One of Deleuze's hopes for philosophy is that if difference can be freed from identity's shadow our thought might then not have to rely on opposition and contradiction- the thinking that, for Deleuze, takes its “highest” and most oppressive form in the Hegelian dialectic. Rather than synthesis and the negation that Deleuze associates with it, our thought could revel in a liberating multiplicity. The prioritizing of representation goes back to the philosophers of ancient Greece. Plato distinguished three categories in relation to the Ideal: the model, which is to say the Idea, or Form, itself; the copy- that which represented the Ideal form in material reality; and simulacra- the phantasm of represented Ideality, the ghost-like doppelganger of the copy whose repetition of its appearance puts the relation between model and copy in question. If simulacra appears to be a copy of the Form but is not, then how can the copy itself be proven to be an authentic representation of the Idea? Simulacra would then be an anarchic and problematizing actor in the play of representation, one that would be best kept off stage. Deleuze asks us early on to try to think of something we cannot represent. Difference is not, of course, anathema to representation, indeed it would seem to be a necessary aspect of it. I recognize thing x as such in part because it is different from thing y, and this conditions the representation of the world that I use to comprehend reality. But if difference is so central to our regimes of representation and understanding, why cannot we imagine difference in itself? Difference is subordinated to representation, to the “difference” (and therefor also the resemblance) between two (represented) things. Difference itself is faceless. In the first chapter, Deleuze offers a “vulgar theory of difference” to demonstrate how clueless we really are in our day to day thinking about this essential concept. There is, according to this vulgar theory, an inverse relationship between conceptual extension, the number of related predicate-concepts that can be related to a concept, and comprehension, the set of necessary determinating attributes that define a concept. The larger a concept's extension, in other words the broader a concept is, the less specifics needed to comprehend it. A true singularity could only be comprehended as such through infinite comprehension. If something is truly one of a kind, it would have an infinite number of determinating attributes. Conceptual blockage occurs when a concept inevitably fails to fully describe and represent a singularity in its absolute uniqueness. Concepts can, however, point to determinating resemblances between things. The word/ concept “cat” describes nothing with great, little less infinite, comprehension but it does represent a real resemblance between, for instance, my pet kitty and a wild tiger. This “vulgar theory” of common-sense is, then, incredibly useful, but it actually brings us no closer to things in themselves, or of differences in themselves. It reveals only the resemblances that are the bread and butter of representation. Deleuze offers a model of the ways in which difference in itself is subordinated to resemblance. In fact, he does so at three different instances in the book. I will try to condense these three descriptions into one account. The most detailed discussion occurs in the third chapter, “The Image of Thought”. Philosophy always tries to represent the truth and it always claims the title of truth for the representations that it offers. Thinkers as diverse as Plato, Descartes and Kant have all insisted in one way or another that a thinker knows what it is to think. Thought, for philosophy, is self-recognizing. Deleuze defiantly rejects this self-validating tradition. He characterizes this philosophical self-presentation as a malevolent stupidity that intentionally attacks genuine thought and turns it against itself. Genuine thinking, for Deleuze, is always a “lucky trespass” in which an intruder accidentally disturbs the self-satisfied peace of the image of thought. But to have any hope of engendering such a crisis/opportunity, we need to understand the edifice we are up against and its means of supporting itself. Deleuze claims the image of thought is based on a series of eight postulates- pre-philosophical presumptions that shape the way philosophy will proceed. First, as we have already noted, it is presumed that we can all think and that thinking seeks out 'truth.' Secondly,it is assumed that sense, imagination, memory, and thought work together harmoniously when trying to ascertain an object. Next, it is assumed that the object this quartet confronts is a static object with a static identity. Then, it is assumed that this identity can be represented. Deleuze first, and perhaps most clearly, breaks down the nature of philosophical representation in the first chapter of the book, so let us now turn to that section. It should be noted that some important clarifications are made in the Conclusion, in which he characterizes representation as a transcendental illusion. I will thus also be including some notes from the final section. Deleuze says that philosophy tames difference with four primary shackles of representation: identity, analogy, resemblance, and opposition. Identity is manifested by the Platonic ideal. The Idea of the Beautiful and that of Ugliness are, according to the Platonic theory of the Forms, identified singularities that cannot overlap. The Ideas are identical to themselves, and therefor different from one another. The transcendental illusion of representation here pertains to thought. An identical thinking subject is posited that in turn grounds the identity of an originary concept. Deleuze will frequently refer to this paradigm as “common sense”. Analogy is the comparison of (the difference between) two things based on categories such as genus or genre. Difference is knowable in Aristotle only by what it divides into such categories, although this difference ultimately serves as a relation between things based on these categories. Here the transcendental illusion pertains to being. Difference is subordinated to judgment and everything is a “this” or “that” based on the categories. Resemblance seeks to find similarities between things that seem to minimize difference. Leibnitz could be said to treat difference with resemblance when he claims that difference was created, or chosen, by God to create maximum compatibility and harmony in the universe. Difference, understood as compatibility, is not so much difference at all but the very manifestation of totality. Here, the illusion pertains to sensibility. This subordination of difference to resemblance is often referred to by Deleuze as “good sense.” Finally, opposition contrasts identities with each other. Hegel (Deleuze's old target) claims to find difference- or contradiction as he calls it- at the foundation of genesis, but this still assumes a beginning with two static identities in an antagonistic relation. The illusion here pertains to ideas. Difference is subordinated to a false image of itself as the negative, the limit, and as opposition. Philosophical representation, then, can mediate difference, but cannot capture it. All of the shackles of representation listed above rely, in some way or another, on an identical and identified perspective. Representation can contain difference to