Saturday, May 25, 2013

Joseph Stalin Collected Works, volume one to twelve:

Collected Works Volume 1
Collected Works Volume 2
Collected Works Volume 3
Collected Works Volume 4
Collected Works Volume 5
Collected Works Volume 6
Collected Works Volume 7
Collected Works Volume 8
Collected Works Volume 9
Collected Works Volume 10
Collected Works Volume 11
Collected works Volume 12
'€œTheory is the experience of the working-class movement in all countries taken in its general aspect. Of course, theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice, just as practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary theory. But theory can become a tremendous force in the working-class movement if it is built up in indissoluble connection with revolutionary practice; for theory, and theory alone, can give the movement confidence, the power of orientation, and an understanding of the inner relation of surrounding events; for it, and it alone, can help practice to realise not only how and in which direction classes are moving at the present time, but also how and in which direction they will move in the near future.'€

Various Foucault Studies: Issues on Neoliberal Governmentality, Foucault and Race, Foucault and Accounting, and Foucault and Queer Theory

Number 6, February 2009
Editorial:
Neoliberal Governmentality (Various Authors)
Various Studies/Articles:
Foucault and the Invisible Economy (Ute Tellmann)
Description: This paper discusses the extent to which governmentality provides a critical visibility of the economy beyond its liberal imaginary. It argues that Foucault’s conceptual and historical understanding of liberal governmentality has two traits that encumber a de-centering of the economy from a Foucauldian perspective. The first obstacle results from a persistent asymmetry of the concept of governmentality as it remains solely geared towards replacing the monolithic account of the state. Governmentality is therefore in danger of rendering the economic invisible instead of advancing an analytics of power appropriate to the specificity of this field. The second impediment relates to how Foucault reads the invisibility of the economy asserted in liberal discourse. While Foucault emphasizes how the “invisible hand” imparts a critical limitation towards the sovereign hubris of total sight, the paper unearths a more complex politics of truth tied to the invisible economy. Drawing on selected historical material, the papers shows that the liberal invisibility of the economy rather functions as a prohibitive barrier towards developing novel and critical visibilities of the economy. A Foucauldian perspective on economy, the paper concludes, benefits from piercing through this double invisibility of the economy.
A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Jason Read)
Description: This article examines Michel Foucault’s critical investigation of neoliberalism in the course published as Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978-1979. Foucault’s lectures are interrogated along two axes. First, examining the way in which neoliberalism can be viewed as a particular production of subjectivity, as a way in which individuals are constituted as subjects of “human capital.” Secondly, Foucault’s analyses is augmented and critically examined in light of other critical work on neoliberalism by Wendy Brown, David Harvey, Christian Laval, Maurizo Lazzarato, and Antonio Negri. Of these various debates and discussions, the paper argues that the discussion of real subsumption in Marx and Negri is most important for understanding the specific politics of neoliberalism. Finally, the paper argues that neoliberalism entails a fundamental reexamination of the tools of critical thought, an examination of how freedom can constitute a form of subjection.
Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics (Trent H. Hamann)
Description: This paper illustrates the relevance of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal governance for a critical understanding of recent transformations in individual and social life in the United States, particularly in terms of how the realms of the public and the private and the personal and the political are understood and practiced. The central aim of neoliberal governmentality (“the conduct of conduct”) is the strategic creation of social conditions that encourage and necessitate the production of Homo economicus, a historically specific form of subjectivity constituted as a free and autonomous “atom” of self-interest. The neoliberal subject is an individual who is morally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculations grounded on market-based principles to the exclusion of all other ethical values and social interests. While the more traditional forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereign and disciplinary forms of power remain evident in our ”globalized” world, the effects of subjectification produced at the level of everyday life through the neoliberal “conduct of conduct” recommend that we recognize and invent new forms of critique and ethical subjectivation that constitute resistance to its specific dangers.
The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality: Temporality and Ethical Substance in the Tale of Two Dads (Sam Binkley)
Description: This paper considers debates around the neoliberal governmentality, and argues for the need to better theorize the specific ethical practices through which such programs of governmentality are carried out. Arguing that much theoretical and empirical work in this area is prone to a “top down” approach, in which governmentality is reduced to an imposing apparatus through which subjectivities are produced, it argues instead for the need to understand the self-production of subjectivities by considering the ethical practices that make up neoliberal governmentality. Moreover, taking Robert T. Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad/Poor Dad as an illustrative case, the point is made that the work of neoliberal governmentality specifically targets the temporalities of conduct, in an attempt to shape temporal orientations in a more entrepreneurial form. Drawing on Foucault’s lecture courses on liberalism and neoliberalism, and Jacques Donzelot’s work on the social, the case is made that neoliberal governmentality exhorts individuals to act upon the residual social temporalities that persist as a trace in the dispositions of neoliberal subjects. Moreover, the paper concludes with a discussion of the potentials for resistance in this relation, understood as temporal counter-conducts within neoliberalism.
Number 13, May 2012
Editorial:
Editorial (Various Authors)
Various Pieces from the Issue:
Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism (José Medina)
