Pub Date : 2023-11-26DOI: 10.1177/07255136231209545
Johan Trovik
This article reinterprets the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a retelling of the Christian myth of the Fall. Through its account of the aporia, which Horkheimer and Adorno maintain stands at its core, the Dialectic of Enlightenment rearticulates the doctrine of original sin. The human condition is presented as tragic, and the source of this tragedy is inscribed into the very structure of human subjectivity. While the Dialectic of Enlightenment refuses to abandon hope, emancipation is reconceptualised on the model of redemption; a kind of fulfilment of human nature, which would at the same time be an escape from it. Horkheimer and Adorno dispense, however, with any transcendent source of grace. Instead, the activity of philosophy itself takes on redemptive quality.
{"title":"Dialectical myth of the Fall","authors":"Johan Trovik","doi":"10.1177/07255136231209545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231209545","url":null,"abstract":"This article reinterprets the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a retelling of the Christian myth of the Fall. Through its account of the aporia, which Horkheimer and Adorno maintain stands at its core, the Dialectic of Enlightenment rearticulates the doctrine of original sin. The human condition is presented as tragic, and the source of this tragedy is inscribed into the very structure of human subjectivity. While the Dialectic of Enlightenment refuses to abandon hope, emancipation is reconceptualised on the model of redemption; a kind of fulfilment of human nature, which would at the same time be an escape from it. Horkheimer and Adorno dispense, however, with any transcendent source of grace. Instead, the activity of philosophy itself takes on redemptive quality.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139235883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-20DOI: 10.1177/07255136231212696
Harry Blatterer
{"title":"Interpreter of culture, conveyor of feel: Peter Beilharz’s musicality","authors":"Harry Blatterer","doi":"10.1177/07255136231212696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231212696","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139259680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-08DOI: 10.1177/07255136231209522
Thembisa Waetjen
Can a colonial archive render up form-of-life? To what ends? This essay explores these questions through a methodological exercise that casts a specific historical subject in the role of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘unspeakable girl’. The subject is a woman identified in a 1910 Cape Town police report as a habitual opium smoker. The unspeakable girl is a philosophical construction through which Agamben develops a concept of initiated (or initiating) knowledge. At stake in my forensic re/deconstruction of this case is how a concept of the ‘unspeakable’ may help to unsettle the figure of the ‘addict’ as a stigmatised object of knowledge and paternalism, in service of more humane policy and treatment regimes in the present. The transformative potential of initiating knowledge supports current practice as the ‘come as you are’ motto of harm reduction, and as a bridge between academic analysis and the more intimate concerns of the heart.
{"title":"A blue coat: The addict and the unspeakable girl in South Africa’s colonial archive","authors":"Thembisa Waetjen","doi":"10.1177/07255136231209522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231209522","url":null,"abstract":"Can a colonial archive render up form-of-life? To what ends? This essay explores these questions through a methodological exercise that casts a specific historical subject in the role of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘unspeakable girl’. The subject is a woman identified in a 1910 Cape Town police report as a habitual opium smoker. The unspeakable girl is a philosophical construction through which Agamben develops a concept of initiated (or initiating) knowledge. At stake in my forensic re/deconstruction of this case is how a concept of the ‘unspeakable’ may help to unsettle the figure of the ‘addict’ as a stigmatised object of knowledge and paternalism, in service of more humane policy and treatment regimes in the present. The transformative potential of initiating knowledge supports current practice as the ‘come as you are’ motto of harm reduction, and as a bridge between academic analysis and the more intimate concerns of the heart.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135392370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-08DOI: 10.1177/07255136231209519
Emanuel Copilaş
Owing to various reasons, Stalinism still represents, according to this essay, a fertile intellectual topic. Therefore, my aim here is to offer a reading of Pavel Campeanu’s works on Stalinism – a relatively unknown Romanian Marxist – through the social history of the Soviet Union in general and of Stalinism in particular advanced by Moshe Lewin. The argumentation advances by taking into account the overall historical frame of the debate (Eastern and Western Marxism during the Cold War) and by stressing some key issues like primitive accumulation, legitimacy, a certain overstretching of the concept of Stalinism and, finally, the issue of totalitarianism. The stake of the essay resides in claiming that Campeanu’s analyses of Stalinism, original and convincing as they are, may favor, in the above-mentioned issues, and regardless the author’s intentions, interpretations belonging to or deriving from the totalitarian school of Cold War and Soviet Studies.
{"title":"Reading Campeanu through Lewin: A contribution to the political history of Stalinism","authors":"Emanuel Copilaş","doi":"10.1177/07255136231209519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231209519","url":null,"abstract":"Owing to various reasons, Stalinism still represents, according to this essay, a fertile intellectual topic. Therefore, my aim here is to offer a reading of Pavel Campeanu’s works on Stalinism – a relatively unknown Romanian Marxist – through the social history of the Soviet Union in general and of Stalinism in particular advanced by Moshe Lewin. The argumentation advances by taking into account the overall historical frame of the debate (Eastern and Western Marxism during the Cold War) and by stressing some key issues like primitive accumulation, legitimacy, a certain overstretching of the concept of Stalinism and, finally, the issue of totalitarianism. The stake of the essay resides in claiming that Campeanu’s analyses of Stalinism, original and convincing as they are, may favor, in the above-mentioned issues, and regardless the author’s intentions, interpretations belonging to or deriving from the totalitarian school of Cold War and Soviet Studies.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135393311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-30DOI: 10.1177/07255136231199782
Jiayang Qin
The article ‘Aesthetic culture’ was written in 1908. Although it is in the same period as Soul and Form, in essence, the ideas expressed in this article go beyond the pure philosophy of life and the theory of form, which is different from the idealistic tendency of Lukács in this period. Moreover, ‘Aesthetic culture’ and History and Class Consciousness have ontological and epistemological consistency in subject–object relation and class consciousness. This was the first Marxist reflection of Lukács, and also a reliable sign that he was to join the Hungarian Communist Party 10 years later and turned to Marxism. By criticizing the paradox of aesthetic culture itself, Lukács tried to construct a culture as a whole as a category, and tried to solve the deep contradiction between the freedom of consciousness and the passive form of the subject in modern society. This kind of culture as a whole would be based on the class consciousness of the proletariat itself and take life as the main category, so as to provide the proletariat with practical theoretical conception to expand their space for living in bourgeois culture.
