Jameson

This thesis examines contemporary cosmetic surgery within a multidisciplinary feminist framework and is particularly interested in anti-ageing cosmetic surgery. It looks at many discursive and concrete examples of cosmetic surgery and casts a net that is inclusive of a wide variety ...

Final version: https://brill.com/abstract/book/edcoll/9789004362420/BP000011.xml
Recently attempts have been made to revive Hegel’s social and political thinking, combining Bildung with freedom. Making Bildung the explicit point of departure reveals Phenomenology of Spirit to be the most relevant reference. Reading the famous dialectics of the master and the servant, it has been common to highlight how Hegel associates the working with an object conceptually with Bildung. However Hegel consistently fails to use the word ‘Bildung’ in this context. Instead, he uses ‘Bilden’. It might very well be that for Hegel the thing is formed according to the laborer’s idea, and that consciousness is formed through the work, but that does not mean that consciousness achieves Bildung.
The most comprehensive philosophical reflections on Bildung in the Phenomenology is found in chapter VI, “The Spirit”. Here Bildung is closely intertwined with alienation, and in such a perspective freedom might not reconcile itself that easily, neither with reason nor with the state nor even with society. Hegel thus thinks of Bildung as a phenomenon not solely linked to the individual human being. Spirit is first of all realized as a people and a family, and as such spirit has political importance. Bildung, however, presupposes not only the experience of alienation, but also the expression of it. Language is thus a necessary condition for Bildung. Bildung requires higher education. A close reading of the account of Bildung in Hegel’s Phenomenology thus negate many interpretations of dialectics and philosophy of history in the slipstream of 20th century Marxism.

A partir de la producción teórica de W. Benjamin, Th. W. Adorno y F. Jameson, esta obra explicita un modo de interpretación del mundo cultural circundante que supera el deficiente carácter crítico del modelo hermenéutico de Heidegger y Gadamer. Se trata de una hermenéutica que toma como objeto los fragmentos de la vida social y cultural, descifrando en ellos elementos relevantes para la comprensión crítica de las transformaciones que definen el presente.

Ongoing discussion of this paper here: https://www.academia.edu/s/cf13d33860?source=link
Philosophy – whether traditional or contemporary – has nothing to say about the human metaphysical predicament, and cannot even offer a basic phenomenology of the human condition. Part of the problem is the ongoing confusion as to what philosophy actually amounts to, and what it can achieve. It is necessary to demystify philosophy, and have it restricted to the discipline of critical thinking, and it should not be thought of as possessing any substantial theoretical content of its own. It is a method, a skillset, a series of techniques, not a repository of various highbrow theories, whether about mind, epistemology, ontology, cosmology, science, or anything else. Metaphysics is an entirely distinct and separate field of inquiry, and concerns the human predicament, and ultimate human fulfilment, and it is to this end that critical thinking skills can usefully be applied. The purpose of this short study is to give some help to those hoping to gain an insight into the metaphysical realms of their being, and who would like some guidance with regard to those formal and academic disciplines supposedly geared to dealing with that very subject.

Article based on paper presented as part of Panel 24: ‘Looting, Refusing, Negating, Embodying’ ‘Critical Refusals’ Fourth Biennal Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society, University of Pennsylvania, 27-29th October 2011

http://www.pdcnet.org/radphilrev/content/radphilrev_2013_0016_0001_0375_0385

http://web.asc.upenn.edu/news/Critical_Refusals_Conference.pdf

In this paper I will first trace back Brandom’s understanding of alienation to his understanding of skepticism in the first and second parts of A Spirit of Trust. I will then analyze, in this light, his take on alienation as both a defective metaphysical structure and a meta-attitude and unveil some tensions that arise between these two aspects and are due to the prevalence of the latter. In the second part of my paper, I will develop some thoughts on the fact that Brandom seems to ignore the distinction between Entäußerung and Entfremdung, and thus, on the one hand, assigns to alienation only the negative meaning of estrangement (ignoring the structural process of alienation as externalization or objectification, which can assume both a negative and a positive meaning) and, on the other hand, conceives alienation basically as subjective alienation (ignoring the objective side of alienation as a structural phenomenon). Finally, I will argue that, once the distinction between Entäußerung and Entfremdung is taken into account, the relations both between alienation and domination and between alienation and work, and consequently the relation between Spirit and nature, should be reconsidered in a way that puts into question the bootstrapping model that Brandom supports.