Description: In this paper I argue that Foucaultian genealogy offers a critical approach to practices of remembering and forgetting which is crucial for resisting oppression and dominant ideologies. For this argument I focus on the concepts of counter-history and counter-memory that Foucault developed in the 1970’s. In the first section I analyze how the Foucaultian approach puts practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations, focusing not only on what is remembered and forgotten, but how, by whom, and with what effects. I highlight the critical possibilities for resistance that this approach opens up, and I illustrate them with Ladelle McWhorter’s genealogy of racism in Anglo-America. In the second section I put the Foucaultian approach in conversation with contemporary work in pragmatism and critical theory on the social epistemology of memory. In the third and final section, I explore some of the implications of the Foucaultian notion of resistance and what I term guerrilla pluralism for contemporary epistemological discussions of ignorance in standpoint theory and race theory
The Down Low and the Sexuality of Race (Brad Elliott Stone)
Description: There has been much interest in the phenomenon called “the Down Low,” in which “otherwise heterosexual” African American men have sex with other black men. This essay explores the biopolitics at play in the media’s curiosity about the Down Low. The Down Low serves as a critical, transgressive heterotopia that reveals the codetermination of racism, sexism, and heterosexism in black male sexuality.
The War on Terror and Ontopolitics: Concerns with Foucault’s Account of Race, Power Sovereignty (Falguni A. Sheth)
Description: In this article, I explore several of Foucault’s claims in relation to race, biopolitics, and power in order to illuminate some concerns in the wake of the post-9.11.01 political regime of population management. First, what is the relationship between sovereignty and power? Foucault’s writings on the relation between sovereignty and power seem to differ across his writings, such that it is not clear whether he had definitively circumscribed the role of sovereignty in relation to “power.” Second, while central sovereign authority, at least in ”Society Must Be Defended” has been displaced by Foucault’s analysis of power, the question still remains as to what drives or instantiates the exercise of power. I lay out an account of what I will call “ontopolitics,” as one that foregrounds the role of sovereign authority in ascribing racial divisions. Moreover, these divisions are driven by cultural, social, and moral criteria that complement—or circumscribe—biopolitics—and are inscribed at the level of the ontological, or onto-ethical.
Decapitating Power (Ladelle McWhorter)
Description: In “Society Must Be Defended” Foucault examines 17th century race war discourse not so much in order to understand 20th century racism or concepts of race but primarily because it constitutes an historical example of an attempt to think power without a head or king. This essay examines his account of race war discourse and the sources he used to construct it. It then takes issue with his claim that early race war discourse can be separated from 18th and 19th century racisms. Finally, it returns to the question of power and argues that the effect of the 1976 lecture series was to dislodge the sovereign model of power but also the model of power as war.
Modern Living and Vital Race: Foucault and the Science of Life (Mary Beth Mader)
Description: The paper examines the relation between Foucault’s account of modern race and racism in the “Society Must Be Defended” lectures and his analysis of the emergence of the modern notion of life and its science in The Order of Things. In “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault uses the term ‘life’ both with respect to pre-modern and modern political regimes, arguing that in the pre-modern eras there was a particular relation of sovereign power to life and death that differs from the relation to life and death which prevails in the modern era. In The Order of Things, Foucault also discusses the concept of life and the historical emergence of the science of life, biology, in the nineteenth century. For Foucault, modern biological racism is a specifically scientific death sentence. The paper argues that the kind of death at issue in this modern racism must be understood in light of the new evolutionary accounts of life as a transorganismic continuity that emerge in the life sciences.
Various Articles:
From ‘Entrepreneur of the Self’ to ‘Care of the Self’: Neo-liberal Governmentality and Foucault’s Ethics (Andrew Dilts)
Description: In his 1979 lectures, Foucault took particular interest in the reconfiguration of quotidian practices under neo-liberal human capital theory, re-describing all persons as entrepreneurs of the self. By the early 1980s, Foucault had begun to articulate a theory of ethical conduct driven not by the logic of investment, but of artistic development and self-care. This article uses Foucault’s account of human capital as a basis to explore the meaning and limits of Foucault’s final published works and argues for two interrelated genealogical projects focused on the ethics of economic activity.
Welfare and Foreign Aid Practices in the Contemporary United States: a Governmental Study (Philippe Fournier)
Description: This article aims to expose the main governmental shifts in recent American history (1961-2000) by examining two programs: the Assistance to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and the Agency for International development (US-AID). Through the exploration of primary and secondary sources, we analyse the production, organisation and circulation of governmental practices in the realms of both domestic and foreign policy. In the American context, practices of government typically revolve around freedom, efficiency models and individual responsibility. Throughout the analysis, we find that the general critiques which have guided reforms and experiments in both areas converge around the same elements. This testifies to the fact that the reflexions and technical models directed at the optimal management of populations are more far-reaching than they first appear. Moreover, the historical transformations in welfare and foreign aid practices bear out the increasingly disciplinary nature of the administration and objectification of the poor, both within the United States and internationally.
The Biopolitics of Ordoliberalism (Thomas Biebricher)
Description: This article examines the biopolitical dimension in ordoliberal thought using Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow as exemplary figures of this tradition. Based on an explication of various biopolitical themes that can be extracted from Foucault’s writings and lectures the article argues that these biopolitical themes, although rarely touched on in Foucault’s lectures on ordoliberal governmentality, nevertheless constitute an integral aspect of the thought of Röpke and Rüstow. From the regulation of the population through the strategic lever of the family to the organicist concerns over the health of the social body, biopolitical themes pervade the socio-economic theories of ordoliberalism. The article suggests that critical evaluations of the ordoliberal approach to political economy, which has been gaining ground again in the aftermath of the financial crisis, should take into account the biopolitical–and rather illiberal–dimension of this approach as well.
Number 13, May 2012
Editorial:
Editorial (Various Authors)
Various Pieces from the Issue:
Accounting, Territorialization and Power (Andrea Mennicken and Peter Miller)
Description: This essay aims to introduce readers to the social studies of accounting, attending in particular to the roles and relevance of Foucault’s works for this field. We provide a brief overview of social studies of accounting, discuss recent developments in Foucault oriented accounting scholarship, and position the articles that appear in this special issue in the context of these developments. In the concluding section, we argue that accounting is an inherently territorializing activity. The calculative instruments of accountancy transform not only the possibilities for personhood, they also construct the physical and abstract calculable spaces that individuals inhabit. A focus on territorializing shifts attention to the links between calculating and governing.
The Subject of Retirement (Cameron Graham)
Description: This paper examines the ”subject of retirement,” one of the most intimate governmental technologies of our present. It extends Read’s argument regarding Foucault’s views on neoliberalism, by providing explicit examples of the technologies of neoliberal government. Read drew attention to the intensification of governmentality by which neoliberalism has operated, and its pervasion into every aspect of society as the individual-as-citizen is transformed into the individual-as-entrepreneur. By examining the Canadian retirement income system, this paper provides a specific example of accounting as a tool of governmentality, a technology integral to neoliberalism’s regime of truth and its production of subjectivity.
Accounting and the Making of Homo Liberalis (Caroline Lambert and Eric Pezet)
Description: This paper investigates the practices whereby the subject, in an organisational context, carries out systematic practices of self-discipline and becomes a calculative self. In particular, we explore the techniques of conduct developed by management accountants in a French carmaker, which adheres to a neoliberal environment. We show how these management accountants become calculative selves by building the very measurement of their own performance. The organisation thereby emerges as the cauldron in which a Homo liberalis is forged. Homo liberalis is the individual capable of constructing for him/her the political self-discipline establishing his/her relationship with the social world on the basis of measurable performance. The management accountants studied in this article prefigure the Homo liberalis in the self-discipline they develop to act in compliance with the organisation’s goals.
Governing and Calculating Everyday Dress (Ingrid Jeacle)
Description: Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality thesis, together with the insightful lens offered by Miller and Rose’s seminal work “Governing Economic Life,” this paper suggests that the ‘quick response’ initiatives deployed by contemporary fashion chains to address the problem of ‘fast fashion,’ are illustrative examples of technologies for governing economic life. The meticulous recording and the minute surveillance regimes of the apparatus of quick response, renders the phenomenon of fast fashion knowable and administrable. Calculative technologies operate according to a normalising process that separates the fashionable from the unfashionable. Calculative practices also perpetuate the phenomenon of fast fashion by facilitating the faster flow of both product and information. In so doing, they both construct and sustain mass fashion.
Various Articles:
The Truths We Tell Ourselves: Foucault on Parrhesia (Zacharia Simpson)
Description: Michel Foucault’s later concept of parrhesia presents a number of potential interpretive problems with respect to his work as a whole and his conception of truth. This article presents an alternative reading of parrhesia, which develops its concept through Foucault’s earlier pronouncements on truth and fiction. Seen this way, parrhesia becomes a means whereby one enacts useful fictions within the context of one’s life. As a practice, which demands self-mastery, orientation towards truth, and a command of one’s life, parrhesia becomes crucial to an aesthetics of existence.
Foucault’s ‘German Moment’: Genealogy of a Disjuncture (Matthew G. Hannah)
Description: Foucault’s lectures from early 1979 on the German Ordo-liberalen are typically taken to comprise his most comprehensive account of why Germany is important for understanding neo-liberal governmentality more broadly. This paper argues, to the contrary, that the 1979 lectures actually obscure a potentially more complete account of German, neo-liberal governmentality Foucault had begun to sketch in 1977. To support this reading and to offer an explanation of why Foucault would have decided to alter his presentation of West German neo-liberalism, the paper undertakes a genealogy of Foucault’s involvement with West German political issues in 1977 and 1978. The core claims that structure the argument are as follows: (1) Key aspects of the “security state” that Foucault began to work out in 1977, must have been at least partly modeled on West German “militant” or “battle-ready” democracy; (2) Yet, in his 1979 lectures, there is no longer any trace of these repressive, extralegal dimensions; (3) This shift was motivated to a significant extent by his 1977 disagreement with Deleuze, Guattari, and others over whether the West German state of the late 1970s could be considered “fascist.” This concern to contest the accusation of fascism is carried forward in his 1979 lectures in a critique of “state phobia.”
Foucault Among the Classicists, Again (Brenden Boyle)
Description: Foucault’s posthumously-published late work on epimeleia heautou might inaugurate a new partnership between classicists and Foucault. This work, however, has been misconstrued in recent classical scholarship, an important instance of which I consider here. I remedy the errors of one of Foucault’s classical interpreters; diagnose the reasons for the errors; and briefly suggest the transformative potential of Foucault’s work for students of antiquity.
Number 14, September 2012
Editorial:
Editorial (Various Authors)
Various Pieces from the Issue:
Foucault’s Ironies and the Important Earnestness of Theory (Mark D. Jordan)
Description: Foucault’s History of Sexuality 1 cannot be understood without sustained attention to its ironies, which are written into every level from diction to structure. The little book does not intend to deliver a theory, queer or otherwise. It means rather to display and then to frustrate the desire for theory—especially when it comes to sexuality.
Foucault and Sedgwick: The Repressive Hypothesis Revisited (Lynne Huffer)
Description: This essay examines the Foucauldian foundations of queer theory in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The essay argues that Sedgwick’s increasing disappointment with Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis is in part produced by the slippery rhetoric of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Specifically, Foucault’s use of free indirect discourse in that volume destabilizes both the theory of repression and the critique Foucault mounts against it, thereby rendering ambiguous any political promise his critique might seem to offer. Returning to the fraught relation between Foucault and Sedgwick, the essay concludes by reading Foucault and Sedgwick together through the lens of a reparative ethics in which the felt experience of knowing the world is also an experiment in new ways of living.
