Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx

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From the MIT Press:

"Kojin Karatani's Transcritique introduces a startlingly new dimension to Immanuel Kant's transcendental critique by using Kant to read Karl Marx and Marx to read Kant. In a direct challenge to standard academic approaches to both thinkers, Karatani's transcritical readings discover the ethical roots of socialism in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a Kantian critique of money in Marx's Capital.

Karatani reads Kant as a philosopher who sought to wrest metaphysics from the discredited realm of theoretical dogma in order to restore it to its proper place in the sphere of ethics and praxis. With this as his own critical model, he then presents a reading of Marx that attempts to liberate Marxism from longstanding Marxist and socialist presuppositions in order to locate a solid theoretical basis for a positive activism capable of gradually superseding the trinity of Capital-Nation-State." 

The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Editied by Jonathan Barnes

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The Oxford Translation of Aristotle was originally published in twelve volumes between 1912 and 1954. The revised edition contains the substance of the original translation, slightly emended in light of recent scholarship; three of the original versions have been replaced by new translations; and a new and enlarged selection of fragments has been added. The aim of the translation remains the same: to make the surviving works of Aristotle readily accessible to English-speaking readers.

Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor

Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor

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What has philosophy to do with the poor? If, as has often been supposed, the poor have no time for philosophy, then why have philosophers always made time for them? Why is the history of philosophy—from Plato to Karl Marx to Jean-Paul Sartre to Pierre Bourdieu—the history of so many figures of the poor: plebes, men of iron, the demos, artisans, common people, proletarians, the masses? Why have philosophers made the shoemaker, in particular, a remarkably ubiquitous presence in this history? Does philosophy itself depend on this thinking about the poor? If so, can it ever refrain from thinking for them?Jacques Ranci?re’s The Philosopher and His Poor meditates on these questions in close readings of major texts of Western thought in which the poor have played a leading role—sometimes as the objects of philosophical analysis, sometimes as illustrations of philosophical argument. Published in France in 1983 and made available here for the first time in English, this consummate study assesses the consequences for Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu of Plato’s admonition that workers should do “nothing else” than their own work. It offers innovative readings of these thinkers’ struggles to elaborate a philosophy of the poor. Presenting a left critique of Bourdieu, the terms of which are largely unknown to an English-language readership, The Philosopher and His Poor remains remarkably timely twenty years after its initial publication.

Vesa Oittinen, Evald Ilyenkov's Philosophy Revisited

Vesa Oittinen, Evald Ilyenkov's Philosophy Revisited

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On behalf of the Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, it is a great honour for me to open the Symposium on Evald Ilyenkov. The Symposium is a joint project of the Department of Philosophy (Faculty of Arts), the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research (Faculty of Education), and the Alexander Institute. It is thus a multidisciplinary enterprise in a positive sense. The main effort in planning and organizing the Symposiurn has been made by Dr. Vesa Oittinen to whom we are all most grateful.

Evald Ilyenkov was born in Smolensk in 1924. He started his studies at the Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature in the University of Moscow. After the World War he continued his studies and defended in 1953 his candidate thesis on the questions of dialectical logic in Marx's economic works. From 1953 to his untimely death in 1979 he worked at the Institute of Philosophy in the Academy of Science of the Soviet Union.

Ilyenkov's study of the dialectics of abstract and concrete in Marx's Capital appeared in 1960. Combining his interest in the history of philosophy with contemporary debates, he published in 1968 his doctoral dissertation on “the question of the nature of thought”.

Ilyenkov's book on Dialectical Logic appeared in Russian in 1974, and as an English translation in 1977. In this work, he tried to combine the Marxist‑Leninist theory of knowledge with methodological questions about special scientific disciplines. In his posthumous work, he discussed Lenin's conception of materialist dialectics.