Final version: https://brill.com/abstract/book/edcoll/9789004362420/BP000009.xml
The dialectical aspect in the work of Georges Bataille is often
neglected. At the suggestion of Foucault and Derrida, Bataille is most often
even taken to be a non-dialectical thinker. But Bataille worked intensely with
Hegel’s ideas, his thought was expressed in Hegelian terms, and both his
epistemology and his ontology can be considered a determinate negation
of Hegel’s position in the Phenomenology. This is shown, first, by analysing
Bataille’s notions of ‘inner experience’, and, second, by showing how Bataille
extends dialectics to the natural, non-human realm, and even conceives the
link between the human and non-human as itself dialectical. However, once
we see the dialectical nature of his theoretical stance, we are struck by a great
vagueness in his practical conception of where society ought to be going.

Final version: https://brill.com/abstract/book/edcoll/9789004362420/BP000010.xml
Tong Shijun holds a concept of dialectics which can also be found in Mao’s writings and in classical Chinese philosophy. Tong, however, is ambivalent in his attitude to dialectics in this sense, and for this reason he recommends Chinese philosophy to focus more on formal logic. My point will be that with another concept of dialectics Tong can have dialectics without giving up on logic and epistemology. This argument is given substance by an analysis of texts by Mao, Tong and Hegel.

Ondokuzuncu yüzyılın belki en büyük düşünürü olan Hegel de geride bıraktığı “ölümü” ve yapıtlarıyla yeniden anlamlandırılmak üzere bizi aynı büyüklükte karartan bir gölge düşürüyor üzerimize. Olgulara, dile, varlığa ve düşünmeye dönüş çağrılarıyla dolu yirminci yüzyıl felsefi bakımdan bir “dönüş”ler çağı olarak kapandı. Şimdi yirmibirinci yüzyılın başında, felsefi açıdan bakıldığında, daha en başta tarihsel bakımdan geçmiş çağların günümüze mirasının dökümü yapılmaya başlandığında bu işin nasıl yapılabileceğine dair ilk ve en büyük işareti “düşünce”nin de bir tarihi olduğunu bildiren Hegel vermektedir.

Thursday 9th Oct. at 6pm, by the classroom n. 3 of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Szeged, as part of the socalled "Oszi Kulturalis Fesztival", in the year of 50th anniversary of the publication of the book "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, will take place my lecture "Herbert Marcuse: 'One-Dimensional Man' 50 years later".

The book "One-Dimensional Man" turns 50. Of course in the book there are elements strictly close to the USA society of 60's, but what we have to seek for in those pages are the theoretical acquisitions (which make Marcuse interesting to read also, and especially, out from any kind of vogue, like that of ’68).
Those acquisitions contribute to delineate, from one side, the way from which the current society comes, and from the other, a possible trend in development that the nowadays society could/ought take.
The idea of a continuity in the evolution between the Totalitarian societies of XX cen. and the nowadays western democracies; the related new reconsideration of what is ideology; the main trait of this societal evolution as the rise of a new impersonal subject who leads power: no longer capital but technology, in front of which all of us (including those who have a high status in society, like a Prime Minister or the administrator of an international Corporation) are mere executioners.

(Lecture's language: English)

---

Oktòber 9-én délutàn 6 òrakor a SZTE BTK (Egyetem u. 2) 3-as teremben, az Oszi Kulturàlis Fesztivàl alkalmàbòl Herbert Marcuse Az egydimenziòs ember megjelenésének 50. évfordulòjàra eloadàst tartok "Herbert Marcuse: 'Az egydimenziòs ember' - 50 évvel késobb" cìmmel.

Federico Sollazzo (SZTE BTK Filozófia Tanszék) előadása angol nyelven.
Az egydimenziós ember című mű 50 éve íródott. Bár számos eleme a ’60-as évekbeli Egyesült Államok valóságához kapcsolódik, elméleti eredményeinek köszönhetően napjainkban is érdeklődésre tarthat számot. A evolutív folytonosság gondolata a huszadik század totalitárius társadalmai és a mai nyugati demokráciák között; annak szükségessége, hogy újra átgondoljuk, mi is az ideológia; a társadalmi evolúció alapvető jellemzője, hogy kialakult egy új személytelen hatalom: immár nem a tőke, hanem a technika, egy olyan hatalom, amelynek mindnyájan csupán végrehajtói vagyunk.
Federico Sollazzo posztdoktori kutató és óraadó az SZTE Filozófia Tanszékén.
http://www.arts.u-szeged.hu/szervezeti-felepites/munkatarsaink/dott-ph-federico

(Az eloadàs nyelve: angol)

Herbert Marcuse entendió la miseria del marxismo. Herbert Marcuse barruntó la miseria teórica y práctica del marxismo vía el sicoanálisis y el existencialismo: El inicio de la prehistoria en el siglo XXI con la sociedad del placer que superó a la sociedad de consumo. Lecturas de Jurgen Habermas. Mi artículo en el portal madrileño @Neupic, líder en el novedoso y revolucionario sistema del periodismo de autor, que es el Periodismo del siglo XXI, escribimos todos los Lunes y Viernes, síguenos …
https://neupic.com/articles/herbert-marcuse-entendio-la-miseria-del-marxismo
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Standing at the apex of the late 18th– early 19th century German Idealist tradition, contemporary thought has all but universally dismissed the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. Against this current this paper travels with those select few who today call for a serious re-examination of Hegel as the sought after theoretical foundation for true radical critique. To that end we unabashedly utilize Žižek's persuasive work to organize a re-reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel's most well-known and arguably single greatest work. We begin with its first chapter on sense-certainty to find that Hegel's discussion of language is still highly relevant; then travel through its key third chapter on the understanding to put it to use to undermine our continuing and highly counterproductive obsession with deep meaning; only to end with the mother of all Hegelian topics, Absolute Knowing, to find that it is not some absurd egotistical stance but quite possibly the most modest position a modern subject can assume. Stopping along the way to reconsider a few other 'figures of consciousness', this strategy – organized as it is under the twin topics of meaning and subjectivity – amounts to a non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach to the Phenomenology which simultaneously endeavors to theorize such a textual approach in general.

A distinction between an earlier and later Charles Taylor might be drawn between Charles Taylor the political activist versus Charles Taylor the intellectual. (1) Certainly the nature of the writing going on in a political tract like The Pattern of Politics (1970) (2) is at removes from intellectual forays into the malaise of modernity or the crisis of the self and identify. I won't attempt to square what an earlier Taylor says with a later Taylor. But Taylor's politics were local enough in the 1960s to make a book he wrote during that time pertinent 1o what I want to say about The Trotsky (2009), a film shot entirely in Montreal and engaged in its own way with "radical" Canadian politics. I am not applying a Taylorian reading to the film than suggesting that the film itself is a reading of this particular political text of Taylor's--that the movie ingests and thereby depicts some of us most pertinent lessons. Even if a later Taylor does not square with an earlier Taylor, what The Trotsky attempts is to make something like the politics of polarization matter once again, which is to say it attempts to reclaim some of the lessons put forward in The Pattern of Politics. One could also say this film attempts to reclaim the dialectic, in particular the notion that holds conflict (between clearly opposing viewpoints) as the lynchpin of social change. How the film reinterprets the dialectic will be considered here. The premise of the film that a young Montreal teenager, Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel), believes himself to be the living embodiment of Leon Trotsky reincarnated suggests it is not beyond the pale to think about things like having another's soul occupy one's body, and, from there, to consider whether the ontology of film facilitates a discussion of reincarnation (another's soul trapped in a body eerily present to us) or rather, something like the reverse (a different body occupying another's soul). I raise these examples in consideration of the ontological differences between what Cavell calls, simply, the "actor" (stage actor) and the "performer" (screen actor). What we might nowadays call 1960s (Canadian) "counterculture," auteuring a film explicitly aimed at the youth of Canada. Whether or not Pierre Trudeau is a galvanizing figure for today's youth or not, those who are curious to know him are likely to know him through Colm Fiore. I don't mean that Fiore's persona trumps Trudeau's. Indeed, Fiore interprets Trudeau the way a stage actor interprets a character. But Fiore, in interpreting Trudeau, is interpreting a star, or, say, Trudeau's star-like quality and not a character, To play the role of Trudeau, he must get his persona to match Trudeau's. Others may come along, not with "different" interpretations, but something like "better" impersonations. (4) Yet for a generation at least (or for a generation of Canadian youth interested in 1960s Canadian counterculture now), simply by having appeared to us as Trudeau on screen, Fiore's persona will invoke or be caught up with Trudeau (though not vice versa). Fiore is, or has achieved, a reincarnation of Trudeau. The [stage] actor's role is his subject (or study, and there is no end to it. But the screen performer is essentially not an actor at all: he is the subject of study, and a study not his own. (That is what the content of a photograph is--its subject.) On a screen the study is projected; on a stage the actor is the projector. An exemplary stage performance is one which, for a time, most fully creates a character. After Paul Scofield's performance in King Lear, we know who King Lear is, we have seen him in the flesh. An exemplary screen performance is one in which, at a time, a star is born. After The Maltese Falcon, we know a new star, only distantly a person. "Bogart" means "the figure created in a given set of films." His presence in those films is who he is, not merely in the sense in which a photograph of an event is that event; but in the sense that if those films did not exist, Bogart would not exist, the mane "Bogart" would not mean what it does. …

