Category: Critical Theory
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‘A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse’ by David Harvey
When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx’s Grundrisse – his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital – in the 1950s in New York Public Library, he recognized it as “a work of fundamental importance,” but declared “its unusual form” and “obscure manner of expression, made it far from…
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Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx
In the first two essays of this book, Louis Althusser analyses the work of two of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment – Montesquieu and Rousseau. He shows that although they made considerable advances towards establishing a science of politics, particularly in comparison with the theorists of natural law, they nevertheless remained the victims of…
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Experience and Empiricism: Hegel, Hume, and the Early Deleuze
A clarifying examination of Gilles Deleuze’s first book shows how he would later transform the problem of immanence into the problem of difference Despite the wide reception Gilles Deleuze has received across the humanities, research on his early work has remained scant. Experience and Empiricism remedies that gap with a detailed study of Deleuze’s first book, Empiricism and…
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The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory
This book presents for the first time the correspondence during the years 1954 to 1978 between the Marxist-Humanist and feminist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-87) and two other noted thinkers, the Hegelian Marxist philosopher and social theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and the psychologist and social critic Erich Fromm (1900-80), both of the latter members of the…
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Denial, Negation, and the Forces of the Negative: Freud, Hegel, Lacan, Spitz, and Sophocles
Finalist for the 2006 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship presented by the Section on Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Psychology of the Canadian Psychological Association It is often the case that painful truths emerge first in the form of denial; one needs to create distance from what is painful. In Denial, Negation, and the Forces of the…
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Recent Philosophy: Hegel to the Present | 2 Volumes
The philosophical unity so visible in Europe at the time of the Reformation and still perceptible during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began to disintegrate in the early years of the nineteenth century. The accession of new languages to the status of scientific languages, the rise of nationalistically minded generations of philosophers, the progressive multiplication…
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Hegel’s Encyclopedic System
This book discusses the most comprehensive of Hegel’s works: his long-neglected Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. It contains original essays by internationally renowned and emerging voices in Hegel scholarship. Their contributions elucidate fundamental aspects of Hegel’s encyclopedic system with an eye to its contemporary relevance. The book thus addresses system-level claims about Hegel’s…
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Hegel Short Course: A Primer for Marxists
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are widely regarded as titans of philosophy, having influenced thinkers from every country, enemies and allies alike. Equally respected is Georg W. F. Hegel. The opposition between Hegel and Marx, however, is taken for granted. The logical development of Marxism out of Hegelian thought is underappreciated. Also underappreciated is the…
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German Stoicisms: From Hegel to Sloterdijk
Stoicism has had a diverse reception in German philosophy. This is the first interpretive study of shared themes and dialogues between late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century experts on classical antiquity and philosophers. Assessing how modern philosophers have incorporated ancient resources with the context of German philosophy, chapters in this volume are devoted to philosophical giants such…
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From Hegel to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of “Commodity Fetishism”
From Hegel to Madonna presents a genealogical survey of the discourses of negation and affirmation associated with the work of Hegel, Adorno, Deleuze, and Guattari; then, rotating from the philosophical to the political-economic axis, turns to the problem of a general economy of “commodity-fetishism. ” Drawing on the work of Marx and Freud, Miklitsch mobilizes…
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Post-Secularism, Realism and Utopia: Transcendence and Immanence from Hegel to Bloch
This book explores the contribution to recent developments in post-secularism, philosophical realism and utopianism made by key thinkers in the Hegelian tradition. It challenges dominant assumptions about what the relationship between religion and our so-called “secular age” should be that have sought to reduce or even eliminate religiosity from the public sphere. It draws upon…
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Hegel and the Foundations of Literary Theory
Do the various forms of literary theory – deconstruction, Marxism, new historicism, feminism, post-colonialism, and cultural/digital studies – have anything in common? If so, what are the fundamental principles of theory? What is its ideological orientation? Can it still be of use to us in understanding basic intellectual and ethical dilemmas of our time? These…
