'Alienation' tag archive

Mattin, Social Dissonance (Falmouth: Urbanomic/Mono, 2022). 256pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 91302 981 4 Both a reconstruction of the notion of alienation and a partisan reflection on the relationship between experimental art and a social world, Social Dissonance could be considered the first work of ‘Brassierian Marxism’. If the study of Wilfrid Sellars led Ray […]

Humanism and Nature John O’Neill Those who aim to construct links between Marxism and the green movement often look to Marx’ s early work on alienation as a source for a green Marxism. I There is an immediate apparent problem with any such attempt to marry the early Marx and the greens, viz. that Marx’s […]

The Inorganic Body and the Ambiguity of Freedom Andrew Collier The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means oflife and (2) as the matter, the object and the tool of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, […]

The Situationist International: A Case of Spectacular Neglect Sadie Plant The recent exhibitions of Situationist art and paraphernalia in London, Paris, and Boston, have given the Situationist International (SI) an unprecedented academic and cultural profile. Even during the movement’s most active period, when many of its ideas and practices were realised in the events in […]

Labour and Labour-Power fan Hunt Marx claimed that his principal theoretical achievements were the distinctions he drew between ‘concrete labour’ and ‘abstract labour’, and between ‘labour’ and ‘labour-power’. These distinctions have been the focus of subsequent interpretation and criticism of Marx’ s theory of the capitalist mode of production. In this paper I shall argue […]

The Need to Work Sean Sayers The theme of this paper is work. At a time when mass unemployment is a major social and political problem throughout the industrial world, it is a theme which needs little introduction. Nevertheless, I shall begin with a bit. For I must confess that work is a subject that […]

REVIEWS Post-Industrial Socialism Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival (trans. David Fernbach), Heretic Books, f.3.50 pb Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (trans. Michael Sonenscher), Pluto Press, 1:.3.95 pb The ‘debate on the concept of the proletariat’ is, suggests Rudolf Bahro, ‘outdated’; it ‘tends right from the start to be scholastic’. Farewell to the Working […]

Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Negativity Chris Arthur In 1844 a turning point occurs in Marx’s philosophical development: for the first time he makes labour the central category of his social ontology (1) position of importance it was never to lose. Productive activity, and its alienation, are thematized in that most extraordinary document containing the results […]

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 Crucially, linguists do not agree. Mounin, G., Clefs pOUY’ la linguistique, Seghers, Paris, 1971, p.ll. See above, ‘Process Three – The Oedipus Complex, the Father and Social Rules’ . Identified by, amongst others, E.P. Thompson. Turkle, S., Psychoanalytic Politics, Burnett Books, New York, 1979. For […]

Personality and the Dialectic of Labour and PropertyLocke, Hegel, Marx. Chris Arthur Introduction One of the earliest objections to communism claims that ‘the complete abolition of private property’ makes no sense because people have an inalienable property in their own individuality, which comprises all those features that are peculiar to the person who has them […]

l’reecloDl and Alienalion RossPoole 1 According to Hegel For freedom it is necessary that we should feel no presence of something else which is not ourselves. 1 Taken at face value, this makes little sense. For what are we to make of the idea of ‘feeling no presence of something else which is not ourselves’? […]

In Defence of Inlemai Relalions -Beriell OIlman 11 Most of the criticisms of Alienation have centered on my account of Marx’s philosophy of internal relations. I would like to take advantage of the appearance of a second edition to develop my defence of this philosophy beyond the brief remarks found in the appendix on this […]

PiRSONAL AUTONOMY a: HISTORICAL MATERIALISM Richard Archer The following is largely a criticism of some of the mistakes and certain tendencies antithetical to an historical materialist conception of the world found in Eoss Poole’s paper ‘Freedom and Alienation’. (Radical Philosophy, Winter 1975). Basically the criticism is this: because Poole never entirely leaves the framework employed […]

l is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. -The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question. The clarity that we are aiming at is’indeed complete clarity. But this simply means the philosophical problems should completely […]

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••• mEDTAllllDESS AS A mORAL [OD[EPT ………………………. SEAnSAVERS (, The concept of mental illness has been the subject of heated controversy in recent years; and this debate has caught the attention of a wide public. The reason for this is not simply that the debate has sometimes been conducted in heated terms; but, more importantly, […]

posItIve suggestions I have made: but I think it symptomatic of our state that we don’t have lots of ideas – and activities going about this. Maybe not everyone in sympathy with the general idea of radical philosophy feels these needs. When talk about new modes of communicating, this must include more or less regular […]

The work of the German philosopher Michael Theunissen spans a forty-year period from 1958, when he published his doctoral thesis The Concept of Earnestness in Søren Kierkegaard, to the present. [1] His general intellectual trajectory can be divided into four loosely distinct phases, developing from an early interest in existentialism, via a period focused on […]

Philosophizing the everyday The philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies John roberts The following presents a genealogy and critique of the concept of the ʻeverydayʼ, looking at the philosophical, political and cultural conflicts and contexts which radically transformed its contents after the Russian Revolution from a term synonymous with the ʻdailyʼ and […]

Since the mid-1980s there has been a major revival of interest in the work of Siegfried Kracauer, focusing on the essays he wrote during the Weimar Republic for the Frankfurter Zeitung. [1] As a result of this renewed interest in Kracauerʼs early writings, a revisionist school of Kracauer criticism has emerged, particularly in the USA. […]

Interview paolo virno Reading Gilbert Simondon Transindividuality, technical activity and reification Jun fujita hirose At the end of the 1980s, the thought of Gilbert Simondon – a French philosopher (1924–1989) almost entirely ignored until then – was given a new lease of life on the French philosophical scene. The year of his death, 1989, saw […]

Between sharing and antagonism The invention of communism in the early Marx Antonia birnbaumlondon calling Why talk about communism today?* A first point everybody will be agreed upon: the spectre of communism is not haunting Europe, nor for that matter any other region of the world. The only place where ‘communism’ is a positive name […]