The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in the work of (...) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions. (shrink)

Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy, shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ...

This volume, assembled with the collaboration of the author, presents for the first time in English a comprehensive outline of Badiou's ambitious system.

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. A history, thought Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comparative charting of structural transformations and displacements. But for Sartre, authentic historical understanding demanded a much more personal and committed narrative, a kind of interpretive diary of moral (...) choices and risks compelled by critical necessity and an exacting reality. Sartre's history, a rational history of individual lives and their intrinsic social worlds, was in essence immersed in biography. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume work, Thomas R. Flynn conducts a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory, and provocatively anticipates the Foucauldian counterpoint to come in Volume Two. (shrink)

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.

This book was written with a view to sorting our some of the muddles and misreadings - especially misreadings of Kant - that have charaterized recent postmodernist and post-structuralist thought. For these issues have a relevance, as Norris argues, far beyond the academic enclaves of philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism. Thus he makes large claims for the importance of getting Kant right on the relation between epistemology, ethics and aesthetics; for pursuing the Kantian question 'What is Enlightenment?' as raised (...) in Foucault's late essays; or again, for recalling William Empson's spirited attempt to reassert the values of reason and truth against the orthodox 'lit crit' wisdom of his time. These are specialized concerns. But for better or worse it has been largely in the context of 'theory'- that capacious though ill-defined genre- that such issues have received their most scrutiny over the past two decades. As its title suggests, The Truth About Postmodernism disputes a good deal of what currently passes for advance theoretical wisdom. Above all it mounts a challenge to those fashionable doctrines - variants of the 'end-of-ideology' theme - that assimilate truth to some existing range of language-games, discourses, or in-place consensus beliefs. Norris's book will be welcomed for its clarity of style, its depth of philosophical engagement, and its refusal to endorse the more facile varieties of present-day textualist thought. It will also serve as a timely reminder that the 'politics of theory' cannot be practised in safe isolation from the politics of activist social concern. (shrink)

Political liberalism purports to be independent from any controversial philosophical presuppositions, and its basic principles and features are often presented as the most accommodating of difference and heterogeneity, so long as the latter is not illiberal, oppressive and fanatic. Educational theory welcomes this assumption and attempts to utilise it in citizenship curriculum debates, often in a receptive and arguably uncritical way. I shall critique the above by unveiling the contestable epistemological and anthropological theses underlying Rawls' difference principle and by discussing (...) the conception of education that they ground. I shall draw especially on sociology of education and its questioning of the ‘racism of intelligence’ in order to show that political liberalism mistakes its self- and world-understanding as a reflection of general and undisputed facts. Further, I shall explain how a more critical perspective would give educational theory a more active role by challenging the so-called ‘reproductive’ conception of education. I shall conclude by assessing the significance of such a critique for teaching citizenship, putting forward some suggestions for a reorientation of political education. (shrink)

A study of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and of its relevance for contemporary sociology.

Political liberalism purports to be independent from any controversial philosophical presuppositions, and its basic principles and features are often presented as the most accommodating of difference and heterogeneity, so long as the latter is not illiberal, oppressive and fanatic. Educational theory welcomes this assumption and attempts to utilise it in citizenship curriculum debates, often in a receptive and arguably uncritical way. I shall critique the above by unveiling the contestable epistemological and anthropological theses underlying Rawls’ difference principle and by discussing (...) the conception of education that they ground. I shall draw especially on sociology of education and its questioning of the ‘racism of intelligence’ in order to show that political liberalism mistakes its self- and world-understanding as a reflection of general and undisputed facts. Further, I shall explain how a more critical perspective would give educational theory a more active role by challenging the so-called ‘reproductive’ conception of education. I shall conclude by assessing the significance of such a critique for teaching citizenship, putting forward some suggestions for a reorientation of political education. (shrink)

Contra those proclaiming the end of philosophy, Badiou aims to restore philosophical thought to the complete space of the truths that condition it.