The originality of Karl Polanyi's work in the interwar period has gained increasing recognition in recent years, during which time the major debate on modernity has erupted. In order to link Polanyi's work with this debate, I will first discuss his legacy on the controversial concept of progress, and then relate his position to this debate. It is my contention that Polanyi's position combines the better aspects of the two rival approaches to modernity. I will then re-link Polanyi's thought to (...) the intellectual figures, movements and climate of his time and thereby disclose a curious affinity between his thought and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This affinity can best be understood within the parameters of the historical context that they once shared. (shrink)

Few thickets are more tangled than that in which the idea of modernity has become enmeshed, few topics less likely to inspire confidence than the question of its relations to the ‘postmodern’. Not least of the problems concerns the character and status of the concept of modernity itself. For it is far from clear that the main figures in recent debates have been writing about, and disputing, the same set of issues when the term has been used. This is of (...) course, in one sense, precisely the point: it is the meaning of ‘modernity’ that is in dispute, and the argument is hardly just terminological. Nonetheless, there remains considerable scope for reflection about what kind of concept ‘modernity’ is, and in particular for a more systematic consideration of the relations between its various uses. What follows is offered as a preliminary contribution to this task. (shrink)

In its etymology and in popular discourse, the term ‘avant-garde’ is commonly associated with a future temporality, while in art-historical discourse, it represents a tradition of modernist innovation, periodised as ‘historical avant-garde’ and ‘neo-avant-garde’. Since this historical periodisation was first established in the 1950s, the avant-garde’s futurity has been repeatedly disputed, bringing the very notion of an avant-garde into question. This thesis takes as its starting point the predicament of ‘an avant-garde after the avant-garde’ as a means to investigate the (...) philosophico-political implications of a historical temporality marked by ‘afterness’. Writing in critical dialogue with scholarship that has articulated the avant-garde as a notion of historical time, the thesis modifies the parameters of this scholarship by foregrounding the category of historicism, and by reformulating the avant-garde as a notion that both resists and inhabits historical periodisation. As a study at the disciplinary intersection of comparative literature and critical theory, 'Ahead of its Time' proceeds via close readings of selected theories of the avant-garde (German literary scholar Peter Bürger’s foundational Theory of the Avant-Garde in the 1970s; British art theorist John Roberts’ formulation of a ‘suspensive avant-garde’ in the twenty-first century; and the intellectual debates of the Italian circle Neoavanguardia in the 1960s), while also mobilising the critical resources available in the thought of Walter Benjamin. Through a non-linear, comparativist critical analysis that discusses these theories in, and as, a Benjaminian constellation, the thesis proposes the avant-garde as a relational, indexical category that is constitutively split between historical continuity and historical rupture. In this manner, 'Ahead of its Time' revisits the broader question of mediation between universality and particularity, and by recasting it in temporal terms, it advocates a chronopolitics of singularity, whereby the avant-garde’s split between continuity and rupture also reveals the ethically-necessary relationship between self-determination and contingency. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s work on the sublimity of aesthetic experience lends itself to puzzlement, if not misclassification. Complicating matters, Kant distinguishes between two kinds of sublimity: respectively, the “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublime. More mystifying is that the sublime is ineffable, beyond the ken of human comprehension. These perplexities notwithstanding, Kant argues that sublime sentiment produces a feeling of supersensible comfort. Commentators identify this comfort emanating most strongly from the dynamical sublime. However, in this paper I draw from the unity of reason (...) thesis to offer a plausible account of how the mathematical sublime is equally capable of providing the same feeling of supersensible comfort. (shrink)

Essays explore the significance of Julia Kristeva’s concept of intimate revolt for social and political philosophy. Over the last twenty years, French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and novelist Julia Kristeva has explored how global crises threaten people’s ability to revolt. In a context of widespread war, deepening poverty, environmental catastrophes, and rising fundamentalisms, she argues that a revival of inner psychic experience is necessary and empowering. “Intimate revolt” has become a central concept in Kristeva’s critical repertoire, framing and permeating her understanding of (...) power, meaning, and identity. New Forms of Revolt brings together ten essays on this aspect of Kristeva’s work, addressing contemporary social and political issues like immigration and cross-cultural encounters, colonial and postcolonial imaginations, racism and artistic representation, healthcare and social justice, the spectacle of global capitalism, and new media. Sarah K. Hansen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. Rebecca Tuvel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rhodes College. (shrink)

Postmodernism is a post Second World War movement that is the natural issue of its progenitor, modernism. That is, where early twentieth century and post First World War ‘modern’ intellectuals held that it was their privilege and duty to restore order to a fragmented and chaotic world, post Second World war thinkers hold that since world order is an unachievable and therefore fruitless ambition, all humankind can do is make the best of what they have. One could say that where (...) modernists attempted to put the shattered shell of Humpty Dumpty back together again following his tumble from the wall, postmodernists feel that all one can do is do what one can with the pieces. Postmodernism is also associated with a movement that arose when writers and thinkers, in the wake of Saussure’s revelation that the words we attach to things are purely arbitrary, turned their iconoclastic gaze on universal concepts or ‘grand narratives’. This thesis sets out to show that postmodern consciousness is not a recent phenomenon, but, as a critique of the fragility of the claims made by exponents of the notion of metanarratives or ‘universal concepts’, it is evident in the philosophy of the eighteenth century Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico. The title of this thesis, ‘Vico’s Road to Postmodernism’, is something of a play on words of the theme that James Joyce, who, as will be shown, Ihab Hassan identifies as a postmodern thinker, took for his book Finnegans Wake. It seems that Joyce, who declared that his imagination soared whenever he read Vico, as a tribute to the Italian philosopher, begins the narrative of his famous novel at the Vico Road in the South Dublin suburb of Killiney. Not only is there a link between the name of this road and Giambattista Vico, but the view of Dublin Bay from this road is said to replicate the view of the bay of Naples, Vico’s native city. (shrink)