that one point but it cannot capture (represent) it because representation is static and difference is ever flowing, even when contained in one point. It is easy to forget, but the idea that an identity can be represented is, in fact, only the fourth of the eight postulates, if by far the most widely discussed. We still need to complete our survey of the image of thought. So, back to chapter 3. The fifth postulate is error, the acknowledgment that thought is sometimes mistaken, but only because of outside interference. The sixth postulate states that designation is a neutral expression of the “whatness” of an object. Next, it is postulated that problems are derived from their ability to be solved. The final postulate is that the result, the solution, is the purpose of thought. I think we can easily guess that Deleuze does not agree with any of these postulates and will try to attack each of them with intellectual savagery. But the individual attacks will make more sense once we have a better sense of what Deleuze thinks is really going on behind the image of thought, in other words, when we have a better sense of his concept of difference-in-itself. At this point it can simply be said that Deleuze claims that all of these postulates mistake the empirical for the transcendental. They seek to reduce thought to a question and answer test- a matter of being correct or incorrect. They thus deploy notions of falsity and negativity that help reify identity and, thus, representation. So, what does Deleuze think is “really” going on? What is the image of thought obscuring? We've probably all figured out by now that the answer to this question is the same as that to “what is difference in itself?” Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to that question. Indeed, one could argue that it is, according to Deleuze, unanswerable because difference in itself is precisely that which cannot be represented, and representation is all philosophical language is good for. But much of this imposing tome is nonetheless dedicated to trying to explicate difference in itself as far as it is able. Difference & Repetition often doesn't even seem so much like philosophy as much as a kind of religious text or creation myth. It proposes a kind of radical cosmology. Indeed, one of the more obscure thinkers to heavily influence Deleuze in this work is the 13th century theologian John Duns Scotus and his notion of the univocity of being. Scotus argued that concepts that were applied to both God and humanity meant the same thing when applied to either. In other words, the differences between humanity and God were questions of quantity not quality. A good person was good in the same sense that God was good, God simply had way more good than any person. The entire cosmos, both its divine and mortal aspects, could be described in the same language. Deleuze takes the outlines of this concept and actually takes it a step further. All aspects of the entire cosmos can be described with one word: “difference”: a generic concept of being that forgoes all individuations and hierarchies. Part of the reason we have difficulty imagining difference in itself is because we've become so accustomed to opposing and subjugating difference to identity. Rather than even relating difference and identity, Deleuze relates difference only to indifference, or void. It is the presence which first distinguishes itself and does so by illuminating not just itself, but the void along with it. Difference breaks from the void, but also affirms it. It is almost as if difference and indifference collaborate to reveal each other. From here, the book will, much like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, attempt to navigate us from the unrepresentable “real”- pure difference- to the represented world that we all know. Indeed, the very structure of the rest of the book is modeled on the Critique of Pure Reason, albeit the (as the commentaries informed me) lesser-known original version of the Critique, not the “compromised” revision for which Husserl so harshly criticized Kant. Some of the language, unsurprisingly, is very un-Kantian. Indeed, the work seems an attempt to fuse the philosophies of Kant with that of the Nietzsche imagined by Deleuze in his earlier work, “Nietzsche & Philosophy.” In the second chapter, Deleuze proclaims that all phenomena are the result of contractions in time and space. In chapter five, these will come to be known as intensities, but the use of this term by Deleuze is very confusing because once an intensity becomes, well, intense enough it then constitutes an Intensity. For now, this little, random intensity that we begin following in chapter 2 is just an intensity of time and space in contraction, not an Intensity. The simplest intensity can be thought of as a presence or present. It is the primitive knowledge that “we/I am/ are” in a moment that we/I are in the presence of a moment known as the present. What kinds of questions can such a presence understand? Probably something along the lines of “we/I are thirsty or hungry- how does a thing like us/I satisfy thirst or hunger?” A presence learns to satisfy such needs through habit- the generalization of the activity of what Deleuze calls larval selves that collectively constitute the multiplicity that is a self. At a certain point, habit starts not simply to generalize but to actively contemplate the activities of larval selves and we start to take the giant leap towards imagination and memory. So then, what is a memory? On an abstract level, it is a synthesis of the present and the past. Presence is no longer only concerned with the present. That present is reshaped by the knowledge of the past. The two temporalities are successfully, and fairly simply synthesized by a passive presence. To get to a slightly less abstract understanding of memory, we should take notice that the title of the book is not “Difference...” and introduce ourselves to the second title-concept. For memory is, of course, a kind of repetition, in which a presence mentally returns to their impression of the past. Memory repeats the past in the form of the presence's mentally captured impression of that moment. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 2016
|
Jul 05, 2016
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0231056699
| 9780231056694
| 0231056699
| 4.20
| 4,279
| 1962
| May 1985
|
really liked it
|
This is one of Deleuze's earliest published works. In this radically creative interpretation of Nietzsche, Deleuze is, I think, using Nietzsche's oeuv
