Philosophical

Classicos. André Gorz. Somos presos de una tela que nosotros mismos hemos tejido y tejemos a diario

July 4th, 2014

Modified translation into Spanish of earlier article on André Gorz.  Published in La Maleta de Portbou,Mayo-Junio 2014, pp. 82ff.

Andre Gorz und die philosophische Voraussetzungen des Politischen

March 9th, 2014

The most complete version of the several Gorz articles in english (logos) or french (esprit); this post includes also the other articles solicited by André Hager and Harald Bluhm for the journal Berliner Debatte. Initial.

Read:  Gorz-Initial

La philosophie charnelle d’André Gorz

March 9th, 2014

Version française récrite et rédigée pour la revue Esprit par Alice Béjà, parue janvier 2014.  Voire versions anglaise (dans Logos) et version plus étouffé dans Berliner Debatte. Initial

Lire:  Esprit, janvier 2014, Gorz

“In Search of a New Left, Then and Now

January 27th, 2014

“In Search of a New Left, Then and Now” was published in Living with Class.  Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture, edited by Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz (New York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 25-31.

 

In Search of a New Left, Then and Now

January 25th, 2014

“In Search of a New Left, Then and Now,” is a short autobiographical-philosophical essay published in a collective volume called Living with Class.  Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture, edited by Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz (Routledge, 2013), pp. 25-31).

The important parallels come from the attempts to renew a left gone static, whether it was that of the Old Left of communist-marxist vintage, or the attempt to draw implications from the Occupy … movements.  The collection tries to draw some lessons, or better– to reflect on:  the Occupy movements and the question whether the concept of “class” makes sense today.  Younger contributors offer newer views; but interesting is that the essay following mine is by Stanly Arownowitz, who contributed to the 1971 volume edited with Karl Klare, The Unknown Dimension, in which we tried to make inroads into received opinion, as does this volume.

André Gorz & the Philosophical Foundation of the Political

November 12th, 2013

I wrote first about André Gorz in the early 1970s, in an essay on the New Working Class that later became a chapter in The Marxian Legacy.  We continued to correspond over the years; and he dedicated a later essay to me.  This has led some analysts to ask me questions about Gorz; and it has led others to find some of our correspondence in his Archives at the IMEC in France (full copies of my part, and some missing letters of his are at my Archives at the library of Stony Brook University).

This essay returns to some of the problems that we discussed over the years (but it is not based on archival work, only memory and a rereading of his work).  Especially important is the early philosophical treatise, Fondements pour une morale, and also Le traître.   Perhaps most enlightening for me who knew him is the Lettre à D…,  which seems to me to put an entirely new spin on the thin skin of the early existentialist.

Read:  Gorz dans Logos

Forward to Breckman, “Adventures of the Symbolic. Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy”

June 5th, 2013

Series Editor forward to Warren Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic.  Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (Columbia University Press, “Political Thought/Political History”), pp. xi-xv.  Conveys the excitement of reading this path-breaking study, and draws on analogy in title to Merleau-Ponty’s “Adventures of the Dialectic,” the essay that defined “Western Marxism” while criticizing not only its Stalinist realization in the USSR but also its “existential” variant in Sartre’s “ultra-bolshevism”… a position not without echoes in Breckman’s last chapter which discusses among others Badiou and Zizek!

Forward to Breckman: Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy

Un parcours philosophique et politique franco-américain, via Castoriadis, Lefort et Gorz etc.

May 26th, 2013

Interview paru primitivement dans Platypus Review, reprise dans la revue du MAUSS avec une nouvelle préface.

Lire:  Un parcours philosophique

 

 

Politics and Anti-Politics

December 19th, 2012

Essay published in English in Critical Theory and Democracy.  Civil society, dictatorship, and constitutionalism in Andre Arato’s democratic theory, edited by Enrique Peruzzotti and Martín Plot (New York:  Routledge, 2012), pp. 29-40.

“These Petrified Relations Must be Forced to Danse”: An Interview with Dick Howard

October 4th, 2012

Historical-biographical interview covering both the political experience of the New Left, a participant in May 68, and the author of books including The Specter of Democracy, and The Primacy of the Political.  The interview begins with the publication of The Unknown Dimension:  European Marxism since Lenin (1972).  It concludes with reflections on contemporary politics, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street.

Read:  Those Petrified Relations Must be Forced to Danse: An Interview with Dick Howard

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