This paper considers how science, philosophy, and “the virtual” inform the political potential of the communism that emerges within capitalism. It looks to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in particular What is Philosophy?, to set the terms of an anti-capitalist science and philosophy. Their understanding of the contrasting roles of the virtual in science and philosophy is then used to draw points of distinction between the theories of Manuel DeLanda, Jason Read, and Maurizio Lazzarato. DeLanda's work demonstrates (...) the uses of science, specifically the non-linear tracking of emergent phenomena. Read's work demonstrates the uses of philosophy, specifically the historical tracing of the capitalist mode of production. And Lazzarato's work demonstrates a combination of philosophy and science, specifically the theoretical identification of becomings not captured by capitalism. Throughout, the paper employs Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the “the virtual” to map the potentiality of commu.. (shrink)

The ontological and analytical status of Marxian social theory has been a matter of fierce controversy since Marx’s death, both within and without Marxist circles. A particular source of contention has been over whether Marxism should be construed as an objective science of the capitalist mode of production or as an ethico-philosophical critique of bourgeois society. This is paralleled by the dispute over whether Marxism ought to be considered a humanism or a structuralism. This article addresses both sides of this (...) debate. The argument is that, rather than Marx’s own social thought being split into incompatible poles, giving rise to ‘two Marxisms’, it forms a coherent unity. Marx’s social theory is neither humanist philosophy, nor structural science, but is in fact realist science, which synthesizes these apparent antinomies, and thereby transcends both. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the materialism that Gilles Deleuze espouses in his oeuvre to the benefit of educational theory. In Difference and Repetition, he presented transcendental empiricism by underwriting Kant with realism (Deleuze, 1994). Later, in Capitalism & Schizophrenia I & II that were co-written with Félix Guattari (1984, 1988) and that they named Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze's philosophical approach is realigned into what I term here as transcendental materialism, and latterly as immanent materialism; that I claim effectively (...) eliminate phenomenology as perceptual input. This essay takes this transformation seriously as a way of understanding educational data, research and practices. The proposition that is central to this paper is that transcendental and immanent materialism give us a means of dealing with educational phenomena without the interference of perception or a stable category of experience, by connecting data with theory and circumventing subjectification. It is argued that this proposition has important consequences for educational research, and the construction of educational arguments that will be illustrated in this essay. Deleuze's debt to French Marxism and in particular to the work of Louis Althusser are also recognised through this writing. (shrink)

Against those who wish to marginalise Deleuze's political relevance, this paper argues that his work – including and especially that produced before his collaborations with Guattari – is not only fundamentally political but also profoundly engaged with Marx. The paper begins by focusing on different possible strategies for contesting the claim that Deleuze is apolitical, attempting to debunk this claim by briefly considering Deleuze's work with Guattari. The bulk of the paper is concerned with a close examination of the appearance (...) of Marx in both Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, establishing that the ‘pre-Guattari’ Deleuze was fully engaged with both politics and Marx and demonstrating that the concepts and arguments of the Marxist politics of the Deleuze–Guattari books can be traced back to Deleuze's own work. It is argued that an analysis of Deleuze's work on Marx is significant not only for deepening our understanding of Marx, but also for understanding the possibilities for Deleuzian politics. (shrink)

In liberal modernity, the democratic collective will of society was understood to emerge through the public and deliberative freedoms of associational life. Today, however, democratic discourse is much more focused on the formation of plural and diverse publics in the private and social sphere. In these ‘non-linear’ approaches, democracy is no longer seen to operate to constitute a collective will standing above society but as a mechanism to distribute power more evenly through the social empowerment of individuals and communities as (...) the ultimate decision-makers. Government is brought back ‘to the people’ and democracy is seen to circulate through the personal decisions made in everyday life. This article seeks to analyse the development of non-linear approaches to the political sphere, which seek to overcome the rationalist assumptions of the public/private divide, paying particular attention to the work of two key liberal theorists, John Dewey and Friedrich von Hayek. (shrink)