This is one of Deleuze's earliest published works. In this radically creative interpretation of Nietzsche, Deleuze is, I think, using Nietzsche's oeuvre as the phenomenon through which to express his own fledgling philosophy. This is not, therefore, a book “about” Nietzsche's work in the sense of an explication, but rather an attempt at a wholly original statement that “possesses” Nietzsche's works, those writings that bear his trace. I will thus refer to this work's “protagonist”, the “Nietzsche” that Deleuze claims to explicate, not as Nietzsche but as Deleuze's Nietzsche (DN henceforth). Deleuze defines Nietzsche's philosophical project as an attempt to define a thought that is wholly affirmational, one that negates nothing. Deleuze contrasts what he formulates as Nietzsche's mission to Hegelian dialectics, in which otherness is gradually but inevitably subsumed to the same (thesis+antithesis=synthesis). Hegelian synthesis is seen by Deleuze, then, as the negation of difference as such. DN seeks to affirm everything in its own difference. DN defines a phenomenon as the sign or symptom of the force(s) which express themselves through it. Every phenomenon, according to DN, has as many senses as it does forces acting upon it. The relation between one force and another DN calls a “will to power” and, at other times a “body”. (Deleuze's uses of the two terms seem to me to be more or less interchangeable.) Active forces are that which, in the “natural” state of things (a reoccurring, though I think problematic, starting point for Deleuze), are dominant- are obeyed by other forces within the order of a “natural, healthy” body. Such forces are responsible for the creative aspects of being, of imposing forms in relation to concrete conditions. Reactive forces are “naturally”subservient within a “healthy” body. Reactive forces are in charge of the administrative aspects of life- the regulative accommodations that make life sustainable. Reactive forces are not naturally weaker than affirmative forces. Rather, reactive forces are separated from their own ability to create. They can only assert themselves by limiting the affirmational power of other forces. The hierarchy of forces determines the historical outlook and destiny of a will. “Consciousness”, be it that of a healthy or unhealthy will to power, is always that of a greater force by a lesser force that has been seized or incorporated by the stronger. Weaker forces, which are naturally reactive, are, for DN, necessary for the life of the body, but they can only know themselves in relation to a stronger, more creative force which is always outside consciousness. Consciousness, then, can be described as the limitation imposed on active force by reactive force in the former's ability to affirm. The more reactive force manages to limit active force, the less ability a will has to affirm anything beyond itself. (I want to add at this point that many followers of Deleuze, indeed Deleuze himself, fancied him the philosopher of his generation that broke finally and fully with Hegel and Marx. But Delueze's notions of will as a relations of forces sounds to me quite a bit like those of Althusser's “totality of contradiction.” I am certainly not saying that Deleuze was in any sense a Marxist, but that he was, like so many French philosophers of his generation still in the intellectual shadow of Althusser, and thus, indirectly, of Maoist thought.) One can say, then, that a will, a body be it individual or societal, is not a being, but rather a becoming, a series of forces or points acting upon one another, a shifting constellation of powers. “Being”, however, is not an invalid concept. Becoming must itself have a form of being and this, DN defines as “return.” That force which returns as part of something else, that becomes, that alone is being. DN defines the eternal return as the process of critiquing forces. Forces that are found to be reactive are not selected for return, only active, affirmational forces may be reborn, may continue to become. This selective process of critique is itself an affirmation, for in destroying the reactive forces it creates a new combination of forces. Reactive forces are, in the process of the eternal return, directed against themselves. (Self-destruction is the only affirmational act, according to DN, of which reactive forces are capable.) The eternal return, the ultimate affirmation that reproduces multiplicity, is also the purest nihilism, nihilism at its limit. (This sounded to me dangerously close to negation of negation.) So, if this is how “healthy” bodies “naturally” evolve, then why is every society not in a constant state of creative (re)becoming? Looking around, this does not seem to be the case. Indeed, bodies, natural or societal, seem to generally try to resist change. For DN, it is the exception to the rule that a body is, in fact, healthy, and this has led to a society that is anything but in accord with “nature.” One of Deleuze's earliest critiques of psychoanalysis comes in “Nietzsche and Philosophy” in the form of Deleuze's championing of forgetting. To forget, for Deleuze, is to create, indeed it is to select a memory for return or destruction and to oversee the reproduction of the multiplicity that is the self. In insisting on recovering memory, in Freudianism's struggle against what it deems “repression” or “denial” psychoanalysis is trying to stop the process of critique and return. It is trying to keep the subject where it has already been (in the past). In this way, psychoanalysis acts like many other training techniques of a sick society. (More on this later.) The will that cannot forget cannot create. It can only obsess over that (the past) which it cannot act on and transform. This leads to what DN calls “resentment,” the fear of difference, that which DN defines as being, and the insistence that everything be identical. It seems that what we have come to know as society was created by and for such unfortunates. The resentful posit that since the strong and creative will could choose not to unleash its power, then the weak and reactive must also have the option of unleashing their power, but simply choose not to do so out of virtue. Through this myth and/or fallacy, resentment has thus seduced the active will against itself. It has made the creative will yearn for virtue, and build for the resentful all that we know as society and its identifying representations. In a passage strikingly reminiscent of both Foucault and Althusser, Deleuze describes the process by which society selects traits and trains its subjects through punishment, or what society refers to as “justice.” Society bestows memory, and therefor resentment, in its creation, consciousness, through language, the tool that will allow consciousness to carry the past into the future. This consciousness is what society deems the “free individual”. The resentful, who insist on identity, must think themselves absolutely right. They insist on a “truth” that is on their side. Deleuze defines truth as the unit of reactive thought. He throws all the sciences and humanities into this category of identifying representations, saying that they are always deployed to affirm the truth subscribed to by the powers that be. A truly affirmational thought, says DN, will have nothing of truth. (This broadside against the sciences and humanities strikes me as one of Deleuze's clumsiest moves in this book. Has not scientific discovery destroyed entire regimes of “truth”? Was Galileo not a creator and destroyer?) DN identifies three stages of historical nihilism. The first is negative, or religious nihilism. In the history of philosophy, this impulse goes back at least as far back as Socrates and his spawn, Platonic Idealism. Idealism places the “truth” of phenomenon outside of the world. Life and the world are posited as the inferior imitation of Truth/ Divinity. Classical philosophy thus denies its own creativity. It claims that the “Ideal” it invents is outside of it, waiting to be reached and uncovered by its practitioners. The classical impulse to redeem life by subsuming it to the Ideal found an even purer manifestation in Christianity in which human being is redeemable only through self-destruction in the name of the Ideal- the loving, forgiving Father. The formerly cruel God of the Old Testament manages to put humanity into His debt through the Crucifixion. Humanity is obliged towards negative nihilism. To be a Christian, then, is to think that one has already killed God. This leads one to another form of nihilism, the reactive. Kantian critique is imagined by modernity to be a rejection of faith in favor of reason. But, DN argues, Kant only anoints humanity as the interrogator of claims to knowledge, morality and truth. Kant does not critique knowledge, morality and truth as concepts. Indeed, he assumes their validity as such. Kant thus asks reason to judge (absolve?) itself and makes docility the “choice” of “reasonable men”. Kant places the moralistic mediator inside the individual but, DN asks, does that make subjectivity any less subjugating? If God is dead this was only so the nihilistic tradition of culture could take on the more dangerous, insidious form of rationalistic progress. The ultimate form of nihilism DN defines as the passive. Here, humanity takes the place of an already dead God. The philosophical incarnation of passive nihilism is Hegel. Difference is ultimately subsumed into synthesis, and humanity is all that remains, living in its own values like a slug subsisting in its own excretions. DN's only hope is that nihilist society will reach a level of such negative extremity that it will seek to negate itself and thereby partake in the critique that all of society has been founded to avoid. Having killed God and then taken God's place, human consciousness will then seek (DN hopes) to kill itself. DN's term for this will to transcendence of the nihilistic will is the “Overman”. The only path towards the Overman is an affirmational philosophy. For consciousness, being itself reactive, can not know the truly affirmational. But philosophical thought can imagine an affirmational critique/ destruction of consciousness-as-it-is. The resulting affirmational thought would not oppose reactive thought, which is to say the entire history of philosophy and society. Affirmational thought would differ from reactive thought, just as, indeed, it would differ from itself. For affirmation of being is being itself, which is to say difference. I don't necessarily buy into Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche. For one thing, while “On the Geneology of Morals” is a fine and disciplined work of philosophy, I don't think one can defend the claim that Nietzsche was as ruthlessly systematic a thinker as Deleuze wants to imagine him as having been. Also, I think Nietzsche viewed language as more liberatory, but perhaps less all-powerful than did Deleuze. For the latter, language and the bad memory it represents, is the bedrock of society. For Nietzsche, I think, language and philosophy were a means to reinvention and rebellion, but were not the absolute bedrock of anything. The physical body and its gestations remains an important site for Nietzsche whereas for Deleuze, for all of his talk of bodies, the body seems not even solid, but just points to be shifted by the greater powers of social discourse. This is still a helluva book though. Regardless of its relationship to anyone's understanding of Nietzsche, it remains a vital entry point into Deleuze's exceptionally provocative if (I think) sometimes philosophically problematic body of work. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Feb 2016
|
Feb 23, 2016
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0674624262
| 9780674624269
| 0674624262
| 4.08
| 333
| 1985
| Oct 15, 1987
|
This has become one of the most respected and referenced interpretive works on Nietzsche and I can see why. It was first published in 1985, and Nehama
This has become one of the most respected and referenced interpretive works on Nietzsche and I can see why. It was first published in 1985, and Nehamas does a fine job of seeing past the competing extremes of Nietzsche interpretation to arrive at a mature, thoughtful portrayal that takes the best aspects from various modes of Nietzsche scholarship. Nehamas's Nietzsche is neither the “secular-humanist in disguise” that an existentialist like Walter Kaufman would present us with, nor is he the “executioner of the subject” that the post-structuralists claimed him to be. Rather, Nehamas argues, Nietzsche opened up the philosophical subject to relentless critique, but the role of the individual, evaluating consciousness is still paramount in his cosmos. Nehamas locates the heart-beat of Nietzsche's thought in his perspectivism; the notion that interpretation could not be transcended. This, Nehamas acknowledges, begs the question of whether, for Nietzsche, there is anything to interpret, and therefor whether Nietzsche's thought constitutes a working philosophy at all. What is this world that we can only interpret, and does even asking that question mean that we are seeking to transcend interpretation? According to Nehamas, the world is, for Nietzsche, the unmeasurable excess of all things acting upon all things. Every thing that happens to a person or thing shapes, absolutely and definitely, what that person or thing can become. This is not fatalistic determinism but its opposite. The subject is, after all, a thing in the world. The subject, therefore, acts upon the world and shapes it unalterably. The world is the invention of the self as much as the self in shaped by the world. But what is the self? It, too, is the rationalized consumption of an excess. The body is the site of a violent ordering (acknowledgment and repression) of conflicting drives, simultaneous impulses, memories and hopes. The assertion of a self is the same as the assertion of any truth about any other object in the world. To say, “I am this way” is no more or less complex an operation of affirmation and negation as to say “that tree is this way” because someone looking at the same tree from a different perspective could see something very different in the tree. The assertion of Self X or Tree X are both wills to truth: the violent assertion (on ourselves) of one way of reading our countless drives and impressions. The will to truth (which is also the will to denial, to ignorance of the excluded) and the will to power are the same thing. The subject selects the impression and drive that is most beneficent for its particular mode of survival. So how are we to answer, what is the thing that is interpreted? We can only answer by saying that it is the thing that is interpreted, and to give that answer any meaning we can only offer a history of the different ways it has been interpreted in different epochs. We can only offer a genealogy of how it came to be interpreted in the ways in which it is currently. The mode of survival for the weak is, for Nietzsche, that of the herd. The herd interprets its fear of the world as a strength, and in a sense, it is a strength in so far as it is a mode of survival. For a unified horde of weaklings can gang up on and kill a mighty, solitary predator. But they must assure their absolute unity and crush not only specific dissent, but any instinct outside of that of the herd. In one stage of history, what is good for the herd may, at a later stage, be bad for it. But as the herd can never allow for the possibility that anything could ever have been (or become) different than the way they say it is, they must offer a new interpretation, a new history, of how