Empire and the Dispositif of Queerness (Robert Nichols)
Description: Thinkers heavily indebted to Foucault—such as Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Jodi Melamed and Jasbir Puar—are at the fore of a contemporary interrogation of queerness and racialized empire. This paper critically surveys this terrain, differentiates several strands of it, and attempts a theoretical reframing such that we may be better equipped to gain new vantage on the central problematic. I argue that the current conviviality of queerness and empire is best understood not only through a univocal ‘homonationist’ lens, but also requires situating in the context of multiple languages of civilizational superiority and liberal tolerance. In particular, it requires the deployment of arguments about the ‘benchmark of civilization,’ in which whole societies are ranked along a unilinear trajectory of development according to standards set by the most powerful among them. One relatively recent addition to the criteria of civilizational adjudication is the capacity of societies to ‘tolerate’ new forms of societal difference. In this case, I argue, the most important of these are the strange pairing of sexual and religious dispositifs.
Queer Economies (Ladelle McWhorter)
Description: Queer defies categorization and resists preset developmental trajectories. Practices of queering identities emerged near the end of the twentieth century as ways of resisting normalizing networks of power/knowledge. But how effective are queer practices at resisting networks of power/knowledge (including disciplines) that are not primarily normalizing in their functioning? This essay raises that question in light of expanding neoliberal discourses and institutions which, in some quarters at least, themselves undermine normalized identities in favor of a proliferation of personal styles susceptible to governance through market forces. Special attention is given to Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics in this analysis.
The Queer Thing about Neoliberal Pleasure: A Foucauldian Warning (Shannon Winnubst)
Description: Through a careful reading of Foucault’s 1979 lectures on neoliberalism alongside Volumes 1 and 2 of The History of Sexuality, I argue that scholarship on both neoliberalism and queer theory should heed Foucault’s framing of both neoliberalism and sexuality as central to biopolitics. I thus offer two correctives to these fields of scholarship: for scholarship on neoliberalism, I locate a way to address the ethical bankruptcy of neoliberalism in a manner that Marxist analyses fail to provide; for scholarship in queer theory, I warn that the longstanding embrace of non-conformity as a mode of resistance to normalization is suspiciously neoliberal. I conclude with the possibility of rehabilitating the concept of jouissance as a non-fungible limit to the enterprising rationality of neoliberalism that, if historicized and especially racialized, might offer a meaningful response to the increasing ethical collapse wrought by the neoliberalization of our lives.
Various Articles:
Neosocial Market Economy (Frieder Vogelmann)
Description: Although the governmentality literature has occasionally acknowledged the importance of the concept of a liberal truth-regime, there has never been a thorough investigation of the role it plays in Foucault’s governmentality lectures. Therefore, this paper begins with an examination of the lectures’ “archaeological dimension” that leads to two claims: First, it shows that the crucial conceptual tool in the lectures is the question about the relation to truth that a particular political rationality possesses. Only by looking at the changing truth-regimes of the liberal governmentalities will their differences and continuities come into full contrast. The article’s second claim is that this conceptually sharpened understanding of the political rationalities is required for a diagnosis of the present, which reveals that today’s dominant governmentality is no longer neo-liberalism but a new liberal rationality: neosocial market economy.
Confession, Voice and the Sensualization of Power: The Significance of Michel Foucault’s 1962 Encounter with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Lauri Siisiäinen)
Description: Michel Foucault is known for his critiques of the intertwinement of empirical knowledge, perception and experience, and power. Within this general framework, this article focuses on a fairly unnoticed text of Foucault’s: his 1962 Introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dialogues. The article shows that Foucault’s Introduction is central for more than one reason: Firstly, it is apparently the first piece, in which Foucault focuses in detail on confession as an individualizing mode of power and truth-utterance. Secondly, in this text, Foucault treats confession as an empirical, sensual and affective form of power. Thirdly, in this early text, Foucault presents what can be called his critique of phonocentrism, i.e., of the interrelated centrality of voice, hearing, authenticity and “presence.” We find out that Foucault elaborated this critique (from the starting point of his archaeology of knowledge), already before Jacques Derrida introduced the actual term “phonocentrism,” and made it generally known. Finally, we will see that Foucault’s seminal 1970s genealogies of confession, sexuality and pastoral power revisit as well as revise the earlier insights discovered in the Introduction.
On Historicity and Transcendentality Again: Foucault’s Trajectory from Existential Psychiatry to Historical Epistemology (Elisabetta Basso)
Description: In this paper I focus on the emergence of the concept of the “historical a priori” at the origin of Foucault’s archeology. I emphasize the methodological function of this concept within Foucault’s archaeology, and I maintain that despite the different thesis it entails as compared to its philosophical sources, it pertains to one of the main issues of phenomenology, that is, the problematization of the relation between reality as it appears in its historicity, and transcendentality. I start from the interest of the young Foucault in existential psychiatry, and I focus on the French philosophical context in which Foucault’s Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s “Dream and Existence” (1954) was conceived. My aim is to show that the first “phenomenological” phase of Foucault’s work is coherent, from a methodological point of view, with the development of archaeology intended as “historical epistemology.” I conclude by arguing that Foucault’s archaeology is methodologically linked to Canguilhem’s epistemology, in that the latter presents itself as an important attempt at linking together historicity and transcendentality

