Book Description
Enrique Ambrosini Dussel is and has been one of the most prolific Latin American philosophers of the last 100 years. This is the definitive English language collection of Dussel's enormous body of work in ethics, economics, history, and liberation theology.
Customer Reviews:
Theorizing Liberation from the Underside of Modernity.......2006-02-20
Enrique Ambrosini Dussel is arguably one of the greatest living Latin American philosophers and among the short list of leading radical philosophers globally over the last century. Born in Argentina in 1934, Dussel has been residing as an exile in Mexico since the 1970s. His moving reflections in the Preface to the book under review recount the political reasons for his exile and hint at the underlying problems preventing the actualization of liberation that Dussel's theoretical works seek to solve: "In 1973, I suffered a bomb attempt in my house, with my wife and children, because I expressed opinions such as those expressed in the texts here collected; in 1975, I was expulsed from my university and from Argentina for criticizing a military dictatorship put in power by CIA recommendation, one placed under Kissinger's strategy, whom the Spanish judge Garzón does not judge, but who was the explicit and public inspiration for Pinoché, Videla, and so many dictators of the period. It was Kissinger who began the international politics and pure doctrine of the `defense of North American interests' without any reference to ethical principles. Thus, I began my long exile in Mexico."
Much of my own introduction into Dussel's life and work comes most intimately through his involvement with the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) and his attempt to bridge the work being done by scholar-activists in Latin America with the efforts of those in the Caribbean. Dussel is the author of more than fifty books and a staggering number of articles, position papers, and books chapters whose subject matters includes areas as wide-ranging as political theory, philosophy, postcolonial thought, church history, liberation theology, ethics, and Marxism. Among his previous groundbreaking books available in English translation are A HISTORY OF THE CHURCH IN LATIN AMERICA, THE INVENTION OF THE AMERICAS, and THE UNDERSIDE OF MODERNITY. Sadly, as a result of our current age that privileges works composed in English and dissuades persons from working in several languages, the vast majority of Dussel's texts have remained in the original Spanish and accessible only to those who read texts in that language. English readers are thus indebted to Eduardo Mendieta for a wonderful translation of a selection of Dussel's important essays.
Dussel's BEYOND PHILOPHY (2003) echoes the Marxian injunction that political action can only take place "beyond" the realm of the philosophical. Political action for those situated at the "underside of modernity" as a result of the invention of the Americas in 1492 requires attentiveness to thinking about the causes of post-1492 disorder and methods for overcoming the adverse effects of slavery, colonialism, and their aftermaths. Dussel rejects the notion of a singular modernity ushered in by Enlightenment Europe. He suggests the idea of multiple modernities worldwide, a "trans-modernity" as he terms it. Blending Latin American liberation theology with the ideas of thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Dussel develops a compelling case for why Latin American thought is relevant for a global audience.
The book is divided into four parts, and it contains brilliant essays with titles such as "The `World System': Europe as `Center' and Its `Periphery' beyond Eurocentrism" (Ch. 3), "Exodus as a Paradigm in Liberation Theology" (Ch. 6), "Racism: A Report on the Situation in Latin America" (Ch. 7), "Modern Christianity in Face of the `Other' (from the `Rude' Indian to the `Noble Savage')" (Ch. 12), and "Was America Discovered or Invaded?" (Ch. 13). Make no mistake: this book does not address all of Dussel's important theoretical formulations. This latter statement is perhaps the most amazing, given that a mere sampling of Dussel's essays here far exceeds the insights of many other thinkers. BEYOND PHILOSOPHY is intended to be read as a companion text to an earlier volume of essays on Dussel's thought edited by Linda Martín Alcoff and Eduardo Mendiata entitled THINKING FROM THE UNDERSIDE OF HISTORY (2000).
In closing, if you seek an introduction into the political thought of a major thinker of our time, then I feel confident in recommending this book without hesitation. BEYOND PHILOSOPHY will open your minds to a radical, alternative account of human liberation. Hopefully, this shall also lead you to read additional texts by Dussel and embrace the Dusselian belief that liberation begins after rigorous philosophical reflection on the Other ends.
