Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

Taj Frazier - The East Is Black. Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination During the Cold War, several prominent African American radical activist-intellectuals including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, journalist William Worthy, Marxist feminist Vicki Garvin, and freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams traveled and lived in China. There, they used a variety of media to express their solidarity with Chinese communism and to redefine the relationship between Asian struggles against imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice. In The East Is Black, Taj Frazier examines the ways in which these figures and the Chinese government embraced the idea of shared struggle against U.S. policies at home and abroad. He analyzes their diverse cultural output to document how they imagined communist China’s role within a broader vision of a worldwide anticapitalist coalition against racism and imperialism.

Valentin Cartillier - The (re)commencement of Aleatory Materialism: reading the appearances of the void across the oeuvre of Louis Althusser In the light of the series of posthumous publications of the works of Louis Althusser, the concept of the void is increasingly being recognised as a central tenet of his theoretical output by scholars such as François Matheron, G.M Goshgarian, Isabel Garo, André Tosel, and Stefano Pippa. However, given the heterogeneity of its appearances across the different domains of his thought, it has proven a difficult, yet fecund, concept to understand. This is in part due to Althusser’s own insistence that the void is not a philosophical concept that can be systematised. At times it is used as a theory of historical change, other times it implicitly scaffolds his theory of subjectivity, it dictates the purpose of philosophy in relation to scientific and political practice, and most explicitly, it serves as the basis for his theory of aleatory materialism. This thesis will not content itself with simply a descriptive reading of the appearances of the void but instead understand these appearances and transformations across different domains as a disclosure of the structure of his late concept of aleatory materialism. This structure, consisting of atoms (elements), the void, and the swerve (encounter, or clinamen) will serve to elaborate the two central theses at stake in this reading. The first is that the contingent encounters of elements within the void discloses its structure, while the second, which results from the first, contends that there exists an ‘ontological break,’ in Althusser’s work. To reduce our line of inquiry to a single question: How do the appearances of the void throughout his work help us understand the primacy of contingency posited by aleatory materialism and the ontological break? This thesis will therefore track the appearances, transformations, and conceptual uses of the void in Althusser’s thought in order to interrogate the theoretical and practical consistency of aleatory materialism across what can easily appear to be very disparate works. It will consist of a close, slightly altered chronological rereading of Althusser’s oeuvre, beginning with an exposition of his later concept of aleatory materialism which will then serve as the basis to track changes in how the void is formulated from early on in his career, in a master’s thesis on the G.W.F. Hegel to his later work on Lenin and Machiavelli.

Andrea Mariuzzo - Communism and Anti-Communism in Early Cold War Italy: Language, Symbols and Myths The struggle in projects, ideas and symbols between the strongest Communist Party in the West and an anti-communist and pro-Western government coalition was the most peculiar founding element of Italian democratic political system after World War II. Communism and anti-Communism in early Cold War Italy enlightens new aspects of and players of the anti-Communist ‘front’. It takes into account the role of cultural associations, newspapers and the popular press in the selection and diffusion of critical judgements and images of Communism, highlighting a dimension that explains the force and the diffusion of anti-communist opinions in Italy after 1989 and the crisis of traditional parties.

Frank Ruda - Indifference and Repetition; Or, Modern Freedom and Its Discontents In capitalism human beings act as if they are mere animals. So we hear repeatedly in the history of modern philosophy. Indifference and Repetition examines how modern philosophy, largely coextensive with a particular boost in capitalisms development, registers the reductive and regressive tendencies produced by capitalisms effect on individuals and society.Ruda examines a problem that has invisibly been shaping the history of modern, especially rationalist philosophical thought, a problem of misunderstanding freedom. Thinkers like Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx claim that there are conceptions and interpretations of freedom that lead the subjects of these interpretations to no longer act and think freely. They are often unwillingly led into unfreedom. It is thus possible that even freedom enslaves. Modern philosophical rationalism, whose conceptual genealogy the books traces and unfolds, assigns a name to this peculiar form of domination by means of indifference. Indifference is a name for the assumption that freedom is something that human beings a given, a natural possession. When we think freedom is natural or a possession we lose freedom. Modern philosophy, Ruda shows, takes its shape through repeated attacks on freedom as indifference; it is the owl that begins its flight, so that the days of unfreedom will turn to dusk.

Kevin Cox - South Africa In History’s Shadow Why is South Africa seemingly still mired in the income and spatial segregation patterns of the apartheid era? Standard explanations focus on the ANC, either as too neoliberal or too statist. Kevin Cox looks instead at the making of classes and expropriation of African farmers in conditions of globalization’s labour shock. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii156/articles/kevin-cox-south-africa-in-history-s-shadow