Suggests an open system of psychological exploration to cut through accepted norms of morality, language, and politics.

No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in For Marx (...) (1965), and Reading Capital (1968). These works, along with Lenin and Philosophy (1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship. This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science. Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist." Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history. (shrink)

The animal that therefore I am (more to follow) -- But as for me, who am I (following)? -- And say the animal responded -- I don't know why we are doing this.

Anarchist theory has a long-standing history in political theory, sociology, and philosophy. As a radical discourse, anarchist theory pushes educators and researchers towards new conceptualizations of community, theory, and praxis. Early writers, like Joseph Proudhoun and Emma Goldman, to more contemporary anarchists, such as Noam Chomsky, have established anarchist theory as an important school of thought that sits outside the Marxist discourses that have dominated the radical academic scene. Today, anarchists have been responsible for staging effective protests (specifically, Seattle, 1999) (...) and have influenced autonomous groups like the Animal Liberation Front in their organizational and guiding philosophies. Interestingly, anarchism is glaringly absent from the literature in educational theory and research. In this article, I highlight aspects of anarchist theory that are particularly applicable to education, and also establishes specific ways that anarchist theory can inform one's own educational praxis. Specifically, I employ the anarchist framework of direct action and micro-level strategies, such as sabotage, that challenge people to resist the oppressive practices found in institutions today. (shrink)

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother’s lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues (...) resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother’s vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority. At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but—dare he admit it?—strangely on target. In this landmark book, Nobel Prize–winning writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello’s own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction—Coetzee brings all these elements into play. As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee’s text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation. (shrink)

Complexity theory challenges educational philosophy to reconsider accepted paradigms of teaching, learning and educational research. However, though attractive, not least because of its critique of positivism, its affinity to Dewey and Habermas, and its arguments for openness, diversity, relationships, agency and creativity, the theory is not without its difficulties. These are seen to lie in terms of complexity theory's nature, status, methodology, utility and contribution to the philosophy of education, being a descriptive theory that is easily misunderstood as a prescriptive (...) theory, silent on key issues of values and ethics that educational philosophy should embrace, of questionable internal consistency, and of limited ‘added value’ in educational philosophy. The paper sets out key tenets of complexity theory and argues that, though it is useful for educational philosophy, it requires new conceptual tools and mind‐sets to comprehend fully its significance. (shrink)

Complexity theory challenges educational philosophy to reconsider accepted paradigms of teaching, learning and educational research. However, though attractive, not least because of its critique of positivism, its affinity to Dewey and Habermas, and its arguments for openness, diversity, relationships, agency and creativity, the theory is not without its difficulties. These are seen to lie in terms of complexity theory's nature, status, methodology, utility and contribution to the philosophy of education, being a descriptive theory that is easily misunderstood as a prescriptive (...) theory, silent on key issues of values and ethics that educational philosophy should embrace, of questionable internal consistency, and of limited ‘added value’ in educational philosophy. The paper sets out key tenets of complexity theory and argues that, though it is useful for educational philosophy, it requires new conceptual tools and mind‐sets to comprehend fully its significance. (shrink)

Philosophy of education is regarded as an art of hermeneutics that integrates a theory of mimesis in its understanding of the educational transmission. The idea of the master is reconsidered in this perspective in order to overcome the old opposition between classicism and romanticism. In that way the author attempts to respond to the question: What is the secret to pedagogically sound education?

Philosophy of education is regarded as an art of hermeneutics that integrates a theory of mimesis in its understanding of the educational transmission. The idea of the master is reconsidered in this perspective in order to overcome the old opposition between classicism and romanticism. In that way the author attempts to respond to the question: What is the secret to pedagogically sound education?