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The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond
Boris Groys
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
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ASIN: 0691055963 |
Book Description
As communism collapses into ruins, Boris Groys provokes our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists' demands that art should move from depicting to transforming the world. The revolutionaries of October 1917 promised to create a society that was not only more just and more economically stable but also more beautiful, and they intended that the entire life of the nation be completely subordinate to Communist party leaders commissioned to regulate, harmonize, and create a single "artistic" whole out of even the most minute details. What were the origins of this idea? And what were its artistic and literary ramifications? In addressing these issues, Groys questions the view that socialist realism was an "art for the masses." Groys argues instead that the "total art" proposed by Stalin and his followers was formulated by well-educated elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the future-oriented logic of avant-garde thinking. After explaining the internal evolution of Stalinist art, Groys shows how socialist realism gradually disintegrated after Stalin's death. In an undecided and insecure Soviet culture, artists focused on restoring historical continuity or practicing "sots art," a term derived from the combined names of socialist realism (sotsrealizm) and pop art. Increasingly popular in the West, sots-artists incorporate the Stalin myth into world mythology and demonstrate its similarity to supposedly opposing myths.
Book Description
A key figure in the Italian “Autonomia” Movement reads Marx's Gründrisse, developing the critical and controversial theoretical apparatus that informs the “zero-work” strategy and other elements so crucial to this new and “heretical” tendency in Marxist theory. A challenge to both capitalist and socialist apologists for waged slavery.
Customer Reviews:
An entire course taught by Toni Negri!.......2003-08-12
This book consists of 9 transcribed lectures; 3 introductions by 3 different authors; and a preface by Negri, written from his prison cell. The 9 lectures form a coherent course on Marx's increasingly-influential collection of notebooks, 'The Grundrisse.' If you do not already own 'The Grundrisse,' then you should definitely buy it with this book by Negri. Because Negri's lectures consist of a college course on 'The Grundrisse.' He even specifies the order in which he will discuss the book, listing the pages to read in preparation for each lecture. So this book, MBM, really provides its readers with a tremendous opportunity: to take a lecture course on Marx taught by Toni Negri!
Through these lectures Negri provides a very unorthodox, very sophisticated and politically powerful reading of Marx. Ultimately, you must understand Negri's reading of Marx to fully understand Negri's own theoretical analyses, developed most recently in 'Politics of Subversion,' 'Labor of Dionysus,' 'Empire,' and 'Time for Revolution.' ('Empire' was co-written by Michael Hardt, and LD includes some early essays by Negri and a book-length analysis co-authored by Negri & Hardt.)
Negri is not an orthodox Marxist. He speaks openly of communism, but of communism here and now, of communism as an ongoing revolutionary process -- not as a state or government or even as an "economic system." As far as I know, he was never a member of the CP, and never embraced "state socialism" or the so-called communism of the USSR or PRC.
Nor is Negri a terrorist, as the Italian state charged. Indeed, his criticism of terrorism is the sharpest criticism and most coherent critique of terrorism I have ever read. See 'Communists Like Us: New Lines of Alliance' for an example of his writing on the subject. And for a courtroom transcript, see the (nicely-bound!) Red Notes collection of Negri's writings, 'Revolution Retrieved.' In that transcript, you see that Negri's criticism of terrorism actually get used as evidence against him, in an unbelievable echo from Orwell's '1984.' (Sadly, it is all too easy to imagine Ashcroft making the very same argument today.)
In any case, if you're up for a college course on the Grundrisse, taught by Negri, read this book! And/or, if you really want to understand Negri's theoretical framework, and his analysis of capitalism, then read this book!
My only criticism is with the binding. Like so many books today, the binding breaks all too easily. And due to the nature of this book's content, if you really put it to use, you will be referring to the book again and again as you read 'The Grundrisse' and other related books and writings. Just to understand Negri in this book, it takes some repeated reading of sections. So treat the book carefully. It does, however, have a great cover design, and a great choice of blurbs on the back.
