Dismissing Dialectic of Enlightenment Among Britain’s New Left

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
Howard Prosser
Keyword(s):  
New Left ◽  
Dialectic Of Enlightenment

Adam Smith en Pekín. Orígenes y fundamentos del siglo xxi de Giovanni Arrighi

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (153) ◽  
Author(s):  
HUGO RODAS MORALES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
New Left ◽  
Fredric Jameson

Este libro completa otro, cuyo título destaca el largo periodo que estudia: The Long Twentieth Century. Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994), adoptado elogiosamente por la teoría posmoderna —“Cultura y capital financiero” de Fredric Jameson—. El que se reseña fue anticipado parcialmente a los lectores de los números 20 y 32 de la conocida publicación internacional New Left Review, en 2003. Del declive militarista euroestadounidense y el prometedor ascenso social y capitalista chino deriva esta mirada occidental (auto)crítica que anticipa sus desafortunadas páginas finales: declarar que Smith y Marx no han sido bien comprendidos reduce toda obra interpretativa anterior sobre dos océanos de conocimiento y otros tantos de errores.

The Thanatosis of Enlightenment

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-106
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
Phenomenological Theory ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
Methodological Errors ◽  
Psychological Models ◽  
History Of ◽  
Living Nature ◽  
Dialectic Of Enlightenment

The article analyzes methodological errors Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, particularly their incorrect use of the concepts of mimicry and mimesis. The author of the article maintains that the leaders of the Frankfurt School made a mistake that threatens to undermine their argument when they juxtaposed mimesis and the attraction to death, which has led philosophers to trace back to mimesis the desire for destruction that is found in a civilization constructed by instrumental reasoning. The author reviews the arguments of the Dialectic of Enlightenment and emphasizes the unsuccessful attempt to fuse Freudian and Hegelian methods, which exposes the instability of opposing scientific reasoning to “living” nature. Some amusing quotations from Roger Caillois, who refused to think of mimesis as something entirely rational, are also brought to bear. As Brassier gradually unfolds Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis, he indicates the consequences of their mistake, which confined thinkers to the bucolic dungeon of “remembering” the authentic nature that they cannot abandon because they have denied themselves access to both reductionist psychological models and to phenomenological theory as such. Brassier delineates the boundaries of this trap and notes the excessive attachment of the Dialectic of Enlightenment to the human. Brassier goes on to describe the prospects for a civilization of enlightenment: a mimesis of death in both senses (death imitates and is imitated) finds its highest expression in the technological automation of the intellect, which for Adorno and Horkheimer means the final implementation of the self-destructive mind. However, for Brassier it means the rewriting of the history of reason in space. This topological rewriting of history, carried out through an enlightenment, reestablishes the dynamics of horror more than mythical temporality: it will become clear that the human mind appears as the dream of a mimetic insect.

A Divided Public Space?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Chow
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
New Left ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Chinese Christianity ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Chapter 5 looks at how these Christian public theologians compare with other public intellectuals of this period. Because of its significance for our period, the chapter also tries to tease out some of the details of the different intellectual factions that have formed since the late 1990s, paying particular attention to the two major political groupings of ‘new left’ (xin zuo pai) and ‘liberalism’ (ziyou zhuyi). Whilst the revived interests in Confucianism and Christianity are sometimes considered two other factions during this time, the chapter shows how the four schools have much more porous boundaries than is often recognized. The chapter further argues how a ‘Confucian imagination’ shapes various developments in contemporary China, whether this be public intellectualism, generally, or Chinese Christianity, specifically.

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Brazil
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
New Left ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
William Gaddis ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War up to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.

Political Cleavages and Political Parties

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell J. Dalton
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
New Left ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Policy Choices

This chapter uses the cleavage positions of Candidates to the European Parliament (CEPs) to as representative of their parties’ political positions. Three surveys of CEPs track the evolution of party supply in European party systems. In 1979 parties were primarily aligned along a Left–Right economic cleavage. Gradually new left and Green parties began to compete in elections and crystallized and represented liberal cultural policies. In recent decades new far-right parties arose to represent culturally conservative positions. The cross-cutting cultural cleavage has also prompted many of the established parties to alter their policy positions. In most multiparty systems, political parties now compete in a fully populated two-dimensional space. This increases the supply of policy choices for the voters. The analyses are based on the Candidates to the European Parliament Studies in 1979, 1994, and 2009.

The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War

1973 ◽  
Vol 1 (9) ◽  
pp. 196-197
Author(s):  
Richard H. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
New Left ◽  
The Cold War
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