Ilyenkov's works had a profound impact on Soviet philosophy and his studies influenced also a generation of Western Marxism. Today Ilyenkov would be 75 years old. His voluntary death already for twenty years ago prevented him from seeing the decline of Soviet Union, followed in the Western Marxism by the flight back to historical studies in Hegel and eventually to disappointed postmodernism. I will not make any guess at the judgment that Ilyenkov might have given about the present state of the world. But during this conference we shall hear several assessments of the significance of his work and its continuing relevance. I am very impressed by the programme which includes papers both by Ilyenkov's close friends, his followers in the study of human actions, and his admirers in contemporary theories of language, semiotics, and aesthetics.

Coming myself from the Anglo‑Saxon tradition of analytic philosophy, I should like to make a personal remark. In the late 1970s I read an English translation of Ilyenkov's article The Concept of the Ideal, which I found strikingly similar to Karl Popper's conception of the World 3 of human social constructions. In 1981 I read a Finnish translation of Ilyenkov's essay on the genesis of human personality through concrete action and interaction with the material and social environments. Both articles defend very interesting views which are materialistic in an enlightened way but at the same time critical of vulgar interpretations of materialism. Ilyenkov's views on the development of human personality continued the great tradition of cognitive psychology in the Soviet Union. One can understand that his independent views gave emphasis and a voice to ideas that were not very fashionable in the Soviet philosophy in the 1970s but make him a most interesting object of study among contemporary philosophers and psychologists.

More generally, when the new Millennium is starting, it will be worthwhile and rewarding to assess and re‑evaluate the achievements of philosophers and psychologists who worked in the tradition of Marxist dialectics both in the Soviet Union and other countries. It is no doubt that their publications contain parts that strike us as dogmatic errors. But just like in the study of medieval philosophy, we are now able to distinguish the genuine philosophical ideas from the particular theologically or politically correct form in which they were dressed in the historical context. The symposium on Evald Ilyenkov is an example of such efforts of reconsidering the history of contemporary philosophy.

Kathryn Dean, Jonathan Joseph, John Roberts, Colin Wight, Realism, Philosophy and Social Science

Kathryn Dean, Jonathan Joseph, John Roberts, Colin Wight, Realism, Philosophy and Social Science

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The authors examine the nature of the relationship between social science and philosophy and address the sort of work social science should do, and the role and sorts of claims that an accompanying philosophy should engage in. In particular, the authors reintroduce the question of ontology, an area long overlooked by philosophers of social science, and present a cricital engagement with the work of Roy Bhaskar. The book argues against the excesses of philosophising and commits itself to a philosophical approach more deeply grounded in the social sciences.

Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (Second Edition)

Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (Second Edition)
 
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This is one of the most respected books on Marx's philosophical thought. Wood explains Marx's views from a philosophical standpoint and defends Marx against common misunderstandings and criticisms of his views. All the major philosophical topics in Marx's work are considered: the central concept of alienation; historical materialism and Marx's account of social classes; the nature and social function of morality; philosophical materialism and Marx's atheism; and Marx's use of the Hegelian dialectical method and the Marxian theory of value.

The second edition has been revised to include a new chapter on capitalist exploitation and new suggestions for further reading. Wood has also added a substantial new preface which looks at Marx's thought in light of the fall of the Soviet Union and our continued ambivalence towards capitalism, exploring Marx's continuing relevance in the twenty-first century.

Sean Sayers, Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge

Sean Sayers, Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge

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G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic

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The final, 1830 version of the Hegel’s Logic, known as “The Shorter Logic,” is the most accessible and until recently, the most widely known of Hegel’s mature works, the work which has been most influential among Marxists. In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to “The Phenomenology” at the expense of his mature work. An understanding of “The Phenomenology” is important to understanding “The Logic,” but unlike “The Logic,” “The Phenomenology” was written in a hurry, contains much that is dated and is so poorly structured as to be almost unreadable. The 1830 Logic, which Hegel used in his lectures, is on the other hand, a reliable and structured presentation of Hegel’s mature views.

The Logic is provided with a new Foreword by Andy Blunden which approaches Hegel from a Marxist perspective and will help the novice appreciate Hegel’s importance. Hegel’s mode of writing is arcane, and even this most accessible of his works may be hard for the modern reader to make sense of. This Foreword goes a long way to unlocking the mysteries of Hegel’s writing for the uninitiated.

Few introductions to Hegel tackle the problem of what the subject matter of the Logic is. This is only made clear in his early works, and through an appreciation of his life and times. Andy draws on these aspects to introduce the reader to a powerful and systematic approach to problems which are as acute today as they were in 1830.

Walter Benjamin, Early Writings

Walter Benjamin, Early Writings

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Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds—penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have since come to appreciate—have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century's most resolutely independent thinkers.Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of experience. Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of thinking comes into view—a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the College de France: 1977-1978)

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the College de France: 1977-1978)
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Marking a major development in Foucault’s thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the Collège de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of  “bio-power,” introduced in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended, Foucault sets out to study the foundations of this new technology of power over population. Distinct from punitive, disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security, and it is to 18th century developments of these technologies with which the first chapters of the book are concerned. By the fourth lecture however Foucault’s attention turns, focusing on a history of “governmentality” from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state. These lectures show that the trenchant analysis of biopower, “power over life”, which Foucault had begun in the first volume of the History of Sexuality and which he pursues here in terms of technologies of security, led him to a decisively deeper and more radical formulation of his guiding problematic—what he called “the government of the self and others”—the issue that would serve as the basis for all his subsequent work. Security, Territory and Population might thus properly be called the ‘missing link’ that reveals the underlying unity of Foucault’s later thought.

Excerpt:

We tried to show what the problems were that this “police” had to address; the extent to which the role it was assigned was different from the role that is later given to the institution of the police; and what was expected of it in ensuring the state’s growth in terms of two objectives: to enable it to stake out and improve its position in the game of rivalries and competition between European states, and to guarantee internal order through the “welfare” of individuals. Development of the state of (military-economic) competition, and development of the Wohlfahrt state (of wealth-tranquility-happiness): these are the two principles that “police” as a rational art of government must be able to coordinate. At this time “police” was conceived of as a sort [of] “technology of state forces.”
—Translated by Graham Burchell

Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism

Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism

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What is needed for something new to appear? According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the most brilliant contemporary philosophers, this question of “novelty” is the major problem posed by Bergson’s work. In this companion book to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Deleuze demonstrates both the development and the range of three fundamental Bergsonian concepts: duration, memory, and the élan vital. Furthermore, Deleuze interprets and integrates these themes into a single philosophical program, arguing that Bergson’s philosophical intentions are methodological. They are more than a polemic against the limitations of science and common sense, particularly in Bergson’s elaboration of the explanatory powers of the notion of duration - thinking in terms of time rather than space. Bergsonism is also important to an understanding of Deleuze’s own work, influenced as it is by Bergson.
—Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam

Paul Ashton, A. J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens, The Praxis of Alain Badiou

Paul Ashton, A. J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens, The Praxis of Alain Badiou

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Following the publication of his magnum opus L'être et l'événement (Being and Event) in 1988, Alain Badiou has been acclaimed as one of France's greatest living philosophers. Since then, he has released a dozen books, including Manifesto for Philosophy, Conditions, Metapolitics and Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds), many of which are now available in English translation. Badiou writes on an extraordinary array of topics, and his work has already had an impact upon studies in the history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and ontology. This volume takes up the challenge of explicating, extending and, in many places, criticizing Badiou's stunningly original theses. Above all, the essays collected here put Badiou's concepts to the test in a confrontation with the four great headings that he himself has identified as essential to our humanity: science, love, art and politics. Many of the contributors have already been recognized as outstanding translators of and commentators on Badiou's work; they appear here with fresh voices also destined to make a mark.

Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction

Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction

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The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited Very Short Introduction, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer. Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers--from Marx and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett--have responded to the ultimate question of meaning. He suggests, however, that it is only in modern times that the question has become problematic. But instead of tackling it head-on, many of us cope with the feelings of meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, "New Age softheadedness," or fundamentalism. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up. He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living--that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life. Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but with a very serious end in mind. 

Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction

Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction

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Peter Singer identifies the central vision that unifies Marx's thought, enabling us to grasp Marx's views as a whole. He sees him as a philosopher primarily concerned with human freedom, rather than as an economist or a social scientist. In plain English, he explains alienation, historical materialism, the economic theory of Capital, and Marx's ideas of communism, and concludes with an assessment of Marx's legacy.

Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction

Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction

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Hegel is regarded as one of the most influential figures on modern political and intellectual development. After painting Hegel's life and times in broad strokes, Peter Singer goes on to tackle some of the more challenging aspects of Hegel's philosophy. Offering a broad discussion of Hegel's ideas and an account of his major works, Singer explains what have often been considered abstruse and obscure ideas in a clear and inviting manner.

Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volumes I & II

Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volumes I & II

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Henri Lefebvre’s magnum opus: a monumental exploration of contemporary society.
The two volumes of Lefebvre’s three-volume Critique of Everyday Life provided here are perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, the Critique was a philosophical inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France and is considered to be the founding text of all that we know as cultural studies, as well as a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. A work of enormous range and subtlety, Lefebvre takes as his starting-point and guide the “trivial” details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet one which remains the only source of resistance and change.

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume III (Joe Butt Translation)

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume III (Joe Butt Translation)

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Columbia University Press’s multivolume Prison Notebooks is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci’s seminal writings in English. The notebooks’ integral text gives readers direct access not only to Gramsci’s influential ideas but also to the intellectual workshop where those ideas were forged. Extensive notes guide readers through Gramsci’s extraordinary series of reflections on an encyclopedic range of topics. Volume 3 contains notebooks 6, 7, and 8, in which Gramsci develops his concepts of hegemony, civil society, and the state; reflects extensively on the Renaissance, the Reformation, and Machiavelli’s political philosophy; and offers a trenchant critique of the cultural and political practices of fascism. A detailed analysis of positivism and idealism brings Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis and conception of historical materialism into sharp relief. Also included are the author’s extensive observations on articles and books read during his imprisonment.

In fairness to Hoare and Smith’s Selections, the first complete, critical edition of Gramsci’s notebooks in Italian – edited by Valentino Gerratana – was not published until 1975. Yet while some of the limitations were resolved by the publication of two further collections of prison notes (1985, 1995) which use Gerratana’s texts (and include Q/§ annotation), the pattern continued, despite multiple translators and publishers, of picking through Gramsci’s notebooks and reorganizing his notes and ideas thematically. Moreover the critical apparatuses of these collections are highly uneven. All this helps to explain the proliferation of multiple, competing interpretations of Gramsci’s ‘open Marxism’. The challenge of textually grasping his prison notebooks undoubtedly contributed to many partial and weak readings.

What graduate students genuinely needed was a complete and critical edition of the Prison Notebooks, translated in full and replete with explanatory footnotes. No such book existed then, but thanks to Joe Buttigieg and Columbia University Press, soon enough it will, when we will have a complete set of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks in five volumes. To date three volumes have been published in hardback (1992; 1996; 2007), covering Q1-8 and roughly half of all Gramsci’s notes. Buttigieg’s translation of the Notebooks stands, along with Gerratana’s Italian edition, as the definitive source (see the essays in Green 2011, §IV). And Buttigieg’s critical notes are the most careful and complete in any language.

As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak exclaims in a blurb for the back cover of the paperback edition: ‘Until Joseph A. Buttigieg’s meticulous translation and critical attention to Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, this invaluable text, a testimony to the most emancipatory thinking of our time, was available to English readers only in an artificially contrived form.