A final note to the folks at Autonomedia, if you're reading this: it's great that you've published this, and that you continue to do so. But really, better binding would be much appreciated. I've went through two copies myself. If you'd like to see an example of excellent binding in paperback book, see the Red Notes book of Negri's writings. If you could do something like that -- with nicely-sewn signatures -- even in just a limited run, say for a deluxe edition of MBM, I suspect people would buy it. Hell, I would cherish it.
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Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post Modernism and Beyond (Key Contemporary Thinkers)
Douglas Kellner
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
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ASIN: 0804717389 |
Customer Reviews:
Critical but excellent.......2004-11-23
Kellner is highly critical of Baudrillard's turn from Marxist/political solutions to a kind of techno-nihilism but the book is a great review and analysis of Baudrillard's work; it is much easier to read this book with many passages from Baudrillard's own writings with Kellner's critical but complete commentaries than to read some of the horribly translated works of Baudrillard out there. Baudrillard read's more like a sci-fi dystopian at times-his theory of the code and his use of the term Matrix (pre-movie) is very interesting stuff. This is a great introduction to a cutting edge philosophy that provocatively analyzes our current capitalistic and media saturated society.
Book Description
A completely reworked edition of his classic volume, Michael Lebowitz's Beyond Capital explores one of the great debates among Marx scholars, that of the implications of Marx's uncompleted works. Lebowitz focuses on the side of the workers, which, he argues, was not developed in Marx's Das Kapital and which was to be the subject of his intended book on wage-labor. Beyond Capital criticizes the one-sidedness of much of Marxist thought and argues that Marx's political economy of the working class and the way in which human beings produce themselves through their struggles are central for going beyond capital.
Customer Reviews:
Brilliant and devastating.......2006-05-12
Michael Lebowitz, Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser in Vancouver, has been able to do with this book what no theoretician has done in decades: he has actually added to Marx and the Marxist view of society, explaining what Marx left out of "Capital", and showing what the importance of the missing parts of Marxist theory is.
The crux of the book is this: "Capital", says Lebowitz, is essentially a one-sided book. It brilliantly explains the Marxist view of the political economy of capitalism, but only from the side of capital. This one-sided view of society has led to many errors and a constant problem with economism. Lebowitz, however, is able to show that what is missing is (among other things!) a view of capitalism from the vantage point of wage-labour.
This of itself is already quite groundbreaking. But the book goes on to explain the consequences of this (wilful) omission, and shows how viewing the capitalist society from the point of view of wage-labour allows us to solve or at least clarify many issues that have bothered Marxists for many decades. Among these are:
- What place the class struggle can have in the 'closed' system of capitalism;
- What the meaning is of the reproduction of the labourer by means of his wage;
- The theory of capitalist crises from the view of the wage-labourer;
- How the rising real wages of labourers in history since Marx in no way refutes Marxism, and how it is in fact compatible with the immiseration ("Verelendung");
- What the role of capital is in the problem of unpaid domestic labour on the part of wife and children in patriarchal family relations;
- Why (as reviewer Byars pointed out) socialism is not inevitable, and yet can be a more rational and productive system from the view of the wage-labourer;
- And why capitalism always tries to create new needs for wage-labourers, and at once always must fail to fulfil them.
Lebowitz has done a masterful job and the book is written in clear language, though a basic understanding of "Capital" and the Marxist view of political economy is certainly needed to understand the book. All who profess Marxism or are even slightly interested in Marx' views for economic or historical reasons must have this book on their shelf. For the value you get out of it, the price is a steal.
Book Description
"Not only profound in its analysis, but also so passionately inspired by sympathy for the downtrodden and their struggle for liberation. . ."
--Daniel Singer, The Nation
"This is an important book, heavy in size and tone. It belongs in every serious library."
--Choice
Customer Reviews:
our instrumentality in the sickness of the totality.......2000-04-16
If the author isn't a genius, and I'll say he is, he at least has the elements of genius at his disposal. He has read, of both the good and the bad, and this book is an expression of his bioligical and spiritual drive to let us know about the variables we are dealing with in our project to kill pain and feel pleasure, enhance cognition and engage sensuality. Everyone who's brain's structure is remotely similar to mine might want to read this book. Unless you've been lucky enough to be immersed in the depths of the realest and most dream-logical philosophy for your whole life, in which case you could conceivably know the material in Beyond Capital. Even so, reading the book would be a reminder, as if you need reminders.