some things have “always been bad or always been good.” It would appear, then, that Nehamas views Nietzsche as a kind of godless Kant, asking of humanity no more from its thought than it must give to sustain itself. Indeed, this is what one of Nietzsche's most direct philosophical heirs, Michel Foucault, always imagined himself to be. But it is also clear that Nietzsche has to be asking more than this from humanity, and Nehamas quickly acknowledges this. For not only is the role of subjective will, desire, and taste, which imply the possibility of dissenting from the herd, foundational for Nietzsche's thought, but Nietzsche also offers the concept of the Superman, that individual who not only makes others follow him, but who sees through the faulty concepts of good and evil while at the same time re-defining them for the herd; He who is both within and outside the historical moment. In other words, an authentic truth creator- He who has seen.... the Truth. Nehamas thinks Nietzsche fulfills this role because through his writing he seduced a large segment of the world, the “philosophical public,” into re-writing the history of morality. I am not so sure. I see in Nietzsche a figure so ground-breaking that his work was, in the most ultimate sense, bound to failure. I mean failure, of course, in the most glorious sense. For Nietzsche foresaw the death of the subject, the fact that we cannot fully liberate ourselves from our cultural assumptions even when we come to realize the “mortality” of those assumptions, their fully provisional nature, but could not fully let go of the ghost of a “transcendental philosophical subject” that could see beyond its own limitations. That would take, perhaps, another couple generations. Perhaps, we have not gotten there yet, even in the realm of philosophy. And never, I think, will we get there in the realm of life. Sorry, Fred. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jul 30, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
1844672387
| 9781844672387
| 1844672387
| 4.03
| 2,441
| Oct 11, 1999
| Apr 17, 2008
|
I was inspired to read this book by the revelation of just how ignorant I was of world history pre-1895 (blame it on the cinematic foundations of my e
I was inspired to read this book by the revelation of just how ignorant I was of world history pre-1895 (blame it on the cinematic foundations of my education). I was also intrigued with it following my recent reading of Zinn's history of the American people. And I must say, it proved a priceless source of information. I had, however, a lot of problems with the book, despite its undeniably splendid passages. For one thing, the very ambition of the project gives way to certain ludicrousies. How is one to write a complete history of the world's oppressed in one volume? I would be more forgiving of this trap had the author acknowledged the inherent narrativizing simplifications of the historian, as Zinn does while attending to a vastly more modest project. Instead, Harmon offers the “suppressed Marxist truth of all human history!” He connects the parts for us to Know How and Why It Was. To question him would be silly or counter-revolutionary. (Harmon is a prominent member of the Trotskyist Socialism Worker's Party of Britain.) To question his interpretation of Marxism would be to miss-understand Marxism. And how does Harmon tackle the task of writing the “suppressed” history of the “people of the world”? By writing a populist version of typically imperialist histories; by which I mean he writes a Euro centric history of the oppressed. We follow, basically, the development of the working class in Europe, and later North America with brief, obligatory, mentions of the development of class society in Asia, the Muslim world, and Latin America. After the rise of Greece, there's a 3-5 page chapter on Africa. No mention on Oceania whatsoever. There's also the problem that a good third of this tome, which is sub-titled “From the Stone-Age to the New Millennium”, is devoted to the twentieth century. Harmon's explanation is that human civilization has changed more in the past one hundred or so years than the rest of history combined. I find this claim spacious and (despite the use of the following term as an accusation by many- such as Harmon- who call themselves “Trotskyists”) characteristic of “vulgar-Marxism” (as opposed to thoughtful Marxism). That everything that matters or ever has mattered can be explained within the parameters of the contemporary working class experience- as if such experience too is not just a “symptom” of the gestations of history- and therefore worthy of more time and attention than the history that conditioned it. Having said that, the sections on pre-capitalist society are, by far, the best. Indeed, there are some truly great chapters. What I enjoyed the most were Harmon's histories of the rise of the major religions- they manage to remain both entirely materialist and profoundly humane. He relates how the masses of people centuries or millennia ago faced conditions so desperate that they had to turn to the hope of a better world than the one they lived in, and what particular conditions drove them to choose some religions over others, even if that meant entire masses choosing religions that differed from those of their upbringing. The newly urbanized Roman subjects attracted to the monotheism of the Judeo-tradition because it meant worshiping only one deity instead of many- a God who looked down on humanity as a mass, like an urban mass, instead of a Sprite that expected the individual to attend to its one particular role in nature. And the “apostles” and rulers who recognized these tendencies of the masses, and through appeal and guile institutionalized the religions. Sadly, Harmon is as narrow in his interpretation of the history of capitalist society as he is empathetic and panoramic in his take on certain passages of pre-capitalist society. He incorrectly equates the economic system of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet bloc with the state capitalism of nationalist bourgeoisie tendencies such as the Arab Baathist movement. What is worse, he simplistically denounces both as “bad”. What start as “revolutions”- be they in the form of the rise of the Bolshevik Party in 1917 or the rebellion of the Iranian masses against the Shaw, devolve into “counter-revolution” as soon as they take any turn that Harmon does not agree with, and Harmon makes no effort to understand the cultural history of each country once he is writing about the period of “global capitalism”- as if the development of global capitalism meant that all national and cultural traits and traditions had ceased to be relevant. Fortunately, Harmon's conclusion is about the future- and it is a stirring statement about the questions humanity must face itself with if it wants to survive. Even this, however, is indicative of the author's tendency to reduce humanity entire into a simplistic “us.” ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jul 30, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
184467553X
| 9781844675531
| 184467553X
| 4.06
| 108
| May 01, 2006
| May 01, 2006
|
it was amazing
|
This volume contains works by Louis Althusser written shortly before and after the author murdered his wife in a fit of madness. These works were left