This review-essay analyses John Beverley’s post-subalternist perspective on the intertwinement of theoretical discourse and politics – so-called Latinamericanism – in the Latin American context. This conjuncture is characterised by themarea rosada, or pink tide, of moderate leftist governments. I contend that Beverley grasps the change introduced by this trend and lucidly criticises the neoconservative, moderate, and deficient political implications of different theoretical views. This contribution notwithstanding, I argue that Beverley’s theoretical project fails effectively to conceptualise this political tide as an (...) object of theoretical inquiry: namely, to grapple with themarea rosada’s Latinamericanism as a populist political logic that simultaneously neutralises and drives socialist transformation. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically (...) read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics. (shrink)

There are three dominant conceptual developments in Althusser’s work that suggest the significance of the subject. One is the perpetual work of ideology—its interpellation of individuals. The second is the primacy of the class struggle in relation to the state, and the consequential function of law and rights. The third is the materialism of the encounter as a process without subject. An examination of these three areas reveals the potentially and strategically important role of legal subjectivity in Althusser’s theory of (...) the political. (shrink)

This article aims to interpret the Althusserian critique of ideology in order to put forth the mechanisms at work within the relation of belief that constitutes every ideology and to insist on its practical consequences on the relation between the intellectual and the masses. To do so, we will draw upon Althusser’s review of humanism, upon his commentaries of the work of Montesquieu and Rousseau, and upon his conception of ideology in the article from 1970 on ‘Ideology and Ideological State (...) Apparatuses’ and in other texts of the same period. By focusing on an analysis of the functioning of belief within the three cardinal forms of ideology, we will highlight the importance of putting into place a social critique attentive to the repetition of the relations of belief with regard to enabling truly transformative actions. (shrink)

Following some of the main arguments Derrida develops in ‘White Mythology’, in this article I propose an unexplored dialogue between Derrida and Althusser considering the use and the place that each of them gives to metaphor in their philosophical strategies. I give special attention to some rather isolated passages of ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’ and ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, where Althusser, against all evidence, seems to be quite aware of the importance of metaphor and mataphorization in every philosophical practice. As Balibar has (...) argued, contrary to the metaphysical tradition, metaphor would not be the opposite but what anticipates the concept. In this sense, it is possible to observe how Althusser’s work has continuously put into practice – as the singular signature of his theoretical practice – something that I call the ‘detour of metaphor’ as a necessary ‘deviation’ for the production of new concepts. Without any evidence that Althusser may have known Derrida’s essay, I show how Althusser’s own theoretical work, one in which ‘metaphor’ as a philosophical theme appears to be rather anecdotic, is unexpectedly close to Derrida’s own positions concerning the margins of philosophy and its ‘outside’, the relation to the metaphysical tradition, and the importance of strategy in philosophy. (shrink)

In this article I start with Marx's transcriptions of Spinoza, and the deep significance of what he transcribed, from the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Correspondence, and in what order. I contend that this demonstrates what was of particular interest and importance to him at that time. Second, I examine the presence, even if not explicit, of Spinoza in Marx's works, and turn to the question whether Marx was a Spinozist. I think he was. Third, I turn to Ilyenkov and his (...) engagement with Spinoza, and fourth, to Ilyenkov's place in the Marxist tradition of Spinozism. Fifth and sixth, I present an analysis of Ilyenkov's instrumental deployment of Spinoza first in his Dialectical Logic and then in his The Dialectic of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital. (shrink)

In a conjuncture marked by the “resurgence of religion,” the problem of historical materialism’s relation to religious ideologies has acquired a new urgency. The work of Roland Boer, recently awarded the Deutscher Prize for his magnum opus on Marxism and Theology poses this question from a surprising perspective. While his main claim is that religious influences in Marxist theory represent a sort of theological unconscious in historical materialism, at the same time Boer also advances an original Marxist interpretation of the (...) Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity. This line of research, which extends from his dissertation on Jameson and Jeroboam through to his most recent work on The Sacred Economy, proposes that theology is a reflective representation of the social totality. In this article, I criticize Boer’s valorization of theology as a practical discourse that is postideological but non-theoretical, and conclude by indicating an alternative. (shrink)

