Philosophy Archives - Page 8 of 23

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The Violence of Abstraction

From debt to race and back again

May 9, 2019 • by Alberto Toscano

I mention this weird vignette, because I associate it with my intellectual preoccupation around that time, when I was exploring the myriad contemporary meanings of a dictum encountered in Marx’s Grundrisse: ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions whereas earlier they had depended on one another’. Societies that were bound together by ...

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The One Who Writes Books

Eric Hoffer and the Perks of Being Self-taught

May 1, 2019 • by Marius Stan

We don’t know much about Hoffer’s first decades of life, up to his forties. The only available markers came through his voice only and they were full of inconsistencies. Many biographers have had difficulties with identifying the real pre-Longshoreman Philosopher Eric Hoffer (see Tom Bethell’s Eric Hoffer, Genius—And Enigma). He had ...

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Richard Rorty: The Dark Years

The philosopher’s vision of what is dangerous and yet possible

April 26, 2019 • by Richard J. Bernstein

The passages below are selections from “Richard Rorty: The Dark Years.” Introduction No one was more acute than American philosopher Richard Rorty in echoing and epitomizing the accusations and taunts of his critics. In “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” he tells us that conservative culture warriors characterize him “one of the relativistic, ...

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Mass Psychology of Crisis

For a structural analysis of financialization and against the use of “fascism” as a scare tactic

April 23, 2019 • by Nancy Fraser

Mass psychology, new fascism, financialization. The conjunction of these three terms is startling. Its meaning is not immediately transparent. To grasp it requires an imaginative leap. What connects them, for me, is a fourth term, crisis. Not just financial crisis, nor indeed any crisis that is merely sectoral -- whether ecological, economic, social or ...

Education

Academia, Grassroots Organizations, and Debt

Towards a Genuine Collaboration

April 22, 2019 • by Ann Larson

What if the president of the United States, along with Congress, cancelled student debt and made public college tuition free? Just a few years ago, these goals would have seemed like the pie-in-the sky dreams of a marginal sect. Today, free public college is supported by major presidential candidates, including ...

Academia, Grassroots Organizations, and Debt

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Merleau-Ponty’s Doubt

On Rethinking Our Thoughts

April 19, 2019 • by David Stromberg

As political camps grow increasingly extreme in their messaging – with Democrat and Republican views both turning less nuanced, with the Right and Left seeming to need each other in order to justify their political survival -- it may be helpful to recall a person who tried to make a ...

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New Fascism, Mass Psychology & Financialization: Part 1

Past, Present and Future of Financialization

April 17, 2019 • by Lucas Ballestín

Organized by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (University College London) and Chiara Bottici (New School) What do the worlds of global finance and nationalist populism have in common? How can we understand the rise of today’s 'new fascisms' through the prism of financialization? This one-day workshop brought together scholars from across disciplines to debate these ...

New Fascism, Mass Psychology & Financialization: Part 1

Education

New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology

Anatole Broyard at The New School

April 16, 2019 • by Mark Larrimore

Because they were displaced themselves, or angry with us for failing to understand history, the professors did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country. … All the courses I took were about what's wrong: what's wrong with our government, with the family, with interpersonal relations ...

New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology

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Artist-as-debtor, Debt-as-Creator

The unseen debt sustaining the art market

April 15, 2019 • by Noah Fischer

This article is part of a series of texts published on Public Seminar in the lead-up to the Digital/Debt/Empire symposium in Vancouver in late April 2019, convened by Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy and Max Haiven. Is there a better place to glimpse the logic of capitalism than at art fairs, those ultra luxury trade shows ...

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In Defense of Do What You Love

Rejoining alienated critiques of capitalism

April 11, 2019 • by Patrick Sheehan

But where did this “most elegant anti-worker ideology,” as Tokumitsu calls it, come from? Tokumitsu suggests that it is a bourgeois culture foisted upon the working masses by the ruling class. One New York Times opinion piece credits “neoliberal masterminds,” while another points the finger at WeWork. What these critics agree on is that the ...

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Another Mother

Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism

April 8, 2019 • by Cesare Casarino and Andrea Righi

In recent years, the tradition of Italian biopolitical thought has become immensely popular and increasingly influential. Most interpreters, however, focus on thinkers such as Agamben, Esposito, and Negri, while the contribution of Italian feminist movement is most often neglected. Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism , brings to ...

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Art, Research and Action Against Debt’s Digital Empire

An introduction

April 4, 2019 • by Max Haiven, Enda Brophy and Benjamin Anderson

This article is the introduction to a series of texts published on Public Seminar in the lead-up to the Digital/Debt/Empire symposium in Vancouver in late April 2019, convened by Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy and Max Haiven. Throughout the history of capitalism, debt has been a key weapon of colonialism and imperialism. Examples include the ruinous ...