Download or read book The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings written by François Matheron and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There can be little doubt that Louis Althusser was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and his influence subsists in many of the concepts currently deployed in disciplines such as cultural studies, social theory and literary criticism. Yet Althusser was also a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party and a foremost participant in the debates in the human sciences that are marked by the names of Claude Lvi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Georges Canguilhem. His writings were major interventions in a specific political and theoretical conjuncture and it is this aspect of his work that this new collection of previously untranslated texts seeks to reflect. Consisting of writings from the very height of Althusser's intellectual powers, during the period 1966-67, this book covers, among other things, the critique of Lvi-Strauss's structuralism, the theory of discourse and its relationship to psychoanalysis, the place of Ludwig Feuerbach, the tasks of Marxist philosophy, and the famous "humanist controversy."
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 Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism written by William Lewis and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2005-10-17 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the course of the twentieth century communism has enjoyed direct competition with all other governmental and economic systems. Often, communist countries produced their own special brand of party intellectual. These figures rightly occupied their place within their own national context and within the context of the International. Some communist intellectuals, through the high level of erudition exhibited in their writing, have received a wider reception, despite their direct linkage to party politics e.g. Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, and, Victor Serge are good examples. After 1956, when Kruschev exposed Stalin's atrocities to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and, as a result, to the entire world, Marxist philosophy was widely discredited. It had been assumed that Stalin's excesses were somehow encouraged or supported through Marx's thought. When, in the mid 1960s, Louis Althusser first offered his re-readings of Marx's philosophy it, and communist political practice, were in ruin. However Althusser was in a unique cultural and historical position. Thinking and writing concomitant with the structuralists and poststructuralists in France and also having access to certain theoretical tools while, simultaneously, committing himself entirely to Marxist thought-Althusser was, conceivably the last of his tradition. He was a Marxist philosopher who, unlike Sartre at the end of his life, did not abandon communism to, for instance existentialism. In Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism William Lewis gives readers a striking example of intellectual biography and critical theory. His approach, considering the work and life of Althusser within French Marxism and French intellectual culture, fills a void in contemporary scholarship. But, much more importantly, Lewis is able to show how Althusser's thought is the result of and a response to specific French intellectual and political traditions of reading Marx. It is through this combination of concerns that Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism offers us a contemporary and poignant Althusser whose ideas, under the weight of Lewis's pen, can help us better understand what resources it may hold for philosophy, political thought, and cultural thought today.
Download or read book Garaudy et Althusser written by Robert Geerlandt and published by FeniXX. This book was released on 1978-01-01T00:00:00+01:00 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger Garaudy, Louis Althusser : deux hommes membres d'un même parti, deux philosophes de haut niveau animés d'une même volonté, l'approfondissement de la théorie marxiste. Garaudy, Althusser, une lutte d'idées aux conséquences incalculables pour l'existence même du Parti communiste français en tant que parti communiste. Une lutte sans merci, sans compromis possible. Garaudy : le marxisme constitue bel et bien un humanisme théorique et pratique. Althusser assène la réponse : l'anti-humanisme théorique de Marx. Les deux philosophes fondèrent écoles, leurs écoles devinrent clans figés et antagonistes. Le débat s'élargit et devint passion, la confusion devint extrême. À ce point que le Parti communiste français s'alarma, l'unité du parti, son efficacité se trouvaient menacées. Le Comité central ne pouvait dire la théorie, il rappela les exigences de la politique : ce fut Argenteuil. [...] À l'heure où la défense des droits de l'homme devient un instrument privilégié de toute stratégie politique, à l'heure où la défense des libertés devient le moteur de toute action politique, il n'est sans doute pas superflu de cerner la réalité de l'humanisme marxiste, de définir sa nature. Le débat sur l'humanisme dans le Parti communiste français, fut un débat théorique et politique immense. Les circonstances qui ont vu naître ce débat, son déroulement, tant dans la forme que dans le fond, son enjeu, ses enjeux, seront examinés systématiquement dans cet ouvrage. À quelles conditions peut-il y avoir réellement un humanisme marxiste ? Comment convient-il d'apprécier l'attitude, les déclarations de la direction politique du PCF à la session d'Argenteuil de son Comité central ? Garaudy-Althusser, le débat sur l'humanisme dans le Parti communiste français et son enjeu se veut ouvrage de clarification sur un débat capital et complexe, se veut un outil de travail pour qui se propose d'aborder les problèmes de l'humanisme marxiste et de l'humanisme en général, pour qui se propose d'analyser l'évolution actuelle du marxisme en France.
Download or read book God Marx and the Future written by Russell Bradner Norris and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Marxism and the French Left written by Tony Judt and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in New York by Oxford University Press, 1986.
Download or read book Marxism Christianity and Islam written by Julian Roche and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger Garaudy was for many years at the centre of the French Communist Party but was eventually expelled for his liberal views. In the Seventies, he strove to bring Marxism and Christianity together, to include all humanity in a project to set all people free. What emerges from Garaudy’s project is a very modern Marxism, with its emphasis on the individual, its ecological politics, and in its insistence on religion as central to human emancipation. Although Garaudy himself became frustrated by the failure of Marxism and converted to Islam, eventually resulting in his work being discredited in the West, it is certainly possible that Garaudy’s project represents a good, perhaps even the best, starting point for Marxism in today’s world.