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Hegel, Marx and the Contemporary World
This book is the result of a three-day conference held in April 2014 at the University of Montreal, Canada, discussing the relevance of the work of Hegel and Marx in today’s world, particularly with regard to the ecological, economic, political and anthropological crisis facing humanity. Accordingly, the book an exploration of the specific nature of…
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Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud
To attain an adequate theory of subject we need to achieve a principled dialectical integration of four contexts of thought that are usually opposed: Hegelian phenomenology, existentialism, marxism, and psychoanalysis. Such a “synthesis” faces a number of interpretive problems, and the reader may well wonder how such a relationship is possible since these movements seem…
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Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao
Few thought systems have been as distorted and sometimes misconstrued as those of Marx and Hegel. Philosophy and Revolution, presented here in a new edition, attempts to save Marx from interpretations which restrict the revolutionary significance of the philosophy behind his theory. Developing her breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolute Idea, Raya Dunayevskaya, who died in the June…
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Mallarme’s Sunset: Poetry at the End of Time
The writings of the great Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) were to become uniquely influential in twentieth century literary criticism. For critics and philosophers such as Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, Mallarmé’s name came to represent a rupture in literary history, and an opening of literature onto a radically new kind of writing. Through close…
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‘Hegel’s Ontology and Theory of Historicity’ by Herbert Marcuse
This was Herbert Marcuse’s first book on Hegel, written in the early 1930s when he was under the strong influence of Martin Heidegger. It provides a still unequaled Heideggerian reading of Hegel’s thought that seeks the defining characteristics of “historicity” – what it means to say that a historical event happens. These ideas were foundational…
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The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of ‘Civil Society’
Extract from the Foreword: “What the reader is invited to explore is a branch line in the understanding of Hegel’s social and political theory. However it is an important one. For one thing it helps to reinforce a side of Hegel’s thought that has often been overlooked or played down, or alternatively said by Marxists,…
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Hegel and the Frankfurt School
This collection of original essays discusses the relationship between Hegel and the Frankfurt School Critical Theory tradition. The book’s aim is to take stock of this fascinating, complex, and complicated relationship. The volume is divided into five parts: Part I focuses on dialectics and antagonisms. Part II is concerned with ethical life and intersubjectivity. Part…
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Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes
The concepts of alienation and its overcoming are central to Marx’s thought. They underpin his critique of capitalism and his vision of future society. Marx’s ideas are explained in rigorous and clear terms. They are situated in the context of the Hegelian ideas that inspired them and put into dialogue with contemporary debates. DOWNLOAD: (.pdf…
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Diagnosing Social Pathology: Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim
Can a human society suffer from illness like a living thing? And if so, how does such a malaise manifest itself? In this thought-provoking book, Fred Neuhouser explains and defends the idea of social pathology, demonstrating what it means to describe societies as ‘ill’, or ‘sick’, and why we are so often drawn to conceiving…
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Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx
Philosopher Terry Pinkard revisits Sartre’s later work, illuminating a pivotal stance in Sartre’s understanding of freedom and communal action. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, released to great fanfare in 1960, has since then receded in philosophical visibility. As Sartre’s reputation is now making a comeback, it is time for a reappraisal of his later work.…
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Understanding Žižek, Understanding Modernism
Slavoj Žižek is one of today’s leading theorists, whose polemical works span topics from German idealism to Lacanian psychoanalysis, from Shakespeare to Beckett, and from Hitchcock to Lynch. Critical through and through of both post-modern ideological complacencies-e.g., the death of the subject and the return to ethics-and pre-modern ones-e.g., the re-enchantment of the world, the…
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The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Althusser enjoyed virtually unrivalled status as the foremost living Marxist philosopher. Today, he is remembered as the scourge and severest critic of “humanist” or Hegelian Marxism, as the proponent of rigorously scientific socialism, and as the theorist who posited a sharp rupture—an epistemological break—between the early and the late…
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Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France
This classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the genesis and trajectory of the desiring subject from Hegel’s formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit to its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Judith Butler plots the French reception of Hegel and the successive challenges waged against his…