Customer Reviews:
A wise book by a truly productive and wonderful human being........1999-06-30
Get a copy of this book. It can change your life. A must read before you leave the face of this earth. An insightful and wise view of life, other people and the world you live in. Fromm is the best. Thank God he lived and wrote everything down for us, and all we have to do is learn from it. After Fromm, you have no excuses for not "getting it".
A wise book by a truly productive and wonderful human being........1999-06-30
Get a copy of this book. It will change your life. A must read before you leave the face of this earth. A refreshing look at yourself, other people and the world you live in. Fromm is the best!
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Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (Critics of the Twentieth Century)
Renate Holub
Manufacturer: Routledge
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0415075106 |
Book Description
Antonio Gramsci examines the influential work of the great Italian thinker. Renate Holub seeks to reclaim Gramsci from classical Marxism, and instead places him in the broad European critical context--alongside the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, and sociolinguistics. This book points to Gramsci's affinities with the cultural theories inscribed in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Bloch, Brecht, Benjamin). It also establishes affinities between Gramsci's linguistic and phenomenological forms of knowledge.
Placing Gramsci in this broader context evokes the immense conceptual and methodological complexity of his work, a complexity Holub discusses in terms of "differential pragmatics." It is this very complexity which is, the author claims, relevant today when constructing our own critical theories. Faced with the transnationalization of capital, the centralization of monetary and economic power, and the decentralization of production processes, a critical theory today must investigate, in the context of information technology, the possibilities of alternative positions to such an order. Gramsci's methodological itineraries are more useful, this book argues, than other critical theories in developing ways of seeing and doing that are commensurate with the complexities of this era.
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Above and Beyond: From Soviet General to Ukrainian State Builder (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Publications)
Kostiantyn P. Morozov , and
Sherman W. Garnett
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
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ASIN: 0916458776 |
Book Description
Above and Beyond is the first book to appear in the West by a major Ukrainian independence figure and is the first by a former Soviet general to discuss the inner workings of the USSR's military. Morozov provides behind-the-scenes insights on Yeltsin, Kuchma, Dudaev, and other important players still active today. His book will firmly alter our perception of the USSR and its demise, the Soviet military machine, and the rise of modern, independent Ukraine.
In September 1991 Major General Kostiantyn Morozov informed the Soviet Armed Forces Command that he was no longer a Soviet general, but the new Ukrainian Minister of Defense. He then set out to create the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF), mounting a brilliant campaign to remove from Ukraine military personnel who were not Ukrainian citizens and not loyal to the new Ukrainian state, taking over the Ukrainian-based assets, nuclear and otherwise, of the Soviet Army, and firmly grounding the idea of an independent UAF in the public mind. Within a year of assuming his post, he was overseeing the second-largest army in Europe and the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The shock waves of his efforts would eventually lead Vladimir Zhirinovsky to put Morozov at the top of his "hit list" of those responsible for destroying the USSR.
Morozov guided his forces through a minefield of intrigues as various figures sought to undermine the UAF and subordinate it to the armed forces of the CIS and, therefore, to Russia. He stood as an important figure in the political landscape for his blunt candor and total devotion to Ukrainian sovereignty. This was especially remarkable because Morozov was ethnically half-Russian (or so he thought), spoke no Ukrainian, and came from the eastern part of Ukraine, long believed to be faithful to Russia and Soviet rule.
Book Description
There are wide disparities of wealth between the different regions of China. The result has been increased tension between ethnic groups and serious divisions between China's provinces. This book offers a balanced assessment of the dynamics and consequences of the decentralization of power and resources in post-Mao China. The author argues that increasing decentralisation has unleashed much competition and emulation among local governments. He discusses also the impact on regional disparities and cleavages, and government efforts to address regional disparities. This book is an authoritative study of an issue that will remain highly visible on China's political agenda for the foreseeable future.
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Philosophy of Liberation
The Idea of Latin America (Blackwell Manifestos)
Thinking from the Underside of History
A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation
Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates