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings


Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings



We are living in an era of revolution, and the revolt of the American Negro is part of the rebellion against oppression and colonialism which has characterized this era….It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter”
— Malcolm X, 1965 

Happy Birthday Malcolm X!

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Pedagogy of the oppressed - Paulo Freire

Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Volume II (Penguin Classics)



Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Volume II (Penguin Classics)
Formats Available
.PDF
Read Online
Volume II on Marxists.org
The second volume of Capital, Marx’s world-shaking analysis of economics, politics, and history, contains the vital discussion of commodity, the cornerstone to Marx’s theories.
—Translated by David Fernbach and Introduction by Ernest Mandel | 1993

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender


Judith Butler, Undoing Gender
Formats Available
.PDF

Felix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977


Felix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977
Formats Available
.PDF
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”

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life


Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Formats Available
.PDF
Read Online
Here, the author of “Stigma” and “Asylums” presents an analysis of the structures of social encounters from the perspective of the dramatic performance. He shows us exactly how people use such ‘fixed props’ as houses, clothes, and job situations; how they combine in teams resembling secret societies; and, how they adopt discrepant roles and communicate out of character. Professor Goffman takes us ‘backstage’ too, into the regions where people both prepare their images and relax from them; and he demonstrates in painful detail what can happen when a performance falls flat.

The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition


The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition
Formats Available
.PDF
Read Online
This revised and enlarged edition of the leading anthology provides the essential writings of Marx and Engels'€”those works necessary for an introduction to Marxist thought and ideology.
Features Selections from the Grundrisse, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Alienation and Social Classes, Theses on Feuerbach, The Civil War in France, On Imperialism in India, On Social Relations in Russia, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and much more.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998


Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998
Formats Available
.PDF
No one would contest that Fredric Jameson, one of the leading Marxist critics in the English-speaking world, has had an immense impact on the way we now understand the phenomenon of postmodernism. His classic work Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, has been widely acclaimed as the seminal analysis of postmodernity from a cultural, philosophical, and historical perspective. Jameson’s reflections have become an essential reference-point for all those attempting to engage with postmodernism. However, until now his key writings on postmodernism have been unavailable in an easily accessible and affordable form. This book, designed as a short and convenient introduction to Jameson’s thought for both the student and the general reader, meets this need. It includes: “Postmodernism and the Consumer Society,” Jameson’s classic analysis of postmodernity; “Marxism and Postmodernism,” in which Jameson responds to his critics; “Theories of the Postmodern,” his survey of alternative approaches; “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” an extract from his recently published work, The Seeds of Time, in which he surveys the philosophical tensions embedded in the postmodern; “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?” and “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity,” two pieces hitherto unpublished in English on art and the image in the postmodern epoch. The Cultural Turn is an indispensable reference guide to the most arresting and substantial theorists of postmodernism.