In a brief comment in ‘History of the Lie’, his one sustained engagement with Arendt, Derrida criticizes the ‘absence’ of any reference to the ‘problematic of testimony, witnessing, or bearing witness’ in her work, and asserts that she was ‘not interested’ in what ‘distinguishes’ testimony from ‘proof’. This passage links Derrida’s reading of Arendt to a theme that concerns him throughout his later work, specifically the ‘affirmation’ or ‘act of faith’ that ostensibly conditions all human relations, and the possibility of (...) sociality in general. In this article, I claim not only that Arendt did address the problem of testimony or witnessing, and the difference between bearing witness and establishing proof, but also that her consideration of these issues represents an alternative to many of the arguments Derrida develops in his later work, especially his approach to responsibility and judgment, secrecy and memory, and the relation between the self and others. (shrink)

This paper considers the trajectory of Althusser's Spinozism pre- and post-May ‘68. Where Althusser's application of Spinoza would often lead him into unknown or non-Marxist territory, one alternative way to think this relation is through the figure of Mao, whose concept of non-antagonistic contradiction I propose to read in terms of Spinoza's “determinate negation.” Although not going so far as to suggest that a certain combination of Mao and Spinoza would have enabled Althusser to “complete” Marx, this paper speculates on (...) this omission from his work and what positive insights we can draw from it retrospectively for developing Althusser's political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines the implicit foundations of several theoretical propositions characteristic of the Marxist tradition in sociology. It argues that these propositions derive from self-contradictory critical premises which are paradoxes of Action Theory. Implicit in these premises is an ideal picture of social reality quite different from the one analytically described by Parsons. I suggest that Action Theory can provide conceptual tools needed to address some specific issues characteristic of the Marxist perspective and, moreover, offers a solution to some epistemological (...) problems raised by the authors who endorse the postmodern position in social sciences. (shrink)

This paper is the first part of an enquiry taking an initial, provisional step toward the construction of a theoretical matrix called speculative jurisprudence. Toward that end, it recruits the thought of Louis Althusser, whose work has taken on new significance thanks in part to the availability of many formerly unpublished texts, the contemporary critical scrutiny of numerous commentators, and the independent emergence of several philosophical currents sharing some of his work’s key concerns. The paper offers a unique characterization of (...) Althusser’s aleatory materialism as at once a novel expression of Althusser’s ‘jurisprudential problematic’, a problematic that I argue shapes his thought as a whole, and as a means of posing the core problem of dialectical materialism. The engagement with Althusser that I propose thus intervenes in current debates about aleatory materialism, but this is subsidiary with respect to the elaboration of speculative jurisprudence as a distinct approach in philosophy and law. That mode of thought begins to acquire a degree of reality by taking Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism as a point of departure for the articulation of a non-humanist conception of legality, in a broad sense that conjoins the territories of both traditional philosophy and legal theory. The paper concludes with a reference to the open questions that Part Two, which will appear in Althusser and Law, will take up. (shrink)

Este libro promete ser una contribución para el estudio de la teoría crítica en general y para el análisis de la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt en particular. Todos los trabajos que están contenidos en este volumen hacen parte del amplio marco teórico de la teoría crítica de la sociedad. Muchos siguen las huellas de los fundadores de esta tendencia, mientras que otros se presentan como críticos de la misma y unos cuantos más tratan de vincular problemas y contextos (...) de relevancia a los conceptos más destacados que se empezaron a construir hace cien años en Frankfurt. Encontramos como buena excusa para su publicación precisamente el año centenario del Instituto de Investigación Social. Además, hemos creído conveniente organizar los materiales en secciones que van desde la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt hasta la consideración de algunos interrogantes de actualidad motivados por el desarrollo de la teoría crítica. No obstante, con esto no pretendemos establecer límites absolutos de clasificación. Confesamos que nuestra forma de organizar los ensayos responde simplemente a criterios editoriales más que a cuestiones teóricas y conceptuales. Claramente las intersecciones entre los estudios aquí presentados son amplias y hacen que cada una de las propuestas pueda dialogar con las otras en función de sus evidentes parecidos de familia. (shrink)

