Download or read book Althusser and Contingency written by Stefano Pippa and published by Mimesis. This book was released on 2019-06-13T00:00:00+02:00 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of contingency plays a central role in Althusser’s attempt to recast Marxist philosophy and to free the Marxist conception of history from notions such as teleology, necessity and origin. Drawing on a wealth of published and unpublished material, Stefano Pippa discusses how Althusser’s unfaltering commitment to contingency should encourage us to revisit our understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology, politics and materialism. As grounded on contingency, Althusser’s so-called ‘Structural Marxism’ originates in fact a ‘logic of interruption’ and a notion of structurally under-determined becoming; just like his theory of ideology is radically reinterpreted on the basis of his notion of ‘overinterpellation’. Though constant, Althusser’s relationship with contingency has not been monolithic throughout his career. As observed by Pippa, it is possible to distinguish a ‘political’ and a ‘philosophical’ moment in Althusser’s late materialism of contingency. Perhaps, as this volume suggests, the problematic coexistence of these two aspects might account for the unstable character of Althusser’s late philosophical project.
Download or read book Aleatory Materialism written by Ross Speer and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philosophy of the Encounter written by Louis Althusser and published by Verso. This book was released on 2006-06-17 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Althusser's most prolific period, this book is destined to become a classic.
Download or read book How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy written by Louis Althusser and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy one of the most famous Marxist philosophers of the 20th century shares his concept of what it means to function fruitfully as a political thinker within the discipline and environs of philosophy. This is the first English translation to Althusser's provocative and, often, controversial guide to being a true Marxist philosopher. Althusser argues that philosophy needs Marxism. It can't exist fully without it. Similarly, Marxism requires the rigour and structures of philosophy to give it form and focus. He calls all thinking people to, 'Remember: a philosopher is a man who fights in theory, and when he understands the reasons for this fight, he joined the ranks of the struggle of workers and popular classes.' In short, this book comprises Althusser's elucidation of what praxis means and why it continues to matter. With a superb introduction from translator and Althusser archivist G.M. Goshgarian, this is a book that will re-inspire contemporary Marxist thought and reinvigorate our notions of what political activism can be.
Download or read book Althusser The Infinite Farewell written by Emilio de Ípola and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Althusser, The Infinite Farewell—originally published in Spanish and appearing here in English for the first time—Emilio de Ípola contends that Althusser’s oeuvre is divided between two fundamentally different and at times contradictory projects. The first is the familiar Althusser, that of For Marx and Reading Capital. Symptomatically reading these canonical texts alongside Althusser’s lesser-known writings, de Ípola reveals a second, subterranean current of thought that flows throughout Althusser’s classic formulations and which only gains explicit expression in his later works. This subterranean current leads Althusser to move toward an aleatory materialism, or a materialism of the encounter. By explicating this key aspect of Althusser’s theoretical practice, de Ípola revitalizes classic debates concerning major theoretico-political topics, including the relationship between Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis; the difference between ideology, philosophy, and science; and the role of contingency and subjectivity in political encounters and social transformation. In so doing, he underscores Althusser’s continuing importance to political theory and Marxist and post-Marxist thought.
Download or read book A Philosophy for Communism written by Panagiotis Sotiris and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser Panagiotis Sotiris reconstructs Althusser’s quest for a new practice of philosophy that would enable a new practice of politics for communism, through a reading of the tensions and dynamics running through his work.
Download or read book The New Materialism written by Geoff Pfeifer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have become two of the dominant voices in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. In this book, Geoff Pfeifer offers an in-depth look at their respective views. Using Louis Althusser’s materialism as a starting point—which, as Pfeifer shows, was built partially as a response to the Marxism of the Parti Communiste Français and partially in dialogue with other philosophical movements and intellectual currents of its times—the book looks at the differing ways in which both Badiou’s and Žižek’s work attempt to respond to issues that arise within the Althusserian edifice. Pfeifer argues here that, ultimately, Žižek’s materialism succeeds in responding to these issues in ways that Badiou’s does not. In building this argument, Pfeifer engages not only with the work of Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek and their intellectual backgrounds, but also with much of the contemporary scholarship surrounding these thinkers. As such, Pfeifer’s book is an important addition to the ongoing debates within contemporary critical theory.
Download or read book Althusser written by Gregory Elliott and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the international renaissance of Marxist theory during the 1960s and early 1970s few projects generated as much excitement or controversy as Louis Althusser's 'return to Marx'. One of the most ambitious enterprises in the post-war history of Marxism, Althusser's reconstruction of Marx's doctrine was heralded as a new start in some quarters, dismissed as a refurbished Stalinism in others. Today, more than twenty years after the appearance of his major works and amidst the profound contemporary crisis of Marxism, Althusser is the victim, rather than the beneficiary, of philosophical fashion. Paradoxically, the oblivion into which he has now fallen affords the opportunity fora return to Althusser: a reassessment that advances beyond the unconsidered responses that Marxist commentators have often given to his work. In this first full-scale study in English of Althusser's career, Gregory Elliott draws on a wide range of untranslated material, surveying the political and intellectual context of Althusser's initiative in For Marx and Reading Capital. He analyses the nature of the Marxism developed in these works and charts their author's subsequent evolution, concluding with a balance-sheet of the French Marxist's contribution to historical materialism. At once sympathetic and critical Althusser: The Detour of Theory will establish itself as the standard introduction to its subject.