The Racial Contract by Charles Mills




The Racial Contract by Charles Mills
FREE PDF HERE
The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged “contract” has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence “whites” and “non-whites,” full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the “separate but equal” system of segregation in the twentieth-century United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War.Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy’s invisible white male bias, Mills’s explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.

Shahram Khosravi - Illegal Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders


Shahram Khosravi - Illegal Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders
PDF
In ‘Illegal’ Traveller, Shahram Khosravi explores the issue of borders and border crossing in the era of globalization and transnationalism, analyzing how the nation-state system regulates movements of people. In doing do, Khosravi contends that freedom of mobility for some is only possible through the organized exclusion of others.

Khosravi examines how migrant illegality is configured in the contemporary world and explores what it means to be an ‘illegal’ migrant. The focus is on a multifaceted picture of what migrant illegality is like for those who find themselves in this position. Based on his own journey and informants’ border narratives, he investigates the nature of borders, border politics, and the rituals and performances of border crossing. By focusing on individual experiences he draws attention to the implementation of policy and law. Border stories reveal the interaction between agency and structure in migratory experiences. They offer a human portrait of illegal travellers.

Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, Contigency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left


Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj ŽižekContigency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
Formats Available
.PDF
What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci’s notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism-versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigor and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.

Free .pdf books by native authors!


The Battle For China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution


The Battle For China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution

‘A powerful mixture of political passion and original research, a brave polemic against the fashionable view on China … Aims a knockout blow at Jung Chang’s recent book on Mao, which Bush and the conservatives rave-reviewed.’ —Gregor Benton, Professor of Chinese History, University of Cardiff.
‘This important book opens a much needed window onto Chinese perceptions of the country’s post-Mao direction … Highlights the renewal of popular support for socialism and the growing opposition to contemporary state policies.’ —Martin Hart-Landsberg, Professor of Economics, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon.
Download PDF

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


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

Volume I:
.PDF
Read Online
Volume II
.PDF
Read Online
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.

Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

PDF


In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful?

Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson’s most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age.

The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness—alien life and alien worlds—and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson’s essential essays, including “The Desire Called Utopia,” conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson’s project on the Poetics of Social Forms.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia


Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Formats Available
.PDF
Read Online

Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002)


Fredric JamesonA Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002)
Formats Available
.PDF
The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this new intervention, Fredric Jameson—perhaps the most influential and persuasive theorist of postmodernity—excavates and explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner.
The extraordinary revival of discussions of modernity, as well as of new theories of artistic modernism, demands attention in its own right. It seems clear that the (provisional) disappearance of alternatives to capitalism plays its part in the universal attempt to revive ‘modernity’ as a social ideal. Yet the paradoxes of the concept illustrate its legitimate history and suggest some rules for avoiding its misuse as well.
In this major new interpretation of the problematic, Jameson concludes that both concepts are tainted, but nonetheless yield clues as to the nature of the phenomena they purported to theorize. His judicious and vigilant probing of both terms—which can probably not be banished at this late date—helps us clarify our present political and artistic situations.

Friday, May 17, 2013

David Harvey, The Limits to Capital

PDF 1
PDF 2


"Money represents, after all, exchange value par excellence, and thereby stands opposed to all other commodities and their use values. Money assumes an independent and external power in relation to exchange because, as the universal equivalent, it is the very incarnation of social power. This social power, furthermore, can be appropriated and used by private persons. The significance of this has now to be worked out. Money permits the separation of sales and purchases in space and time."
--David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, pg 245

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Catherine Cook, Adam Hanieh, Adah Kay, Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel's Detention of Palestinian Children (2004)


Catherine Cook, Adam Hanieh, Adah Kay, Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel's Detention of Palestinian Children (2004)

Formats Available
.PDF
Stolen Youth is the first book to explore Israel's incarceration of Palestinian children. Based on first-hand information from international human rights groups and NGO workers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it also features interviews with children who have been imprisoned. The result is a disturbing and often shocking account of the abuses that are being carried out by Israel, and that have been widely documented by human rights groups such as Amnesty, but yet have never been addressed by the international community.The book presents a critical analysis of the international legal framework and the UN system, arguing that a major failure of these instuitutions is their appeal to neutrality while ignoring the reality of power. The book attempts to address the inadequacy of these institutions by placing the issue of Palestinian child prisoners within the framework of Israeli strategy and the overall system of control.The book is divided into three main sections: the first chapters introduce the major issues, and propose a framework for understanding Israel's policy towards Palestinian detainees, particularly children. The second section examines the actual experience of children from the moment of arrest until their release from prison based on hundreds of affidavits collected from children released from prison. The final section of the book analyses in detail the reasons underlying Israel's incarceration of children and the impact on Palestinian society. It outlines Israel's system of institutionalized discrimination and state torture, challenges the legitimacy of Israel's 'security' argument, and argues that Israel's treatment of Palestinian detainees forms one pillar of a policy designed to quash resistance to the occupation.