This volume contains works by Louis Althusser written shortly before and after the author murdered his wife in a fit of madness. These works were left in unpublishable form due to Althusser's ongoing struggle with exhaustion and mental illness in his last years. The writings contained much repetition and it was clear that the philosopher was as yet unsure how to roll out his ideas before he died. The editors, Francois Matheron and Oliver Corpet, must be acknowledged almost as co-writers of this book in that they constructed the pieces contained here from fragments, piecing together as best they could the general direction of Althusser's thinking in his last years. The philosophical world owes them a great thanks, as this is some of the most powerful thinking Althusser did in his life. It came when the philosophical generation that came after him had already come into its own. Here, Althusser is clearly influenced by the generation of minds- particularly Derrida and Deleuze- that the young Althusser had previously influenced. Obviously, for Althusser, philosophy was always a way of engaging in politics, and, to some degree, vice-versa. It is therefor important to understand the political context in which these works were written. Althusser's last major published philosophical work was “The Reproduction of Capitalism,” from which his most widely known piece of writing, the essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” had been excerpted Taken as an isolated piece, the essay can, and often is, misunderstood as a call to cultural struggle within the state apparatuses- the school, the church, the family- for a healthier ideological culture. But in fact, Althusser was arguing that the ISAs could not be reformed. The capitalist state and its apparatuses, be they directly forceful (the police and military) or ideological, would have to be completely smashed before a revolutionary state could start to form itself and its own apparatuses. A state, Althusser argues, does not just rule over its subjects but in fact engenders subjectivity through ideological conditioning. No matter what economic reforms might take place, the apparatuses of a capitalist state can only engender capitalist subjects. Therefor, any attempt to reform the state from within was bound to simply reproduce capitalist relations in one form or another even if the Communist parties were “completely” victorious in the election results. Althusser was adamant about this point because the late 1970s saw the Communist Party of France moving ever rightward and abandoning militant struggle (even in name, in practice it abandoned it long before the '70s) and entering electoral politics in the name of “Eurocommunism,” the theory, based on a right-wing appropriation of Gramsci's writings on hegemony, that the democratic states of the industrial west were, in and of themselves, inherently apolitical and could be transformed if a working-class party was in charge of them. The CPF was formally abandoning the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Althusser was trying to combat this trend. But while Althusser was combating political revisionism in the Party, his own philosophy was becoming less and less orthodoxically Marxist. In his earlier works on Marx, “For Marx” and “Reading Capital”, Althusser held that in his mature works, such as Das Kapital, Marx had essentially, despite momentary lapses, purged himself of the Hegelian idealism at the heart of his early thought and founded a genuinely materialist philosophy. By the time of the writings collected in this volume, however, Althusser had come to interpret Das Kapital as, philosophically at least, an essentially idealist work, still operating with Hegel as its primary influence. Kapital contained, Althusser felt, dueling idealist and materialist logics, and Marx was probably only conscious of the former as he was writing. The greatness of the work, Althusser had come to believe, lied in the way Marx's idealist philosophical argument accidentally stumbled upon a new science- a way of understanding the way that class struggle operated in different forms of society, though most specifically capitalism. Das Kapital, then, is a scientific, not a philosophic, masterpiece. Indeed, Althusser asserts that there is no Marxist philosophy contained in Das Kapital. (In his autobiography, Althusser goes so far as to say that Marx was a brilliant scientific thinker, but actually a rather lousy philosopher.) So Althusser gives up, as he had been doing in his previous work, trying to imagine a Marxist philosophy and instead goes about trying to find a philosophical explanation of the genesis of Marxism- to find in the history of philosophy an explanation as to how to account for the fact that an idealist philosopher founded a science (which is inherently materialist as such). (Althusser subtlety equates the futility of Marx's appropriation of Hegel with his own appropriation of structuralism in his earlier work. Both men, he subtlety confesses, were using philosophical tools that were “in vogue” at the time that they were writing to try to invent a Marxist philosophy.) His search for an explanation in the history of philosophy for the founding of Marxism leads Althusser to a radical critique of what has come to be known as “materialism” within the philosophical cannon. He points out that the idealism/materialism binary was introduced into western philosophy by Plato, perhaps the purest arch-type of an idealist in the cannon. But even Plato's notion of idealism has been reinterpreted and transformed through history, and indeed this practice started not long after Plato's death, even with Aristotle. We have come to think of idealism as thought which prioritizes the knowledge of the mind over the matter of which it holds knowledge, and materialism as thought which prioritizes the objects that inspire the knowledge of the mind about those objects. In fact, neither of these correspond to the original definitions set fourth by Plato. For Plato, it was not thought at all which was paramount but rather the Idea, the Forms hovering up in the skies with the Gods, which illuminated both mind and matter. Idealism was simply the divine Truth, and materialism the turning away from the Idea towards the dank cave of things, which is to say ignorance, the unexamined life which is not worthy of living. In classically Althusserian fashion, the philosopher examines what he has always called the “philosophy effect,” a philosophical system's indirect effect (via ideology) on social practice, of Plato's originary idealism. The domination of the Idea implies, as Plato plainly asserts in “Republic,” the rejection of any form of democratic rights and the absolute mastery of he who understands the Form of Truth. Authentic materialism, then, is banished from the realm of western philosophy by Plato. Aristotle, Plato's less anti-democratic heir, began to reimagine idealism as a celebration of the human mind, and materialism as simply a more object-centered celebration of the human mind. This materialism, that known by western philosophers including Marx and his followers, Althusser defines as a disguised “idealism of freedom,” of what the transcendent human subject can do with and to the material world. But what of authentically materialistic thinking? Is there such a thing in the history of thought? Might it be lurking in the shadows that Plato had tried so hard, and seemingly successfully, to repress? Althusser goes about trying