The political writings of the French poststructuralists have eluded articulation in the broader framework of general political philosophy primarily because of the pervasive tendency to define politics along a single parameter: the balance between state power and individual rights in liberalism and the focus on economic justice as a goal in Marxism. What poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard offer instead is a political philosophy that can be called tactical: it emphasizes that power emerges from many different (...) sources and operates along many different registers. This approach has roots in traditional anarchist thought, which sees the social and political field as a network of intertwined practices with overlapping political effects. The poststructuralist approach, however, eschews two questionable assumptions of anarchism, that human beings have an essence and that power is always repressive, never productive. After positioning poststructuralist political thought against the background of Marxism and the traditional anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon, Todd May shows what a tactical political philosophy like anarchism looks like shorn of its humanist commitments—namely, a poststructuralist anarchism. The book concludes with a defense, _contra_ Habermas and Critical Theory, of poststructuralist political thought as having a metaethical structure allowing for positive ethical commitments. (shrink)

Mimesis: the idea of imitation. Alterity: the idea of difference, the opposition of Self and Other. In his most accomplished work to date, Michael Taussig explores these complex and often interwoven concepts. Arguing that mimesis is the nature that culture uses to create second nature, he maintains that mimesis - variously experienced in different societies - is not only a faculty but also a history. That history, Taussig writes, is deeply tied to "Euroamerican colonialism, the felt relation of the civilizing (...) process to savagery, to aping, sensateness caught in the net of passionful images spun for several centuries by the colonial trade with wildness." For anthropologists, social scientists, cultural critics, artists and everyone else caught up in the enigma of the postmodern, framing the question "What is Reality" is crucial to gaining an understanding of what it is we know and who we are. Why is it important to understand that traditions are inventions and that social life is a construction when they grip us with all the force of the "natural"? And how is it that we understand reality as both real and really made up? In Mimesis and Alterity Taussig undertakes an eccentric history of the mimetic faculty. He moves easily from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, backwards to the fable of colonial "first-contact" and alleged mimetic prowess of "primitives," and then forward to contemporary time, when the idea of alterity is increasingly unstable. Utilizing anthropological theory, Taussig blends Latin American ethnography and colonial history with the insights of Walter Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer. Vigorous and unorthodox, Taussig's understanding of mimesis in different cultures deepens our meanings of ethnography, racism and society. (shrink)

This text is a provocative investigation of the political, social, and economic factors underlying classroom practices, offering a unique introduction to the contemporary field of critical pedagogy.

The book then addresses the human/animal opposition implicit in much feminist theorizing, arguing that the opposition helps to maintain the essentialism that feminists have so often criticized. The final chapter brings us back from ideas of what 'the animal' is, to ask how these questions might relate to environmental politics, including ecofeminism and animal rights.

Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue—creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought. Michel Serres is professor in history of science at the Sorbonne, professor of Romance languages at Stanford University, and author of several books, including _Genesis._ Lawrence R. Schehr is professor of (...) French at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. His books include _Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal _. (shrink)

Nicole Shukin pursues a resolutely materialist engagement with the "question of the animal," challenging the philosophical idealism that has dogged the question by tracing how the politics of capital and of animal life impinge on one ...

The political writings of the French poststructuralists have eluded articulation in the broader framework of general political philosophy primarily because of the pervasive tendency to define politics along a single parameter: the balance between state power and individual rights in liberalism and the focus on economic justice as a goal in Marxism. What poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard offer instead is a political philosophy that can be called tactical: it emphasizes that power emerges from many different (...) sources and operates along many different registers. This approach has roots in traditional anarchist thought, which sees the social and political field as a network of intertwined practices with overlapping political effects. The poststructuralist approach, however, eschews two questionable assumptions of anarchism, that human beings have an essence and that power is always repressive, never productive. After positioning poststructuralist political thought against the background of Marxism and the traditional anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon, Todd May shows what a tactical political philosophy like anarchism looks like shorn of its humanist commitments—namely, a poststructuralist anarchism. The book concludes with a defense, _contra_ Habermas and Critical Theory, of poststructuralist political thought as having a metaethical structure allowing for positive ethical commitments. (shrink)

The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious. In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between (...) man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives. (shrink)