Israel Shahak, Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism In Israel: New Introduction by Norton Mezvinsky (2004)


Israel Shahak, Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism In Israel: New Introduction by Norton Mezvinsky (2004)

Formats Available
.PDF
At the very heart of the modern world is the idea that all people are born equal. Yet the Jewish religion teaches that people of Jewish faith are special before God, and Jewish fundamentalism passionately defends this belief. This book considers the consequences of this belief in the light of the considerable political influence and power of Jewish fundamentalism. The authors make a clear distinction between the fundamentalist ideology of Israel's Ashkenazi Jews and that of the Sephardic Jews, examining the growing impact of these two movements on Israel's political processes and their effects at a grassroots level through the armed forces' relations with the Palestinian population. Shahak and Mezvinsky argue that Israeli Jewish fundamentalism is closely associated with a new form of national religious Messianism which has its origins in the settling of the conquered territories during the war of 1967 and which vehemently opposes the peace process. Focusing on the consequences for Israel of these ideologies, the authors examine in particular the activities of fundamentalist groups and individuals. Shahak and Mezvinsky conclude by analyzing the possible scenario of civil war in Israel between religious fundamentalists and secularists.

Naseer Aruri, Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return (2001)


Naseer Aruri, Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return (2001)

Formats Available
.PDF
With renewed conflict in the Middle East, the prospect of a peaceful resolution looks more unlikely than ever. The Palestinian right of return to their homes has been upheld in international law and through United Nations' resolutions for fifty years. Equally the right of return has been denied by Israel and deferred to a "final status" issue in the Oslo Accords. It is on this right of return that the Palestinians are united. And it is this issue which is so frequently ignored by the international media. With major contributions from a range of international experts, including Edward W. Said, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Alain Gresh and Norman Finkelstein, this volume examines the Palestinians’ right of return. Chapters cover the historical roots of the Palestinian refugee question; the rights of the refugees under international law; the special case of Lebanon; Israeli perceptions of the refugee question; the practical feasibility of the return; the role of the United States and the European Union and the Refugee Question; the value of the refugee property; the principles of compensation; and a programme for an Independent Rights Campaign.

Jeff Halper, An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel (2008)


Jeff Halper, An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel (2008)

Formats Available
.PDF
Jeff Halper is an Israeli who lives and works in Palestine. This book throws a critical light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an Israeli point of view. Israel's pioneers created a vibrant society, culture and economy. Yet the idea of an ethnically-pure "Jewish State" is no longer viable. Only 72 per cent of Israelis are Jewish, and this proportion is dwindling. To enforce its ethnic exclusivity, Israel adopts policies of occupation and discrimination against Palestinian citizens.Halper puts forward a passionate argument for a new Israel that finds its identity not through ethnicity, but through new ideological and legal frameworks that respect all human rights, and that fundamentally realign Israel's position within the Middle East. Halper explains why a two-state solution will never solve issues such as human rights, refugees, security, access to water and economic development. Instead he develops a positive vision for a new state where Palestinians and Israelis live side by side.

Baruch Kimmerling, Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies (2008)


Baruch Kimmerling, Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies (2008)

Formats Available
.PDF
By revisiting the past hundred years of shared Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli history, Baruch Kimmerling reveals surprising relations of influence between a stateless indigenous society and the settler-immigrants who would later form the state of Israel. Shattering our assumptions about these two seemingly irreconcilable cultures, Kimmerling composes a sophisticated portrait of one side's behavior and characteristics and the way in which they irrevocably shaped those of the other.Kimmerling focuses on the clashes, tensions, and complementarities that link Jewish, Palestinian, and Israeli identities. He explores the phenomena of reciprocal relationships between Jewish and Arab communities in mandatory Palestine, relations between state and society in Israel, patterns of militarism, the problems of jurisdiction in an immigrant-settler society, and the ongoing struggle of Israel to achieve legitimacy as both a Jewish and a democratic state. By merging Israeli and Jewish studies with a vast body of scholarship on Palestinians and the Middle East, Kimmerling introduces a unique conceptual framework for analyzing the cultural, political, and material overlap of both societies. A must read for those concerned with Israel and the relations between Jews and Arabs, Clash of Identities is a provocative exploration of the ever-evolving, always-contending identities available to Israelis and Palestinians and the fascinating contexts in which they take form.

Jonathan Cook, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (2006)


Jonathan Cook, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (2006)

Formats Available
.PDF
What does Israel hope to achieve with its recent withdrawal from Gaza and the building of a 700km wall around the West Bank? Jonathan Cook, who has reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Second Intifada, presents a lucid account of the Jewish state's motives. The heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. Israel fears the moment when the region’s Palestinians – Israel's own Palestinian citizens and those in the Occupied Territories – become a majority. Inevitable comparisons with apartheid in South Africa will be drawn. The book charts Israel’s increasingly desperate responses to its predicament: -- military repression of Palestinian dissent on both sides of the Green Line -- accusations that Israel's Palestinian citizens and the Palestinian Authority are secretly conspiring to subvert the Jewish state from within -- a ban on marriages between Israel’s Palestinian population and Palestinians living under occupation to prevent a right of return ‘through the back door’ -- the redrawing of the Green Line to create an expanded, fortress state where only Jewish blood and Jewish religion count Ultimately, concludes the author, these abuses will lead to a third, far deadlier intifada.

Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military (2001)


Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military (2001)

Formats Available
.PDF
This thought-provoking book, the first of its kind in the English language, reexamines the fifty-year-old nation of Israel in terms of its origins as a haven for a persecuted people and its evolution into a multi- cultural society. Arguing that the mono-cultural regime built during the 1950s is over, Baruch Kimmerling suggests that the Israeli state has divided into seven major cultures. These seven groups, he contends, have been challenging one other for control over resource distribution and the identity of the polity. Kimmerling, one of the most prominent social scientists and political analysts of Israel today, relies on a large body of sociological work on the state, civil society, and ethnicity to present an overview of the construction and deconstruction of the secular-Zionist national identity. He shows how Israeliness is becoming a prefix for other identities as well as a legal and political concept of citizen rights granted by the state, though not necessarily equally to different segments of society.

Ghada Karmi, Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine (2007)


Ghada Karmi, Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine (2007)

Formats Available
.PDF
Two rabbis,visiting Palestine in 1897,observed that the land was like a bride,''beautiful,but married to another man''. By which they meant that, if a place was to be found for Israel in Palestein,where would the people of Palestine go? This is a dilemma that Israel has never been able to resolve.В No conflict today is more dangerous than that between Israel and the Palestinians. The implications it has for regional and global security cannot be overstated. The peace process as we know it is dead and no solution is in sight. Nor, as this book argues, will that change until everyone involved in finding a solution accepts the real causes of conflict, and its consequences on the ground.В Leading writer Ghada Karmi explains in fascinating detail the difficulties Israel's existence created for the Arab world and why the search for a solution has been so elusive. Ultimately,she argues that the conflict will end only once the needs of both Arabs and Israelis are accommodated equally. Her startling conclusions overturn conventional thinking-but they are hard to refute.

Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (2007)


Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (2007)

Formats Available
.PDF
Groundbreaking expos? of Israel’s terrifying reconceptualization of geopolitics in the Occupied Territories and beyond.Hollow Land is a groundbreaking exploration of the political space created by Israel’s colonial occupation. In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel’s mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which all natural and built features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged. Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon’s reconceptualization of military defense during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations. In exploring Israel’s methods to transform the landscape and the built environment themselves into tools of domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

Norman G. Finkelstein, This Time We Went Too Far (2010)


Norman G. Finkelstein, This Time We Went Too Far (2010)

Formats Available
.PDF
For the Palestinians who live in the narrow coastal strip of Gaza, the December 2008 Israeli invasion was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions: in the 22-day-long action 1,400 Gazans were killed, several hundred on the first day alone. More than 6,000 homes were destroyed or badly damaged. The cost of the destruction and disruption of economic life, in one of the world’s poorest areas, is estimated at more than $3 billion.

And yet, while nothing should diminish recognition of Palestinian suffering through these frightful days, it is possible something redemptive will emerge from the tragedy of Gaza. For, as Norman Finkelstein details, in a concise work that melds cold anger with cool analysis, the profound injustice of the Israeli assault has been widely recognized by organizations impossible to brand as partial or extremist.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN investigation headed by Richard Goldstone, in documenting Israel's use of indiscriminate and intentional force against the civilian population during the invasion (100 Palestinians died for every one Israeli), have had an impact on traditional support for Israel. Jews in both the United States and the United Kingdom, for instance, are beginning to voice dissent, and this trend is especially apparent among the young.

Such a shift, Finkelstein contends, can result in new pressure capable of moving the Middle East crisis towards a solution, one that embraces justice for Palestinians and Israelis alike. The seeds of hope were thus sown in the bitter anguish of Gaza. This Time We Went Too Far, written with Finkelstein’s customary acuity and precision, will surely advance the process it so eloquently describes.