to unearth this repressed tradition in western philosophy that he traces back to Epicurus's vision of a primordial rain of atoms falling vertically through a void. The clinamen was when one of Epicurus's atoms suddenly and randomly swerved in its downward trajectory and collided with another atom. Atoms then cascaded into each other. This “pile-up” of atoms results in the creation of a world. Creation, then, is the result of an encounter, and every encounter is arbitrary. Such an arbitrary, yet lasting encounter results in an established, factual world capable of deploying meaning. Most encounters are not lasting, just as most car collisions do not result in pile-ups. Two atoms might make an impression on each other, but this will not result in a new world. And even in the very rare scenario of a world coming into being, we should not expect this world to last. It will be shoved aside eventually, by a different world of equally arbitrary origin. Althusser finds surprising echoes of Epicurus in various western philosophers. Heidegger, too, rejected any notion of originary meaning. The world is something we are simply thrown into, that we are forced to encounter. Machiavelli also, Althusser believes, reflects Epicurus. Machiavelli's political aspirations were nothing more than imagining a series of arbitrary encounters: For Italy to become united, a leader must encounter a region ready to be unified. For there to be such a leader, certain qualities must encounter themselves in an individual. This individual must learn to lead- (s)he must learn to behave wickedly but appear to be good, and this is a hard trick to learn for any individual. All these elements must come together in the void that was Machiavelli's Italy, and unless they do they are not really elements of anything. Spinoza, too, Althusser draws into the repressed tradition. In beginning with God, that which depends on nothing to be affirmed, Spinoza effectively begins with the void. God is that which can not be questioned or deconstructed, and thereby cannot be understood. God is a combination of elements of which we are plunged into as subjects without any concept of how this came to be. Perhaps the clearest reflection of Epicurus's philosophy that Althusser finds is in the work of Rousseau, who divided “nature” into its “pure” and “political” forms. Originary nature is depicted as a huge, wild forest where individuals wander alone without encountering each other. Humans are alone, and thus absolutely free. Yet this radical absence of society is what makes the development of society possible. The State of Nature develops when people suddenly, arbitrarily start encountering each other. Competition and war develops and, following Hobbes, social contracts must be formed if all are not to exterminate all. Proper legislation, Rousseau tells us, can only result from examining the circumstances and environments in which individuals arbitrarily encounter one another. Thus, there is no one “legitimate” form of governance for any one world, which can always be replaced by another world. This buried, authentically materialist, or “aleatory” as Althsser comes to call it, tradition rejects both idealistic, inevitabilist beginnings as well as endings, which such beginnings point to as inevitable. The aleatory tradition truly and authentically embraces disorder. Unlike that which has been labeled “materialism” by the Platonic tradition, authentic, aleatory materialism is not subject-focused (be that subject God or the proletariat) but it is rather process-focused, a process which imposes itself on the subject, rather than the other way around. In creating this history of the repressed history of philosophy, Althusser inherently offers a radical critique of the concept of “history”. For professional historians, history is that of the established facts of past histories, the worlds that took place in the past. The revolutionary historian, however, observes tendencies in the contradictory present, understanding that no physical laws apply to such contradictions, and that the colliding atoms could result in any type of world given the circumstances that apply to the conflagration. This, Althusser posits, must be remembered by any authentic Marxist or psychoanalyst. Practice, be it psychological or political, must inform theory, not the other way around. Only then can it be remembered that philosophical or psychological theory is only the attempt to arrive at a situationalistic truth, rather than an unbendable Truth. Marx single-handedly re-creates this conscious/unconscious binary that haunts the western tradition. He is outwardly an Aristotilian materialist, which is to say an idealist. But unbeknownst even to him, he is continuing the sub-conscious work of aleatory materialism, and founding a science. To bring this philosophical survey back to Marx and the Marxist-Leninist political tradition, Althusser, at the end of his life, posited that Marx was a thinker who understood himself as a child of Hegel (as Althusser had earlier understood himself as a child of structuralism). Marx was thus an idealistic materialist of the tradition inspired by Aristotle. In Das Kapital, Marx presents the commodity as an absolute origin of contemporary social relations. Marx's commodity, Althusser claims (perhaps ignoring Marx's clumsy, yet still relevant, notion of primitive accumulation) is not subjected to any kind of historical genealogy. It is an abstract absolute, which Marx, who was (consciously at least) the slave of western idealism, felt he had to begin with. Marx's conscious thought and politics were shaped by their historically determined limits, and those limits have thus shaped those who consciously thought and acted in Marx's wake. That the Leninist state was ultimately, according to Althusser, incapable of interpolating truly radical subjectivities, that Communist parties in the West fell back on bourgeois-representational models, was a result of an idealist-materialism at the heart of Marx's (conscious) thought. To move forward, we must understand the Marx that Marx himself never knew. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 2015
|
Feb 27, 2015
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1859841643
| 9781859841648
| 1859841643
| 3.93
| 951
| 1968
| Feb 17, 1998
|
liked it
|
This extremely influential text has aged poorly exactly because of how influential its been in Marxist discourse. Many of its key claims, which were e
