philosophy

Toni Negri and Michael Hardt’s recent works, Empire and Multitude, have earned these authors great popularity in the Anglo-Saxon world. Negri is known in Italy for belonging to autonomia operaia in the ’70s and for being on the receiving end of political persecution by the Italian state at the end of that decade. His earlier work (above all Marx Beyond Marx) was a valid contribution to the understanding of the nature of capitalism and influenced many among us who sought an answer to Marxist objectivism and a theory of history based on class struggle. However, Negri’s earlier work circulated among a restricted public, via obscure publishers. The new Toni Negri for the ‘new’ era emerges in 2000 with Empire. A tome written with literature professor Michael Hardt, Empire was warmly welcomed even by the bourgeois press.

In Aufheben #11 we published a critique of our articles on ‘decadence’ (from Aufheben issues 2-4) by the French group Théorie Communiste (TC). In the following issue we published our reply to TC’s critique. Since then we have had a number exchanges with TC in which they responded to our reply.

According to a commonplace, Judaism (and Islam) is a "pure" monotheism, while Christianity, with its Trinity, is a compromise with polytheism; Hegel even designates Islam as THE "religion of sublimity" at its purest, as the universalization of the Jewish monotheism:

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: THE PARALLAX VIEW

Žižek draws on Giorgio Agamben's notion of Homo sacer - someone who is biologically alive but deproved of all rights - in order to understand the rationales and causes of the 'war on terror'.

[i]America's "holiday from history" was a fake: America's peace was bought by the catastrophes going on elsewhere.

[b]This essay critiques classical anarchism using Nietzsche’s concept of ‘ressentiment’ and Michel Foucault’s ideas on power.

From Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) pp. 195-228 translated from the French by Alan Sheridan © 1977

The following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.

[b]This interview illustrates the move amongst the post-Leninist Italian radical left towards an anarchist view of the state, as well as Virno’s insistence that the concept of ‘multitude’ does not replace the concept of ‘working class’ and his controversial assertion that fear and insecurity – which he calls ‘precarity’ – define the globalised world.

An excerpt from the 2005 book State of Exception which serves as a good introduction to Agamben’s recent work on the nature of state power/sovereignty, as well as his dense and difficult style (5,000 words).

[b]In this interview Negri discusses the influence of Michel Foucault on his work, stating how as the radical Italian left drifted towards vanguardist armed struggle after 1968 [i]“we understood that this military drift was something which the movements would not be concerned with; and that it was not only a humanly unbearable choice, but also

This is a transcript of a 1972 conversation between the post-structuralist philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, which discusses the links between the struggles of women, homosexuals, prisoners etc to class struggle, and also the relationship between theory, practice and power (4,000 words).

[b]In this short essay Deleuze looks to move beyond Michel Foucault’s historical understanding of ‘disciplinary societies’, where power is exercised within discrete institutions, towards the concept of 'societies of control'.

Right, i know revol's a fan, and there's a couple of films/tv shows knocking about with him in (C4's Pervert's 'Guide to Cinema', the film 'Zizek!'), so wht not a thread.

Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Chimeres 17 (Paris, Fall 1992). It is printed in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Volume 18, Number 2, 1995, in honor of the late Felix Guattari. Hacked from it is printed form and publicized by korotonomedya in May 2002.

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Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. This article first appeared in Les Temps Modernes 46:539 (June 1991). It is printed in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 18, Number 2, 1995. Hacked from it is printed form and publicized by korotonomedya in May 2002.And subsequently thieved by us. Thanks people!

1. Spinoza, the Romantic

Philosophy of Right
G.W.F. Hegel

Translated by S.W Dyde

Source: Specters of Marx, the state of the debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge 1994

What is ideology? Can one translate with regard to it the logic of surviving that we have just glimpsed with regard to the patrimony of the idol, and what would be the interest of such an operation?