It is not evident in what sense philosophy relates to its own time and present. From the history of philosophical thought, several models have been suggested, ranging from a strong reliance on tradition to the wholesale rejection of the present and demand for a ‘philosophy of the future,’ from the suspicion that philosophy is nothing but one ideology among others to the demand that philosophy should engage in the struggles and conflicts of its time in order to prepare for a (...) better future. The essay presents an assessment and problematization of these approaches and argues for a point of view that starts from philosophy’s precarious, ambivalent and contingent relation to its time and contemporaneity. Neither wholly independent of nor entirely subjected to its own time, philosophy can inhabit a shifting position from which critique and resistance are possible even if not ultimately guaranteed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In The Longing for Total Revolution, Bernard Yack argued that Marx’s thought is plagued by a recurring contradiction. On the one hand, Marx criticized his Idealist predecessors for failing to get beyond the dichotomy between human freedom and natural necessity; and he identified labor, activity determined by the necessity of having to satisfy material needs, as the primary activity of human freedom. On the other hand, Marx’s account of what makes us distinctively human, as well as his view that (...) capitalism dehumanizes workers, implicitly rely on the same dichotomy. However, while Yack identified a real tension in Marx’s writings, he overlooked the resources Marx has to escape it. (shrink)

This article traces certain rhetorics of knowledge-change as well as a few models of such change. In particular, it focuses on models that emphasize novelty and sudden transformation. To this end, the works of Thomas Kuhn, and the debates surrounding his celebrated modeling of the paradigm, are explored. Having established – at least in an illustrative fashion – the role of novelty in Kuhn’s philosophy of science, we then look more briefly at the mid-career work of Michel Foucault (his Order (...) of Things and the Archaeology of Knowledge ), and the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard to find (in Foucault’s case) analogies with the earlier models and debates surrounding Popper and Kuhn, and then (in the Habermas/Lyotard discussion), to see how revolutionary and reactionary status count in assigning value to models of knowledge. In all these inquiries, we seek less to criticize particular theorists (that has already been done) than to understand a dominant strand of understanding of knowledge and knowledge-change in the contemporary academy. (shrink)

While Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex is concerned with psycho-sexual development, it concomitantly presents a novel historical-political imagination. This article compares the post-Oedipal self with the selves envisioned by Nietzsche and Marx, suggesting that while these 19th-century theorists constructed selves that are able to transcend the normalizing and subjugating circumstances of modernity, Freud’s theory defines a healthy self as irredeemably embedded in the prevailing culture and life-orders. In making his case, Freud spurns the quests of Nietzsche and Marx for (...) wholeness of the individual and for self-authorship, and presents the self as structurally agonistic, riven and thoroughly molded by society. (shrink)

In various European countries, the relation between `the left' and `the right' presents itself today in paradoxical form: the attenuation of the differences at the level of policy making is accompanied by the persistence, if not even strengthening, of the polarisation in terms of verbal position taking and of partisan self-description. To understand this situation, one needs to return to that which constitutes the ideological core of the opposition between left and right. The left remains marked, though not necessarily in (...) an explicit fashion, by the heritage of the quest for `total revolution'. Such quest presupposes a radical critique of the world in the form in which it presents itself, namely as an obstacle to the full realisation of humanity. In this sense, the left is intrinsically connected to critique, and left and right stand opposed to each other in the same way that critique is opposed to celebration. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, the critique of the left was elaborated in particular in the form of a social critique of capitalism. Since the 1970s and 1980s, and since the end of communism in particular, the theme of total revolution, however, dissociates itself more and more from the idea of social revolution to focus instead on the idea of sexual revolution. Certain problems that the left encounters today stem from the fact that it amalgamates two highly different kinds of expectation and of critiques. On the one hand, there are the social concerns and the critiques of capitalism, which, however, are no longer oriented towards total revolution. On the other hand, there are expectations that are still turned towards total revolution, but have been shifted towards the exigency of a revolution in the order of reproduction and of sexuality and, thus, have dissociated themselves from the critique of capitalism. (shrink)