Download or read book Althusser and the End of Leninism written by Margaret A. Majumdar and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 1995 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis Althusser was not only a key intellectual for the French Left in the 1960s and 70s, his influence and reputation extended beyond the boundaries of his own country and have left a lasting mark. In the current climate of collapse of Marxist ideas, Althusser has paradoxically become a cuase celebre once again. Not, however, because of the perceived value of his ideas, but because of his own and others' revelations of his psychological problems.
Download or read book Encountering Althusser written by Katja Diefenbach and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-01-10 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French philosopher Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 -1990) helped define the politico-theoretical conjuncture of pre- and post-1968. Today, there is a recrudescence of interest in his thought, especially in light of his later work, published in English as Philosophy of the Encounter (Verso, 2006). This has led to renewed debates on the reformulation of conflicting notions of materialism, on the event as both philosophical concept and political construction, and on the nature of politics and the political. These original essays by leading scholars aim to provide a new assessment of Althusser's thought, especially in relation to contemporary debates. Organized in four sections that represent the main currents in Althusser's scholarship, the book discusses materialism and the different formulations of the relationship between politics and philosophy, Althusser's interpretations of political thinkers (including Machiavelli, Deleuze and Gramsci), the resources he provides to critique political economy and politics in post-Marxist thought, and the theorization of ideology and politics. Encountering Althusser is a groundbreaking resource that highlights Althusser's continuing relevance to contemporary radical thought.
Download or read book Garaudy et Althusser Le d bat sur l humanisme dans le parti communiste fran ais et son enjeu written by and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Proletarian Nights written by Jacques Ranciere and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proletarian Nights, previously published in English as Nights of Labor and one of Rancière’s most important works, dramatically reinterprets the Revolution of 1830, contending that workers were not rebelling against specific hardships and conditions but against the unyielding predetermination of their lives. Through a study of worker-run newspapers, letters, journals, and worker-poetry, Rancière reveals the contradictory and conflicting stories that challenge the coherence of these statements celebrating labor. This updated edition includes a new preface by the author, revisiting the work twenty years since its first publication in France.
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 Althusser s Lesson written by Jacques Rancière and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacques Rancière's first major work, Althusser's Lesson appeared in 1974, just as the energies of May 68 were losing ground to the calls for a return to order. Rancière's analysis of Althusserian Marxism unfolds against this background: what is the relationship between the return to order and the enthusiasm which greeted the publication of Althusser's Reply to John Lewis in 1973? How to explain the rehabilitation of a philosophy that had been declared 'dead and buried on the barricades of May 68'? What had changed? The answer to this question takes the form of a genealogy of Althusserianism that is, simultaneously, an account of the emergence of militant student movements in the '60s, of the arrival of Maoism in France, and of how May 68 rearranged all the pieces anew. Encompassing the book's distinctive combination of theoretical analysis and historical description is a question that has guided Rancière's thought ever since: how do theories of subversion become the rationale for order?
Download or read book Workers and Communists in France written by George Ross and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-03-29 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Workers and Communists in France analyzes the relationship between the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), France’s largest and most influential trade union organization. All trade union movements in advanced capitalist societies have had to develop mechanisms to achieve their goals within the labor market and the political realm. The nature of such mechanisms varies dramatically from society to society. George Ross examines a trade union movement whose philosophy and actions are derived from the political and organizational perspectives of the Communist Third International tradition. Workers and Communists in France submits the modern history of the relationship between the PCF and the CGT to the complex test of a cost-benefit analysis. How well has the linkage between party and trade union worked for French Communism, for French workers, for the French left, and for French society? Since World War II, the ties between the PDF and the CGT have enabled them to promote and perpetuate sharp notions of class and class conflict among French workers and French society in general. The CGT has been the central agency through which French Communism has shaped debate about the nature of French society, a debate with profound effects on the structure of French politics and intellectual life. On the other hand, the basic contradiction between the Communist Party’s desire to use the CGT for partisan purposes and the CGT’s need to generate mass support has never been resolved. This failure may have followed from the very structure of the relationship between the PCF and the CGT, as well as from consistently inappropriate strategic calculations by the PCF. Ross concludes that the Communist Third International's concept of the link between party and trade union is becoming obsolete. The future of Communism in France may well depend, therefore, on a reappraisal of the party’s relationship with organized labor. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.
Download or read book Popular Culture in Modern France written by Brian Rigby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: `Culture' is one of the most frequently used terms in the French vocabulary. It sells not only books, newspapers and magazines but also consumer products and political parties. But what are the meanings of `culture populaire'? What have the French understood by it, and what is its history? Brian Rigby's lively and cogent study traces changing notions of popular culture in France, from 1936 - the year of the Popular Front - to the present day. Asking why `culture' has become such a fiercely contested term, Rigby considers the work of the major French theorists, including Barthes, Bourdieu and Baudrillard.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy written by Marco Di Maggio and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the dynamics through which the two major communist parties of the capitalist world—which in the 1970s had great influence on their respective national political contexts since the 1980s are increasing their marginality and, although in different forms and with different timeframes are unable to stem the decline of their political and cultural influences on the working classes.