This essay argues a case for viewing Derrida's work in the context of recent French epistemology and philosophy of science; more specifically, the critical‐rationalist approach exemplified by thinkers such as Bachelard and Canguilhem. I trace this line of descent principally through Derrida's essay ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’. My conclusions are (1) that we get Derrida wrong if we read him as a fargone antirealist for whom there is nothing ‘outside the text'; (2) that he provides some (...) powerful counter‐arguments to this and other items of current postmodern wisdom; (3) that deconstruction is more aptly viewed as continuing the epistemo‐critical approach developed by thinkers like Bachelard; and (4) that it also holds important lessons for philosophy of science in the mainstream Anglo‐ American ‘analytic’ tradition. (shrink)

Christopher Winch; Women, Reason and Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 91–98, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467.

Christopher Winch; Reading and the Process of Reading, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 23, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 303–315, https://doi.org/10.11.

This article aims to bring together post-Marxist discourse theory and the critique of political economy in the context of the debate on the Marxian theory of value. Although Laclau and Mouffe criticized Marxism for its economic reductionism, they did not connect this to a comprehensive critique of Marx's writings on value and labor. The merit of considering the theory of value in more detail is underscored by discourse theory's relative silence on the capitalist economy. By drawing on the work of (...) Postone and Elson, it will become clear that there are largely two ways to interpret Marx's theory of value: either as an essentialist theory of price and exploitation, or as a historically specific theory of the constitution of social labor relations in capitalist society. By teasing out Laclau's implicit understanding of Marx's value theory, the article argues that it is in fact his essentialist interpretation of the labor theory of value that constitutes an obstacle toward grasping the social relations of labor and commodity production from a discourse-theoretical perspective. This clears the ground toward approaching Marx's value theory from a post-Marxist perspective, which would grasp the social relations of abstract labor as a hegemonic formation. (shrink)

After a definition of ?common sense? it is argued that sociology and common sense both do and ought to interact with one another. Four positions on the sociology?common sense relation in the light of the interaction thesis are then critically discussed: sociology must break with common sense; sociology must be based on common sense; sociology and common sense are incomparable; and sociology and common sense are identical. The first two of these positions are further sub?divided in terms of whether the (...) arguments in their favour are or are not independent of one's conceptions of sociology and common sense. Each of these positions is illustrated by means of a case study of one author. The final section involves a consideration of ethnomethodology on the basis of the above typology: it is argued that ethnomethodology cannot find a site on the sociology?common sense question which is compatible with its basic commitments. (shrink)

According to Sir Karl Popper, there is a harmful approach to the social sciences called 'historicism'. This takes their principal aim to be historical prediction of an unconditional sort and the chief means to this the discovery of laws of historical development. The chief exemplar is held to be Marx. This paper distinguishes two possible sorts of laws of historical development. Popper's arguments against each are rejected. Which sort it is most plausible to ascribe to Marx is considered. Four models (...) of historical determinism are distinguished and the question of Marx's view or views on the question is discussed in terms of them. (shrink)

The relation between structure and conjuncture has been one of the biggest challenges facing social theory and Louis Althusser’s writings provide some of the most important interventions on this subject. Contrary to an image of Althusser first embracing and then abandoning structuralism, Althusser tried from the beginning to articulate the theory of structural causality with an insistence on the singularity of historical conjunctures. Althusser’s theoretical trajectory, despite his shortcomings, still offers a necessary starting point for a materialist conception of the (...) relation between structural and conjunctural determinations that stresses the complex, uneven and overdetermined character of social reality without resorting either to a ‘surface phenomena/deep structures’ dualism or to the empiricism of simply registering singular practices. (shrink)

