Karl Marx

The Bourgeois Revolution From Marx's Point of View

March 19, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

A panel discussion organized by the Platypus Affiliated Society, held on March 19, 2011, at Left Forum, Pace University. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists James Vaughn - University of Texas at Austin, Platypus Affiliated Society Jeremy Cohan - New York University Richard Rubin - Platypus Affiliated Society Spencer A. Leonard - University of Chicago, Platypus Affiliated Society Description The “bourgeois revolutions” from the 16 through the 19 centuries – extending into the 20–conformed humanity to modern city life, ending traditional, pastoral, religious custom in favor of social relations of the exchange of labor. [Read More]

On the Possibility of What Isn't

An Interview with Robert Pippin

March 14, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

A public interview with Robert Pippin, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society, exploring the implications of Hegel’s thought, particularly regarding art, in the present day. Held on March 14, 2011, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Transcript in Platypus Review #36 Description Robert Pippin is a professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. [Read More]

Aesthetics Art Dialectics Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Hegelian Hegelianism Karl Marx Marxism

Praxis, theory, and the unmakeable

March 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

On February 19, 2011, Chris Mansour of Platypus interviewed Robert Hullot-Kentor, noted Adorno translator and author of Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. Chris Mansour: For several decades you have been translating and interpreting the relevance of Adorno’s thought for us. In your most recent essays, however, it seems you have mostly wanted to save Adorno’s ideas from appropriation by the postmodern and contemporary canon, which you claim have done “immense damage” to his insights. [Read More]

Art Critical theory Francis Bacon Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Martin Heidegger Karl Marx Robert Hullot-Kentor Theodor W. Adorno

Egypt, or, history's invidious comparisons

1979, 1789, and 1848

March 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE UPRISING IN EGYPT, which followed soon after the toppling of the old regime in Tunisia, succeeded in bringing down Hosni Mubarak on February 11, the 32nd anniversary to the day of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Already, before this timely coincidence, comparisons between the Iranian Revolution and the revolts gripping the Arab world had started to be made. But other historical similarities offered themselves: the various “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and former Soviet Central Asian states and Lebanon in recent years, and the collapse of Communism in the Soviet bloc and beyond (the former Yugoslavia) starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. [Read More]

1789 1848 1917 Bonapartism Egypt Hosni Mubarak Iran Islamic Republic Karl Marx Marxism Revolution Walter Benjamin

"A Black Man Speaks of Marx"

The Sartre-Fanon Dialogues of the 1940s and 1950s

November 17, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

A talk held on November 17, 2010 at the University of Illinois. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Description In the years immediately following World War II French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon turned their attention to racism, anti-semitism and anti-black racism. Both men were engaged with both. Neither wrote from identity, but rather both sought to link their reflections to Marxism, to its failure and possible reconstitution. [Read More]

Anti-black racism Anti-Semite and Jew Anti-semitism Black Orpheus Black Skin White Masks Frantz Fanon Jean-Paul Sartre Karl Marx Marxism Racism Jean-Paul Sartre Wretched of the Earth

The Marxist hypothesis

A response to Alain Badiou's 'communist hypothesis'

November 6, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

Against Badiou ALAIN BADIOU’S RECENT BOOK (2010) is titled with the phrase promoted by his and Slavoj Žižek’s work for the last few years, “the communist hypothesis.”1 This is also the title of Badiou’s 2008 essay in New Left Review2 on the historical significance of the 2007 election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French Presidency.3 There, Badiou explains his approach to communism as follows: What is the communist hypothesis? [Read More]

Alain Badiou Communism Karl Marx Marxism Slavoj Žižek Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin

Chinoiserie

A critique of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA's 'New Synthesis'"

August 5, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Review of ‘Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage’, a Manifesto from the RCP, USA; and Raymond Lotta, Nayi Duniya, and K. J. A., ‘Alain Badiou’s ‘Politics of Emancipation’: A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World’ Demarcations 1 (Summer – Fall 2009). Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage. Lotta et al. is available online. Prologue DAVID BHOLAT ADOPTED, as epigraph for his essay “Beyond Equality,” the following passage from Joseph Schumpeter’s classic 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: [Read More]

Alain Badiou Bob Avakian Cultural Revolution David Bholat Joseph Schumpeter Immanuel Kant Vladimir Lenin Maoism Karl Marx Marxism RCP (USA) Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Against dogmatic abstraction

A critique of Cindy Milstein on anarchism and Marxism

July 1, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

AT THE LEFT FORUM 2010, held at Pace University in New York City in March, Cindy Milstein, director of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, spoke at a panel discussion on anarchism and Marxism, chaired by Andrej Grubacic, with fellow panelists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Andrew Curley. The topic of Milstein’s talk was the prospect for the “synthesis of anarchism and Marxism” today.1 The relation between anarchism and Marxism is a long-standing and vexing problem, for their developments have been inextricably intertwined. [Read More]

Anarchism Karl Marx Marxism Cindy Milstein

Book Review: Terry Eagleton, _Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate_

June 10, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009 STUDY THE STALLS OF A SEMINARY BATHROOM and chances are you will find the following scrawled out in ballpoint: “Nietzsche: God is Dead. God: Nietzsche is dead.” The quip relies on a misreading – God, for Nietzsche, did not die like your grandmother or pet turtle might die. God died like a language might die. In a secular world, belief becomes unbelievable. But the bathroom graffiti retains a bit of truth. [Read More]

Christopher Hitchens Karl Marx Terry Eagleton Religion Christianity

Adorno and Freud

The relation of Freudian psychoanalysis to Marxist critical social theory

June 10, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ADORNO’S HABILITATIONSSCHRIFT was on Kant and Freud. It ended with Marx. Why did Adorno think that Marx addressed the problems of both Kantian and Freudian accounts of consciousness? The distinction between Kant and Freud turns on the psychoanalytic concept of the “unconscious,” the by-definition unknowable portion of mental processes, the unthought thoughts and unfelt feelings that are foreign to Kant’s rational idealism. Kant’s “critical” philosophy was concerned with how we can know what we know, and what this revealed about our subjectivity. [Read More]

Sigmund Freud Immanuel Kant Karl Marx Theodor W. Adorno