Jean-Paul Sartre, at the height of his powers, debates with Italy’s leading intellectuals In 1961, the prolific French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre was invited to give a talk at the Gramsci Institute in Rome. In attendance were some of Italy’s leading Marxist thinkers, such as Enzo Paci, Cesare Luporini, and Galvano Della Volpe, whose contributions to the long and remarkable discussion that followed are collected in this volume, along with the ...
The “public sphere” is a key concept in political discourse, designating a space for political action. But is this a single authoritative and universal space in which various positions compete for recognition, or does it consist of multiple local spaces spread over diverse collectivities? In Kluge and Negt’s groundbreaking book they examine the material conditions of experience in an arena that had previously figured only as an abstract term: th ...
A major systematic study of the connection between Marx and Lacan’s work This book discusses the importance of Marx’s critique of political economy in Lacan’s attempt to rethink the political and philosophical legacy of Freudian psychoanalysis. By situating Marx in the broader context of Lacan’s teaching, it highlights the ongoing importance of the capacity of psychoanalysis to reaffirm a dialectical and materialist thinking in philosophy and b ...
Central essays by Feuerbach, advancing his humanist and atheist thought. Ludwig Feuerbach’s departure from the traditional philosophy of Hegel opened a door for generations of radical philosophical thinkers, foremost among them the young Karl Marx. Indeed, much of early Marx is unintelligible without reference to certain fundamental Feuerbachian texts. The selections in this volume, few of them available in translation elsewhere, reveal Feuerba ...
A new program for the Left after the death of neoliberalism. ‘We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy—the form of state suited to capitalism—and to the inevitable and “natural” character of the most monstrous inequalities.’—Alain Badiou Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’, first stated in 2008, cut through the cant a ...
Defending scientific truths in an age of obscurantism Are we entitled to say that Earth is 4.55 billion years old, and its trajectory an ellipse centered on the Sun, with an average radius of 150 million kilometers? Most educated people today would say yes. Curiously, however, three hundred years after the century of Enlightenment, the fact that these assertions constitute what it is customary to call “scientific truths” is often perceived, esp ...
Radical new critical theory for the twenty-first century. In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other. Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ru ...
Against the background of recent technological developments, Gorz's major new book explores the political agendas facing both right and left in the midst of the transformations of the nature of work and the structure of the workforce. In this major new book, Andre Gorz expands on the political implications of his prescient and influential Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason. Against the background of technological development ...
The origins of «Western Marxism». The early Marx called for the «realization of philosophy» through revolution. Revolution thus became a critical concept for Marxism, a view elaborated in the later praxis perspectives of Lukacs and the Frankfurt School. These thinkers argue that fundamental philosophical problems are, in reality, social problems abstractly conceived. Originally published as Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, The P ...