Download or read book Philosophy of the Encounter written by Louis Althusser and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of intense mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this deeply troubling period, this fourth and final volume of political and philosophical writings reveals Althusser wrestling in a creative and unorthodox fashion with a whole series of theoretical problems to produce some of his very finest work. In his profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, Althusser developed a "philosophy of the encounter," which he links to a hidden and subterranean tradition in the history of Western thought which stretches from Epicurus through Spinoza and Machiavelli to Marx, Derrida and Heidegger.
Download or read book Plural Temporality written by Vittorio Morfino and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plural Temporality traces out a dynamic historical relationship between the texts of Spinoza and Althusser. It interrogates Spinoza’s thought through Althusser's and vice versa, with the intention of opening new horizons for the question of materialism. From the fragmentary intuitions Althusser produced about Spinoza throughout his life, Morfino builds a new and comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy. In the later sections of the book, this interpretation is put to work to help to clarify some of the more problematic aspects of the late Althusser’s philosophy, thereby offering new concepts for a materialist position in philosophy and the development of Marxist theory.
Download or read book Machiavelli and Us written by François Matheron and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We do not publish our own drafts, that is, our own mistakes, but we do sometimes publish other people's," Louis Althusser once observed of Marx's early writings. Among his own posthumously released drafts, one, at least, is incontestably neither mistake nor out-take: the text of his lecture course on Machiavelli, originally delivered at the cole Normale Suprieure in 1972, intermittently revised up to the mid-1980s, and carefully prepared for publication after his death in 1990. Though only appearing as an occasional reference in the Marxist philosopher's oeuvre, Machiavelli was an unseen constant presence. For together with Spinoza and Marx, Machiavelli was a veritable Althusserian passion. Machiavelli and Us reveals why, and will be welcomed for the light it sheds on the richly complex thought of its author.
Download or read book History and Event written by Nathan Coombs and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nathan Coombs demonstrates that the Marxist science of history has been reimagined by a strand of contemporary French theory after Louis Althusser. Taking a comparative approach, Coombs explores the technical details of both traditions' historical sciences.
Download or read book Lessons on Rousseau written by Louis Althusser and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Althusser dissects the leading Enlightenment philosopher Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau's ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. A new way of coming to terms with Rousseau's theoretical rigour, beneath his apparent reveries and sentimental flights of fancy, was here put to work. Second, we are now discovering that the 'late Althusser's' theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break with the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy 'for Marx' were being worked out well before 1985 - in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau's text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency.
Download or read book Recursivity and Contingency written by Yuk Hui and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-01-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an investigation of algorithmic contingency and an elucidation of the contemporary situation that we are living in: the regular arrival of algorithmic catastrophes on a global scale. Through a historical analysis of philosophy, computation and media, this book proposes a renewed relation between nature and technics.
Download or read book Post Rationalism written by Tom Eyers and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-Rationalism takes the experimental journal of psychoanalysis and philosophy, Cahiers pour l'Analyse, as its main source. Established by students of Louis Althusser in 1966, the journal has rarely figured in the literature, although it contained the first published work of authors now famous in contemporary critical thought, including Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner, Luce Irigaray, André Green and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Cahiers served as a testing ground for the combination of diverse intellectual sources indicative of the period, including the influential reinvention of Freud and Marx undertaken by Lacan and Althusser, and the earlier post-rationalist philosophy of science pioneered by Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Alexandre Koyré. This book is a wide-ranging analysis of the intellectual foundations of structuralism, re-connecting the work of young post-Lacanian and post-Althusserian theorists with their predecessors in French philosophy of science. Tom Eyers provides an important corrective to standard histories of the period, focussing on the ways in which French epistemological writing of the 1930s and 1940s - especially that of Bachelard and Canguilhem - laid the ground for the emergence of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s, thus questioning the standard historical narrative that posits structuralism as emerging chiefly in reaction to phenomenology and existentialism.
Download or read book The Production of Subjectivity Marx and Philosophy written by Jason Read and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-04-11 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines why Marxist philosophy will continue to be a central point of reference well beyond postmodernism and the Anthropocene.
Download or read book Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought RLE Social Theory written by Miriam Glucksmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The primary concern of this book is to investigate whether or not structuralism constitutes a distinctive framework in the social sciences. The author focuses on two major structuralist thinkers, Louis Althusser and Claude Lévi-Strauss. She analyses and compares the structure of their theory, and places them within the context of their respective disciplines. Dr Glucksmann began working on this book at a time when structuralism was at the height of its popularity in France, and was thought to be a homogenous alternative to bourgeois sociology. The progress of her study implicitly reflects the developments and divergences within structuralist thought that have emerged since then. In particular, she examines the differences between the political and philosophical thought of Althusser and Lévi-Strauss, which have become increasingly manifest.