—On Buttigieg’s translation of the complete Gramsci Prison Notebooks, including this third volume, completed in 2007

George Novack | Pragmatism Versus Marxism: An Appraisal of John Dewey's Philosophy

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Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature

Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature
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“Setting himself against the growing tendency to homogenize “Third World” literature and cultures, Aijaz Ahmad has produced a spirited critique of the major theoretical statements on “colonial discourse” and “post-colonialism,” dismantling many of the commonplaces and conceits that dominate contemporary cultural criticism. With lengthy considerations of, among others, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and the Subaltern Studies group, In Theory also contains brilliant analyses of the concept of Indian literature, of the genealogy of the term “Third World,” and of the conditions under which so-called “colonial discourse theory” emerged in metropolitan intellectual circles.”
Excerpt:
The brief discussion of ‘Marx on India’ in Chapter 6, the shortest in the book, is occasioned here formally by Edward Said’s attack on Marx in Orientalism precisely on the issue of India, but I also had some other aspects in mind. Polemical dismissals of Marxism, without any detailed engagement with Marx’s thought, are now a fairly common feature of French poststructuralism and of the straightforwardly right-wing ideas which have arisen in its wake. There has been, since The Order of Things, a pose of weariness and wry contempt. This is duplicated, then, in the whole range of Anglo-American literary poststructualisms — and not only literary, nor only poststructuralisms — where one routinely encounters a dense system of mutual citations and invocations of Foucault and/or Said which portrays Marx as an Orientalistic enthusiast of colonialism. A striking feature of this portrayal of Marx as an Orientalist, based as it is on some journalistic observations about India, is that it never even refers to how those same observations may have been seen by India’s own anti-imperialist historians. The key fact about the post-colonial history of the so-called Third World is that each nation-state came under the dominance of a distinct national bourgeoisie (existing or emergent) as it emerged from the colonial crucible and was then assigned a specific location in the international division of labour as it is organized by imperialism, so that the period has come to be characterized not by greater unity but by increasing differentiation and even competitiveness among these states.

Felix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977

Felix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977

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Desire is not intrinsically linked to an individuation of the libido. A machine of desire encounters forms of individuation, that is, of alienation. Neither desire nor its repression is an ideal formation; there is no desire-in-itself, no repression-in-itself. The abstract objective of a “successful castration” partakes of the worst reac­tionary mystifications. Desire and repression function in a real society, and are marked by the imprint of each of its historical stages. It is therefore not a matter of general categories which could be transposed from one situation to another. The distinction which I propose between micropolitics and macropolitics of desire would have to function as something which would lead to the liquidation of the pretended universality of psychoanalytic models, a notion which ostensibly secures the psychoanalyst against political and social contingencies. It is said that psychoanalysis is concerned with something which takes place on a small scale, barely the scale of the family and the person, whereas politics is concerned only with large social groupings. I would like to demonstrate that, on the contrary, there is a politics which addresses itself to the individual’s desire, as well as to the desire which manifests itself in the broadest social field. And it has two forms: either a macropolitics aiming at both individual and social problems, or a micropolitics aiming at the same domains (the individual, the family, party problems, state problems, etc.). The despotism which exists in conjugal or family relationships arises from the same kind of libidinal disposition that exists in the broadest social field. Inversely, it is by no means absurd to approach a number of large scale social problems (for example, the problems of bureaucratism and fascism), in the light of a micro­ politics of desire. The problem therefore is not to put up bridges between already fully constituted and fully delimited domains, but to put in place new theoretical and practical machines, capable of sweeping away the old stratifications, and of establishing the condi­tions for a new exercise of desire. In that case, it is no longer a simple question of describing preexisting social objects, but one of engaging in a political struggle against all machines of the dominant power, whether it be the power of the bourgeois State, the power of any kind of bureaucracy, the power of academia, familial power, phallo­-cratic power in male/female relationships, or even the repressive power of the superego over the individual.

—Guattari, “Everybody Wants to be a Fascist”