Courage Before the Break

Agnes Heller’s Theory of “Radical Needs” Revisited

“Good persons exist, how are they possible?” With this question, inimitable Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller outlines her philosophical territory. As readers of critical theory, it is hard to know how to begin expressing our admiration for the energetic grande dame of our tradition. One anecdote might suffice: Heller’s mentor, the great, but ...
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Courage Before the Break

Are Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Althusser’s ‘Reading Capital’ Still Relevant Today?

Princeton professor Nick Nesbitt argues for the transhistorical importance of both works

The following are excerpts from an interview with Nick Nesbitt conducted by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paolo and from his introduction to the edited volume The Concept in Crisis. Reading Capital Today published by Duke University Press in 2017. Copyright 2017 Duke University Press. Folha de São Paolo: A century and a half after ...
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Are Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Althusser’s ‘Reading Capital’ Still Relevant Today?

Imagination and Interpretation

On the dialogue between Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur

On March 9th, 1985, Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis met at the studio of the France Culture "Le Bon Plaisir" radio broadcaster. In 2016, the transcript of their dialogue, their only public debate, was published [1]. This publication is significant not only because it highlights the points of convergence and divergence ...
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Imagination and Interpretation

The Power of Affects in Democratic Politics

Manuel Puig’s ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ and the affective turn in democratic theory

The so-called “affective turn” in political theory has recently propelled several scholars to cast aspersions on the deliberative model of democracy. [i] By affirming that democracy should be conceived solely as an exchange of arguments between “reasonable” persons guided by the ideal of “impartiality,” deliberative theorists such as Habermas and Rawls, it ...
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The Power of Affects in Democratic Politics

One Hundred Years of Communism

A look at Leninism

On November 7, 1917 (October 25, old style), the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, took over power, and established their totalitarian rule (the first one-party system ever). Lenin called it "the dictatorship of the proletariat." Rule of law and traditional morality were discarded as "bourgeois hypocrisy." Political competition between parties ...
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What Cass Sunstein Gets Wrong About Marxism, Sanders, and American Politics

Heightening the Contradictions and Missing the Point

Sunstein mentions, in his lone footnote, that his account of Marx and Lenin’s views on “heightening the contradictions” is “a brisk summary of some famously complex and ambiguous arguments.” But the problem is not that his summary is overly brisk, but that it is fundamentally inaccurate and is used as ...
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The New-Old Terror Wave in Europe (Part 3)

A Comparison of European Terrorism Cycles

Suicide bombers have, in a way, replaced car bombs or improvised explosive devices (IED) by themselves. The use of this tactic is also a reaction to learned experience by European security agencies. Car bombing dominated the previous wave in the United Kingdom, Spain, and France. This made police forces alert ...
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The New-Old Terror Wave in Europe (Part 2)

A Comparison of European Terrorism Cycles

It seems, then, that Europe is currently in a new expansionist phase of this latest cycle of terror. Putting aside the isolated case of the El Descanso restaurant bombing in Madrid in 1985 by the Lebanese Islamic Jihad, Jihadi violence reached Europe in late 1994 when the Armed Islamic Group ...
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David Harvey | The New School

2017 ICSI Public Lecture

Sponsored by The New School for Social Research. The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry will open part of its programming to the public -- a series of lectures taught by this Summer's faculty cohort of K. Anthony Appiah (Professor of Philosophy and Law, NYU), David Harvey (Professor of Anthropology and Geography, CUNY), ...
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David Harvey | The New School

Decolonizing Epistemologies: Part 1

Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology

This blog post is republished with the permission of the author, Alana Lentin, from her blog, alanalentin.net . What are the possibilities for social and political critique opened up by the decolonial approach? I shall examine the interconnections between postcolonial theory and the Decolonial, uncovering the trajectory that began with Indian subaltern studies ...
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Decolonizing Epistemologies: Part 1

After Capitalism, the Derivative

For Randy Martin

We forget that Marx’s Capital starts with the appearance of what is new in the world of its time: the abundance of commodities. So why always keep starting with commodities now that they are old, rather than starting with a form of exchange whose abundance is relatively new, with derivatives? ...
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After Capitalism, the Derivative

Remembering György Lukács

Against a repressive act of forgetting

Hegelian Marxism and with it the whole tradition of Eastern Europe’s critical (humanist, revisionist etc.) Marxism are under attack. I first read Georg (György) Lukács when I was 18. I knew from family that he was a celebrated thinker and had served as minister of culture in Imre Nagy’s government, ...
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