In the space of four years, from 1826 to 1829, the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal published three anonymous articles seemingly advocating doctrines inspired by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Decades of scholarship have initially attributed the most outspoken of the three articles, the 1826 "Observations on the Nature and Importance of Geology," to Robert Grant, and subsequently to Robert Jameson, thanks to a critical reassessment by James Secord (1991). More recently, scholars have also ascribed to Jameson an article published in 1829, "Of the Continuity of the Animal Kingdom by Means of Generation from the First Ages of the World to the Present Times." A third short contribution, the 1827 "Of the Changes which Life has Experienced on the Globe" has been credited to the Franco-German Ami Boué. Research undertaken over several years has led to the identification of the three authors hiding behind the veil of anonymity. They were not the ones scholars have agreed upon, nor were they really "Lamarckians." The discussion of the ways in which the three texts reached Edinburgh broadens our understanding of the daily working practices of contemporary periodicals and of the networks of circulation of texts at the Continental level. Finally, when considered within their proper conceptual and social context, the three articles throw light on the many ways in which, during the 1820s, European amateurs, naturalists, and journalists debated the succession of life forms throughout the history of the Earth.

This is n attempt to show how, contrary to A.L. Basham's understanding of the negation of negation, D.D. Kosambi drew the concept of negation from the story of the conversion of Sariputta and Moggallana after hearing Assajit's statement of the doctrine of the Buddha concerning 'nirodha'. Kosambi also said that the concept of the negation of negation could arise only in a more advanced society.

A distinction between an earlier and later Charles Taylor might be drawn between Charles Taylor the political activist versus Charles Taylor the intellectual.  Certainly the nature of the writing going on in a political tract like The Pattern of Politics (1970)  is at removes from intellectual forays into the malaise of modernity or the crisis of the self and identify. 

I won’t attempt to square what an earlier Taylor says with a later Taylor.  But Taylor’s politics were local enough in the 1960s to make a book he wrote during that time pertinent to what I want to say about The Trotsky (2009), a film shot entirely in Montreal and engaged in its own way with “radical” Canadian politics.  I am not applying a Taylorian reading to the film than suggesting that the film itself is a reading of this particular political text of Taylor’s—that the movie ingests and thereby depicts some of its most pertinent lessons.

Even if a later Taylor does not square with an earlier Taylor, what The Trotsky attempts is to make something like the politics of polarization matter once again, which is to say it attempts to reclaim some of the lessons put forward in The Pattern of Politics.  One could also say this film attempts to reclaim the dialectic, in particular the notion that holds conflict (between clearly opposing viewpoints) as the lynchpin of social change.  How the film reinterprets the dialectic will be considered here.

Paper presented at 'Practicing Theory - ASCA International Workshop and Conference 2011', Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, 2nd-4th March 2011 https://asca.uva.nl/programme/archive-conferences/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory.html?1583659550967

Sometimes boredom can be interesting, as in the case of David Hughes’s book, Walking the Dog. In this contribution, Greice Schneider addresses the challenges posed by the experience of reading this multifaceted work that stretches the “dialectics of repetition and difference”.

Critical theory was always characterised by a particular attempt to develop a general theory of society on the basis of an integrative approach characterised by a combination of philosophy and sociology and of normative and descriptive approaches. In Frankfurt, the original epicentre of this particular school of thought, this has however come to an end. Contemporary Frankfurt theorists essentially have abandoned the sociological and descriptive dimension and re-casted what is left of the Frankfurt School into a subdivision of Anglo-American analytical political philosophy. As apparent from the book under review and his entire oeuvre, Hauke Brunkhorst, the last of the Mohicans of real Frankfurt style critical theory, have always resented this development. He has therefore found himself in internal exile at the University of Flensburg, the intellectual equivalent of Siberia in the German academic context, for the last decades. The exceptionally brilliance of the book under review thereby confirms the old insight, which has been illustrated again and again throughout history, that the best books tend to be written in exile. Written by authors who did not correspond with the prevailing Zeitgeist but who nonetheless choose to stick to their guns.
The book literally begins by the dawn of man and ends with an analysis of the pressing problems and challenges characterizing contemporary society. As such the book also reads as a history of the world in its entirety at the same time as the its main focus is on four revolutionary processes: The Papal Revolution of the 11th and 12th centuries, the Protestant revolution of the 16th century; The Atlantic Revolution of the late 18th century and the Euro-Asian (in particular but not only the Chinese and Russian revolutions) of the early 20th century. Finally, as a fifth wave, the global transformations which came about through decolonisation and the transitions from authoritarianism and totalitarianism to democracy and human rights in the latter half of the 20th century are analysed. Full review available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00710.x/abstract