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