Ariel Dorfman, Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic

Ariel Dorfman, Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic

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How to Read Donald Duck is a Marxist political analysis by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart on what they perceive is cultural imperialism in popular entertainment, published in Chile in 1972. Written in the form of essay (or, in the authors’ words, a “decolonization manual”), the book is an analysis of mass literature, specifically the Disney comics published for the Latin American market. It is one of the first social studies of entertainment and the leisure industry from a political-ideological angle, and the book deals extensively with the political role of children’s literature.

Ranabir Samaddar, Emergence of the Political Subject

From Amazon,

"This book is on the political subject, the conditions of its emergence, and the theoretical implications of this emergence, particularly the implications for our history. It seeks to change the way in which we understand our modern political history and the way in which it inquires into life, truth, and collective existence. The book not only marks by dense contentions different and varying histories of turbulent political moments in modern Indian history, but also presents a startling picture of the emergence of the political subject, which has been repeatedly sought to be brought under submission, but has repeatedly emerged as a mark of autonomy and agency in life."


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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

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

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

Volume I:

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Volume 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

Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Theory of Revolution

Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Theory of Revolution
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In this important and wide-ranging critique of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) Raya Dunayevskaya examines the life, political thought, and action of one of the most critical revolutionary figures of our time. Dunayevskaya sheds new light on the questions of socialist democracy after the revolution, disclosing both the unprobed feminist dimension of Rosa Luxemburg and the previously unrecognized new moments in Marx’s last decade concerning the role of women and the peasantry. As the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the United States, Dunayevskaya (1910-87) was an internationally respected writer, philosopher, and revolutionary. This new and expanded edition includes two previously unpublished articles by Dunayevskaya, including her “Challenge to all Post-Marx Marxists.”
More Dunayevskaya:

From Philosophy and Revolution - Chapter 3: The Shock of Recognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin
From Philosophy and Revolution - Chapter 6: Jean-Paul Sartre, Outsider Looking In (A brilliant rebuttal denouncing Sartre’s attempt to reconcile Existentialism with Marxism)

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”