This extremely influential text has aged poorly exactly because of how influential its been in Marxist discourse. Many of its key claims, which were eye-brow raising in 1965, are generally accepted by interpreters of Marx today. What makes this book a somewhat frustrating read is that Althusser's writing style is far denser here even than in his other key works, and yet there seems to be less ideas to sink one's teeth into than in, say, the author's “For Marx.” First off its most influential, and today least interesting suggestion is that Marx, in Das Kapital, proposes a new way of examining society not as a relation between individuals or even classes, but as a structure shaped by class domination, which has many distinct and complex levels but is brought together not by one overriding power, such as the brute force of any one class, but by many factors, the most significant of which is the economy. Althusser sometimes referred to this conception of society as a "topography"- suggesting a layering of complex levels, like shifting tectonic plates, independently following their own laws, yet in doing so collectively shaping a world to which they all belong and which, even if that world is pre-supposed by the levels that form it, shapes the levels' relation to one another. This conception of society and history Althusser opposed to the Hegelian and Hegelian-Marxist notion of history as an unfolding totality, the inevitable end result of which is Knowledge itself. Thus, Althusser was labeled a “Marxist Structuralist” although the author did not consider himself a Structuralist. In the near-fifty years since the book's publication, the discourses of Marxism and Structuralism, in no small part due to this book's influence, have become so intertwined that almost noone who is familiar with these lines of thought would not have come to think of Marx and Das Kapital as forerunners of the work of thinkers such as Saussure and Levi-Strauss. Today the book's most interesting, if least clearly proposed, ideas concern the ways in which a new form of knowledge, which Althusser thinks Das Kapital constitutes, comes into being. Any new form of knowledge, or affect of knowledge, is born from older forms of knowledge, and thus that the thinker who discovers a new knowledge affect can never entirely understand this knowledge, can not truly speak in the language of the new understanding that the thinker has discovered. In “For Marx” Althusser suggested that the work of the young Marx was not Marxist but Hegelian idealist. Only Marx's late work, such as Das Kapital, constituted Marxist thought, a new way to understand social relations. In Reading Capital, Althusser proposes that Marx, in discovering a new knowledge affect, could not himself fully understand his own discovery. It is for this reason that Marx proposes, at the end of Volume 1, that communism will constitute a negation of negation which is, as Mao had previously pointed out, a wholly idealist notion that proposes an inevitable “end of history.” This idea can lead a “Marxist” to the counter-revolutionary notion that struggle is unnecessary and that one can simply wait for the class consciousness of the masses to catch up to that of the “vanguard”. Marx must be forgiven for this indiscrepancy, Althusser writes, because he was all alone with his discovery. His momentary relapse into idealism was simply the all-too-human response of working with a knowledge affect that noone, including Marx himself, fully understood yet. Althusser closes by saluting Marx's courage and solitude. Marx was all alone with his discovery right until the end of his life, when he was still trying to complete Das Kapital. These two branches of thought in the book- the suggestion that Kapital represents a new, structural way to understand society, and the ways that a new thought emerges from an old one, are only seemingly disparate. The "new world" of Marxist thought that Kapital represents still contains an idealist "plate" operating under its own laws, yet transformed and transforming by and of its new materialist world. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 2013
|
Oct 05, 2013
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3.82
|
it was ok
|
This large and expensive book is an interesting example of “history” as commodity. It takes an “important” subject- in this case, the history of commu
...more
|
Apr 2013
|
May 01, 2013
|
||||||
3.88
|
really liked it
|
There's so much to hate about this “classic” that I almost feel a little queasy saying that, at the end of the day, I do think its a great work... of
...more
|
Jul 2012
|
Jul 27, 2012
|
||||||
3.84
|
it was ok
|
I have to start by saying that I haven't felt so much antipathy towards a book in a long time. But I want to present a thoughtful account of why I per
...more
|
Nov 2011
|
Dec 27, 2011
|
||||||
4.03
|
really liked it
|
Mao's early philosophical writings are fascinating and key if one wants to understand the intellectual evolution of Marxist (and post-Marxist) thought
...more
|
Sep 2012
|
Nov 19, 2012
|
||||||
3.93
|
really liked it
|
The essential task that Louis Althusser devoted his philosophical career, and this book most pointedly, to was rescuing what he understood as the scie
...more
|
Sep 2012
|
Nov 20, 2012
|
||||||
3.63
|
liked it
|
This is an interesting, if rather troubling work of interpretation. Badiou here radically reinterprets Deleuze’s philosophy as something very differen
...more
|
Dec 31, 2016
|
Mar 06, 2017
|
||||||
3.92
|
I love this guy. Hard to think of any piece of writing thats influenced the way I think about the world more than "Ideology and Ideological State Appa
...more
|
not set
|
Jul 30, 2011
|
|||||||
4.16
|
It seems to me that Wittgenstein is trying, with this very late work, to answer the questions raised in his Tractatus in the terminology he employed i
...more
|
Oct 2015
|
Oct 15, 2015
|
|||||||
4.01
|
really liked it
|
Fascinating anthology of speeches by the most controversial leader of the French Revolution. Zizek's introduction, while only 30 pages long, is one of ...more |
Jul 2012
|
Jul 29, 2012
|
||||||
4.11
|
These studies and the work they gave rise to, Philosophical Investigations, are commonly understood as a refutation of the author's previous major wor
...more
|
Jul 2011
|
Jul 30, 2011
|
|||||||
3.51
|
really liked it
|
I found this to be not only an interesting work on Wittgenstein, but one of the most enjoyable pieces by Alain Badiou that I've had the opportunity to
...more
|
Jan 2011
|
Aug 12, 2011
|
||||||
4.10
|
I still enjoy re-reading Panofsky. In a bizare twist, I randomly met his granddaughter in a Wallgreen's.
...more
|
not set
|
Jul 30, 2011
|
|||||||
4.42
|
it was amazing
|
I'll say that this, my first dip into the Neruda universe, affected me more than any encounter with 20th century poetry I've yet had. But I also haven
...more
|
Jan 2013
|
Feb 03, 2013
|
||||||
3.84
|
liked it
|
Lissagaray was a participant in the struggle to defend the Commune. He narrowly escaped capture after the fall of Paris and spent the next few years w
...more
|
Aug 2015
|
Sep 01, 2015
|
||||||
4.26
|
really liked it
|
This is one of the most difficult texts I’ve ever challenged myself to read. There’s no way I could have gotten through it without a lot of help from
...more
|
Jul 2016
|
Jul 05, 2016
|
||||||
4.20
|
really liked it
|
This is one of Deleuze's earliest published works. In this radically creative interpretation of Nietzsche, Deleuze is, I think, using Nietzsche's oeuv
...more
|
Feb 2016
|
Feb 23, 2016
|
||||||
4.08
|
This has become one of the most respected and referenced interpretive works on Nietzsche and I can see why. It was first published in 1985, and Nehama
...more
|
not set
|
Jul 30, 2011
|
|||||||
4.03
|
I was inspired to read this book by the revelation of just how ignorant I was of world history pre-1895 (blame it on the cinematic foundations of my e
...more
|
not set
|
Jul 30, 2011
|
|||||||
4.06
|
it was amazing
|
This volume contains works by Louis Althusser written shortly before and after the author murdered his wife in a fit of madness. These works were left
...more
|
Jan 2015
|
Feb 27, 2015
|
||||||
3.93
|
liked it
|
This extremely influential text has aged poorly exactly because of how influential its been in Marxist discourse. Many of its key claims, which were e
...more
|
Sep 2013
|
Oct 05, 2013
|