Anti-utopian and resolutely historical, Claude Lefort’s thought invites us to abandon all practical prescription, all direction, all programmatic formulation, in order to confront the present of politics in all its complexity, and to imagine from it new openings. [Continue reading here…]
Bernard E. Harcourt
31 posts
Many years ago, I wrote a book on Marx and endorsed the Lefortian analysis that rejected the reduction of civil to “bourgeois” society, embraced the emancipatory potentials unleashed in both civil society and the formally (if insufficiently) democratic state. Two developments since then call for more thinking on these topics. [Read more here…]
In February 1844, Marx published two articles in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher: “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” and “On the Jewish Question.” Together, these two articles push Marx, beyond the legal remedies that he had proposed in his 1842 articles on the thefts of wood, to call for revolution in Germany and human emancipation. This introduction begins to place these works in conversation with the writings of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort in preparation for our seminar with Professor Jean Louise Cohen of Columbia University. [Continue reading here…]
Foucault, alter-marxist? Return to the question of illegalisms: Law, history, and subjectivation Judith Revel Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne [NB: The original text in French is below, following this English translation] First and foremost, of course, I’d like to thank Bernard Harcourt for organizing this great seminar series – I was thinking this morning that I have taken part in five CCCCT seminars since 2016. This year is my sixth, and I’m delighted and proud of it, thank you. I can’t begin, however, without apologizing a little for my presence in this context: I’m not a Marx specialist, and what justifies […]
By Bernard E. Harcourt Marx’s articles titled “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” published in the Rheinische Zeitung in October and November 1842, were fetish texts among critical legal scholars, critical sociologists, Marxist historians, and radical lawyers during the late 1960s and 70s.[1] The articles do not typically appear in the canon of Marx’s political writings. They are absent, for instance, from the classic, exhaustive, American compendium, The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker—that thick red volume that every undergraduate in social studies carries with them. They are considered by some, following Louis Althusser, as still tainted […]
The content and concepts in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach model the kind of philosophical method and argumentative strategy that might serve us well today to get beyond, not the conservative Hegelian Idealism that dominated Marx’s intellectual milieu at the time, but the present political liberal hegemony that prevents collective cooperation and political action… [continue reading here]
In Marx 13/13, we return to Marx’s key texts and read them through the lens of world-historical interpretations that pushed Marxian thought and praxis in new directions: toward operaismo or workerism, Black Marxism, feminist, queer and transgender theories, postcolonialism, cultural studies, Freudian or Foucauldian strands of Marxism, as well as Leninist, Maoist, and social democratic forms of Marxism. [Continue reading here…]
André Gorz first used the term “décroissance” (degrowth) in 1972 as a hypothesis in an international conference he had organized in Paris, and it sowed an idea. It was picked up in 2004 (not long before Gorz’s death in 2007) by the main movement of anti-advertising and anti-consumerism campaigners in France, as a “punch word” (un mot coup-de-poing) title for their activist newspaper. From there it quickly became a polarizing slogan and the name of a large and diverse movement, many of whose members recognize Gorz as an intellectual forebearer. [Read more here]