{"title":"The first Marxist reflection of Georg Lukács","authors":"Jiayang Qin","doi":"10.1177/07255136231199782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231199782","url":null,"abstract":"The article ‘Aesthetic culture’ was written in 1908. Although it is in the same period as Soul and Form, in essence, the ideas expressed in this article go beyond the pure philosophy of life and the theory of form, which is different from the idealistic tendency of Lukács in this period. Moreover, ‘Aesthetic culture’ and History and Class Consciousness have ontological and epistemological consistency in subject–object relation and class consciousness. This was the first Marxist reflection of Lukács, and also a reliable sign that he was to join the Hungarian Communist Party 10 years later and turned to Marxism. By criticizing the paradox of aesthetic culture itself, Lukács tried to construct a culture as a whole as a category, and tried to solve the deep contradiction between the freedom of consciousness and the passive form of the subject in modern society. This kind of culture as a whole would be based on the class consciousness of the proletariat itself and take life as the main category, so as to provide the proletariat with practical theoretical conception to expand their space for living in bourgeois culture.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136102712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-30DOI: 10.1177/07255136231199783
David Roberts
The following reflections, occasioned by Agnes Heller’s death, attempt to reconstruct Heller’s sense of temporality and historicity as the key to her rethinking of the idea of philosophy of history after the demise of the grand narratives in the form of a fragmentary philosophy of history and a theory of history.
{"title":"Agnes Heller: The time of your life","authors":"David Roberts","doi":"10.1177/07255136231199783","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231199783","url":null,"abstract":"The following reflections, occasioned by Agnes Heller’s death, attempt to reconstruct Heller’s sense of temporality and historicity as the key to her rethinking of the idea of philosophy of history after the demise of the grand narratives in the form of a fragmentary philosophy of history and a theory of history.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136102957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-27DOI: 10.1177/07255136231202057
Eduardo Enríquez Arévalo
Democracy is seen today as being in erosion or crisis both in the Global North and South. This article puts forward the concept of ‘dependent democracy’ in order to explain that much of the lack of success of democracy in the South in guaranteeing political participation and economic inclusion and wellbeing for the majority of the population is due to a specific tendency of democracy there. Adapting some insights from the more economics focused Dependency theory towards a more contemporary point of view from political sociology and international political sociology, dependent democracy is understood as a democracy that exists in a subaltern position within the hierarchical, post-imperial and neo-imperial global capitalist order. Dependent democracies thus tend to be less ‘democracies’ and more ‘oligarchies’ within a form of government in the South that can be understood as existing in a global pyramid of semi-peripheries, middle peripheries and outer peripheries.
{"title":"Towards a theory of dependent democracy","authors":"Eduardo Enríquez Arévalo","doi":"10.1177/07255136231202057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231202057","url":null,"abstract":"Democracy is seen today as being in erosion or crisis both in the Global North and South. This article puts forward the concept of ‘dependent democracy’ in order to explain that much of the lack of success of democracy in the South in guaranteeing political participation and economic inclusion and wellbeing for the majority of the population is due to a specific tendency of democracy there. Adapting some insights from the more economics focused Dependency theory towards a more contemporary point of view from political sociology and international political sociology, dependent democracy is understood as a democracy that exists in a subaltern position within the hierarchical, post-imperial and neo-imperial global capitalist order. Dependent democracies thus tend to be less ‘democracies’ and more ‘oligarchies’ within a form of government in the South that can be understood as existing in a global pyramid of semi-peripheries, middle peripheries and outer peripheries.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136262089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-27DOI: 10.1177/07255136231206181
Lorenzo Veracini, Dan Tout
Federated Australia was seen for a long time as a significant social ‘laboratory’. The Commonwealth itself was seen as an ‘experiment’. This widespread metaphor relied on a particular pattern of perception: the country was ‘new’ (it was not), and the country was allegedly isolated (it was not, at least not completely). Many believed that its social environment could be controlled, like that of a scientific laboratory. A laboratory is designed to shut all disturbances out – the value of the data and experiments depends on it. This article outlines this metaphor in the context of Australian history during the 20th century, its rhetorical power and what made it discursively possible.
{"title":"The negative Commonwealth: Australia as ‘laboratory’, then and now","authors":"Lorenzo Veracini, Dan Tout","doi":"10.1177/07255136231206181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231206181","url":null,"abstract":"Federated Australia was seen for a long time as a significant social ‘laboratory’. The Commonwealth itself was seen as an ‘experiment’. This widespread metaphor relied on a particular pattern of perception: the country was ‘new’ (it was not), and the country was allegedly isolated (it was not, at least not completely). Many believed that its social environment could be controlled, like that of a scientific laboratory. A laboratory is designed to shut all disturbances out – the value of the data and experiments depends on it. This article outlines this metaphor in the context of Australian history during the 20th century, its rhetorical power and what made it discursively possible.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136262238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}