On the occasion of the publication of the translation of Pierre Raymond’s text on Althusser’s materialism, we attempt an introduction to his theoretical trajectory. We begin with his conception of the conflict between materialism and idealism inLe passage au matérialismein 1973 and his thinking on the question of the history of sciences inL’histoire & les sciences, before turning our attention to his elaboration on the question of a history of mathematics and in particular of the emergence of probabilistic reasoning. Then (...) we examine his confrontation with the question of the relation between materialism and dialectics inMatérialisme dialectique et logique. After that, we proceed to his conception of the need to break with any form of teleology and finalism as the starting point for a new conception of causality, before looking atDissiper la terreur et les ténèbresof 1992 and his attempt to rethink the question of practical reason. It is in light of the above presentation that we insist on the importance of Raymond’s text on Althusser. (shrink)

Peter Thomas has written an important book that brings forward the full importance of Gramsci’s strategic concepts and the pertinence they have for current theoretical and political debates. Based upon this interpretation of Gramsci, this text attempts a critical reading of the contradictory stance of the Althusserian School towards his work. Using Althusser’s own ambivalence towards Gramsci as a starting-point, the main aim of this article is to reconstruct Poulantzas’s direct and indirect dialogue with Gramsci. Despite Poulantzas’s reservations and criticisms (...) regarding aspects of Gramsci’s work, his theoretical endeavour not only is indebted to Gramsci, but also represents, despite its shortcomings and limits, one of the more original and profound theoretical attempts to come to terms with the theoretical challenges posed by Gramsci’s elaboration on hegemony, hegemonic apparatuses and the ‘integral state’. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser encountered Machiavelli’s work and they both attempted to rethink the very possibility of political practice through their respective readings of the Florentine thinker. In a certain way for both Gramsci and Althusser, the reading of Machiavelli was the experimental site where they elaborated their own conceptions of politics, either in the form of Gramsci’s quest for the ‘modern Prince’, the political and organizational form of a potential hegemony of the subaltern, or in the form of (...) Althusser’s constant redefinition of a potential new practice of politics in a communist perspective. The reading of Machiavelli was for Althusser also one of the terrains upon which he attempted to confront Gramsci, something that is particularly evident in a series of Althusser’s texts in the 1970s from Machiavelli and Us to the recently published Que faire? The aim of this article is to do a comparative reading of the approaches to Machiavelli offered by Gramsci and Althusser, focusing in particular on the tensions running through Althusser’s reading of Gramsci’s writings on Machiavelli. In particular, I will offer a reading of Althusser’s extensive criticism of Gramsci in 1977–1978, linking it to his critique of Eurocommunism. Then, I will go back to Gramsci, and in particular Notebook 13, in order to bring forward not only the aspects of Gramsci that Althusser tended to overlook but also how Gramsci is in fact thinking the very question that Althusser attempted to pose, namely that of a new practice of politics for communism. (shrink)

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari claim that a general theory of society must be a generalised theory of flows. This is hardly a straightforward claim, and this paper attempts to examine the grounds for it. Why should socio-political theory be based on a theory of flows rather than, say, a theory of the social contract, or a theory of the State, or the questions of legitimation or revolution, or numerous other possible candidates? The concept of flow (and the related notions (...) of code and stock), I argue, is derived from contemporary economic theory, and most notably John Maynard Keynes. Deleuze and Guattari remained Marxists, not only because they held that contemporary political philosophy must inevitably be centred on the analysis of capitalism, but also because they held, following Marx himself, that the Marxist analysis of capital must constantly be transformed and adapted to new conditions. Thus, while certain aspects of Marx's analysis disappear from Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they are supplemented by the addition of new concepts adequate to the contemporary state of capitalism. The paper concludes, then, with an analysis of the role played by the concepts of flow, code and stock in Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy. (shrink)

In the light of late modern, postmodern and post-critical debates the difficulty of establishing a coherent theoretical framework for both critical pedagogy and youth and community work has been noted by several authors. In this article I will make the claim that critical realism, as a stance within the ontological, epistemological and aetiological paradigms, offers a way to ameliorate a number of tensions in critical pedagogy and youth and community work. Margaret Archer's theories around morphogenesis are particularly useful in re-examining (...) the tensions between essentialist and anti-essentialist views of human nature, identity and community, and structure and agency. In terms of praxis, her method allows us to wish to influence others, without descending into positivity or being satisfied with just uncovering highly individualized accounts of temporary meaning making. She also offers a way of performing critical pedagogy that does not instil a ‘knowing hopelessness’ in people, whereby they are aware of their material conditions, but do not feel enabled to act on their oppression. (shrink)

Looking at the emergence recently of a New Hegelianism (Badiou, Bhaskar, Jameson, Žižek), in which Hegel’s dialectic is variously reassessed for its political and philosophical resistance to the prevailing ‘weak nihilisms’ of left and right, I argue with Žižek and Jameson against Badiou and Bhaskar for Hegel as, essentially, a philosopher of the ‘productive return’ and failure. In this sense, what emerges is a picture of Hegel as a profoundly nonlinear historical thinker, in which loss, dissolution, breakdown and the excremental (...) prevail. This means that the received notion of Hegel as a crude historicist is deeply problematic. But, more importantly, it means that Hegelian dialectic can find a renewed anti-teleological and non-synchronistic identity within the Marxist tradition. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 72-98 Authors John Roberts, University of Wolverhampton Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 12 Journal Issue Volume 12, Number 1 / 2013. (shrink)

By most accounts Deleuze's engagement with Marx begins with the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia he co-authored with Félix Guattari. However, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition alludes to a connection between Deleuze's critique of common sense and Marx's theory of fetishism, suggesting a connection between the critique of the image of thought and the critique of capital. By tracing this connection from its emergence in the early texts on noology, or the image of thought, to the development in the critique (...) of state thought in A Thousand Plateaus, it can be argued that what initially appears as an entirely infra-philosophical problem, concerned with the presuppositions of philosophy, is not only a political problem as well, but ultimately bears on the very nature of the conjunction between thought and politics, making possible a re-examination of what is meant by revolutionary thought. It is a transition from noology to noopolitics. In the end it can be argued that revolutionary thought is no longer an eschatology, attempting to discern the signs of the future revolution in the present, but a thought oriented towards everything that exceeds the fetish of society, towards the virtual relations and micropolitical transformations that constitute society but exceed its representation. (shrink)

Simondon’s concept of the transindividual has become a central point of reference for contemporary critical philosophy and social philosophy. Despite its importance in the work of such writers as Étienne Balibar, Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler and Paolo Virno, Simondon’s works have not been translated into English, and thus no comprehensive study has appeared so far. Muriel Combes’s book presents not only a study of Simondon’s thought, but an examination of what it makes possible in terms of rethinking social relations.

The present article takes as its point of departure the recent tributes to Bhaskar published on the occasion of the latter's death. Laudable and understandable though it was to prioritize the career trajectories of younger scholars, one of the unforeseen consequences was to marginalize those of their more mature colleagues. The latter perforce arrive upon the scene of critical realism already burdened with their own overdetermined legacies, which demand rather more in the way of complex renegotiation. Taking as exemplary his (...) own career path, from a traditional ‘lit crit’ of empiricist and Hegelian extraction, through psychoanalysis, to structural marxism, the author of the present article focuses upon his own ‘Bhaskarian moment’, upon the benefits accrued therefrom, but finally upon the difficulty in reconciling structural marxism with critical realism, insofar as the former prioritizes the notion of a social formation, structured on the basis of a mode of production, the latter the individual/structure dichotomy. Bhaskar's subsequent spiritual turn, it is argued, further aggravated the paradigmatic incommensurabilities, with damaging consequences for those younger scholars attempting to steer a course between both traditions. (shrink)

This article argues against a conception of the body as providing a basis for truth claims within feminist discourse. Taking from Michèle Le Doeuff's theory of the work of the image within discourse, and Michel Foucault's "technologies of the self," it is argued that the doubledness of the body ("who am I? and who is she?") can be put to work to construct embodied enunicative positions within feminist theory.

Deleuze reworks Marxist concepts in order to identify those that represent discontinuity and produce a theory of revolution. Marx is important because, along with Spinoza and Nietzsche, he is a part of a project to leave behind concepts such as transcendence and univocity which underlie the totalitarianism of traditional philosophy. Deleuze is looking for concepts that might form a different theory, within which the structures of production are not organised vertically by the domination of universal concepts, such as ‘being’ or (...) ‘essence’, but flow horizontally through a multiplicity of relations of conceptual singularity. The production of a different series of concepts is a strategic and tactical operation that, in confronting prior notions of transcendental philosophy, turns philosophy itself into a battlefield. Marx provides the general methodology for this tactical approach through two fundamental categories: production and conflict. Deleuze practises Marx's theoretical method and by using Marx's own central concepts challenges traditional Marxism, to arrive at a totally different and revolutionary philosophical structure based on concepts such as those of force, variation, difference, singularity, production and the war machine. (shrink)

This paper undertakes an historical re-evaluation of Louis Althusser's philosophical legacy for modern Marxism. While Althusser self-consciously sought to defend the scientific character of Marxism, many of his closest followers eventually exited the Marxian paradigm for a post-structural post-Marxism. We argue that this development was predominately rooted in a series of philosophical errors that proved fatal in a period of retreat for European socialism. There has always been, however, a second post-Althusserian legacy associated with the critical realist conception of Marxism (...) initiated by Roy Bhaskar. Bhaskar found part of his inspiration in Althusser's successful posing of the question of Marx's science and this paper sets out to excavate the proper links between Althusser and Bhaskar in order to deepen the relationship between critical realism and scientific Marxism. (shrink)

An important question in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its associated literature is how OOO relates to its competitor theories. This article is a meta-philosophical investigation into OOO and its grounding, which hopes to fully theorise this relation, deriving ultimately a “negative dialectic” that emphasises the irreducible differences between OOO and non-OOO. Beginning by analysing the use of OOO as a “starting point”, I consider Althusser’s various contributions to meta-philosophical debates. This leads me to focus on Harman’s notion of “hyperbolic reading”, (...) and on how attempts to hyperbolically ground OOO force it to immanently include its competitors. Finally, I apply these insights to systematise both the negative dialectical relation between OOO and non-OOO and the becoming-OOO of thinking, by applying Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy. (shrink)

György Márkus’s post-Marxist writings on high culture are evaluated in terms of their possible contribution to a neo-Marxist theory of high culture. Because of the highly essayistic character of Márkus’s presentation, this necessarily involves investigation of their dependence on his previous work. According to Márkus, Marxism can be critically reconstructed and superseded on the basis of an independent theorization of the consequences of Marx’s most basic theoretical move: the identification of production as paradigmatic for social action in general. In section (...) 3 this idea of the production paradigm is criticized. In section 4 I show how in Márkus this idea is made the basis of an ostensibly historicist concept of critical theory, in which not only the theory’s object is historicized, but the theory is itself organized as an articulation of the needs of historically specific constituencies. I argue, however, that in reality the idea of the production paradigm stands in fundamental contradiction to this methodological ideal. Márkus’s theory of high culture likewise combines historicist ambitions and reliance on the dehistoricized ‘production paradigm’. I argue that his ‘systematically dialectical’ deployment of this notion allows a quasi-historicist conceptualization of modern high culture as a whole, but that this method simultaneously renders theorization of high culture’s connection with more ‘infrastructural’ social relations problematic, and tends to exclude reflection on the ‘utopian moment’ in high cultural practice today. Section 5, and some remarks at the end of Section 11 suggest horizons for a genuinely historicist theory of high culture, in relation to the constitutive failure of Marxism to confront its dependency on the institutions of high culture, and also suggest a possible confluence and conflict with Roy Bhaskar’s work. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers and social theorists have engaged in an extensive critique of the project of modernity during the past three decades. However, many feminists seem to assume that the critique of religion essential to this project remains valid. Radical criticism of religion in the European tradition presupposes a theory of religion that is highly ethnocentric, and Marx's theory of religion serves as a case in point.

Over time, the quantitative difference grows between what Marx wrote and what those coming after Marx have written. However, rather than a process in which those following have built constructively...