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Outspoken: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century
In a world of increasing right-wing populism, global capitalism, and a climate emergency, leading thinkers come together to interrogate the meaning and practice of being outspoken. The violence, nativism, persecution, and social hostilities of the twenty-first century demand a call to order: philosophical and theoretical communities must commit their intellectual resources to confronting and articulating…
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Marxism and History: A Critical Introduction
Marx’s theory of history is often regarded as the most enduring and fruitful aspect of his intellectual legacy. His “historical materialism” has been the inspiration for some of the best historical writing in the works of scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P.Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Robert Brenner. S.H. Rigby establishes Marx’s claims about social structure…
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Parallax: The Dialectics of Mind and World
Parallax, or the change in the position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and more precisely, the assumption that this adjustment is not only due to a change of focus, but a change in that object’s ontological status has been a key philosophical concept throughout history. Building upon Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax…
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Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism
This collection rethinks the relationship between objectivity and fiction through a series of ‘objective fictions’, such as fetishes, semblances, lies, rumours, sophistry, fantasies and conspiracy theories. It engages with modern and contemporary philosophical traditions and psychoanalytic theory, with all of these orientations being irreducible to either nominalist or realist approaches. The contributors are a mix…
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How to Read Marx’s Capital: Commentary and Explanations on the Beginning Chapters
With the recent revival of Karl Marx’s theory, a general interest in reading Capital has also increased. But Capital―Marx’s foundational nineteenth-century work on political economy―is by no means considered an easily understood text. Central concepts, such as abstract labor, the value-form, or the fetishism of commodities, can seem opaque to us as first-time readers, and the prospect of…
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In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse
This book provides a critical analysis of the Grundrisse as a crucial stage in the development of Marx’s critique of political economy. Stressing both the achievements and limitations of this much-debated text, and drawing upon recent philological advances, this volume attempts to re-read Marx’s 1857-58 manuscripts against the background of Capital, as a ‘laboratory’ in…
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The Sublime Object of Ideology (Second Edition)
The Sublime Object of Ideology was Žižek’s first book to have appeared in English in 1989, which instantly became an astonishing international success of global academic scholarship at that time, and later a classic of philosophical literature, an achievement which even he himself has only attempted to mimic and surpass since then, with more or less…
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Sexuality in the Field of Vision
In Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Jacqueline Rose argues for the importance of sexual difference and fantasy as key concepts through which an interrogation of contemporary theory should be sustained. A brilliantly original exploration of the interface between feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and film theory. DOWNLOAD: (.pdf & .epub)
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Circling Marx: Essays 1980-2020
Karl Marx circles us, and we him. This reflects the power of his legacy, but it also indicates the nature of the intellectual process. We move around objects of interest and insight, working by successive approximations. Peter Beilharz has been circling Marx for forty years. This volume of essays expands the metaphor by working through…
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The Political Economy of Marx
This book provides a comprehensive exposition and appraisal of Marx’s political economy, beginning with the philosophical and sociological foundations of his work and indication how his economic theory emerged from a critique of classical political economy. The authors proceed to examine in detail the theory of exploitation, capitalist development and imperialism, and pay special attention…
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Toward a Concrete Philosophy: Heidegger and the Emergence of the Frankfurt School
Toward a Concrete Philosophy explores the reactions of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse to Martin Heidegger prior to their dismissal of him once he turned to the Nazi party in 1933. Mikko Immanen provides a fascinating glimpse of the three future giants of twentieth-century social criticism when they were still looking for their philosophical…
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Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia: Five Lectures
Back in print after fifty years and with a new introduction by Ray Brassier, this often overlooked but prescient collection of Marcuse’s lectures makes an impassioned plea for the overthrowing of capitalism. Analysing the work of Freud and Marx, and taking in topics like automation, work, postcapitalism, utopia, and technology, Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia excavates the psychic roots of the current crisis…
Simon Gros 