Tag: Politics
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Of an Alien Homecoming: Reading Heidegger’s “Hölderlin”
This study establishes, with unusual steadiness and reach, how the problem of homecoming under estrangement becomes the pivotal relay between Heidegger’s thinking and Hölderlin’s poetizing across the decisive years 1934–1948. Its distinctive contribution lies in reconstructing the inner logic by which figures of journeying, the river, the withheld homeland, and the passage through the foreign…
S. Gros
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Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Volume II: The Lectures of 1830–1831
Hodgson’s edition and Brown’s translation of Hegel’s 1830–1831 Lectures on the Philosophy of World History stake a precise claim: they deliver Hegel’s last, most worked-through public articulation of how world history can be grasped as rational—neither as an imposed schema nor as a string of contingencies—by reconstructing the movement whereby spirit comes to know itself…
S. Gros
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Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Frank Ruda’s Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right proposes that the seemingly marginal figure of “the rabble” is not an incidental social pathology but the pressure point at which Hegel’s entire political architecture—civil society, the state, and the ethical life that binds them—reveals its internal limit. The book’s distinctive contribution lies in…
S. Gros
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‘The Unconscious’ by Sigmund Freud
Freud’s The Unconscious stakes a rigorously delimited claim within the metapsychological project: to sort, with clinical economy and conceptual pressure, the diverse meanings of unconscious and to anchor them to an evidential grammar—dream-work, symptom-formation, slips, fetishistic substitutions, ambivalence of the drives, and the economy of repression—so that the psyche’s most elusive processes can be specified…
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‘In Defense of Lost Causes’ by Slavoj Žižek
In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Žižek is a sweeping philosophical manifesto that boldly confronts the prevailing liberal-democratic consensus, advocating for a re-engagement with radical politics and the revolutionary ideals of the past. Žižek’s work is both a critical examination and a daring re-evaluation of historical totalitarian movements, aiming to uncover and revitalize their…
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‘Nietzsche’ by Martin Heidegger | 4 Volumes
Heidegger’s four-volume Nietzsche undertakes a rigorous, philologically attentive, and architectonically ambitious determination of Nietzsche’s position within the history of Western metaphysics. Its distinctive scholarly stake lies in showing how the triad will to power–eternal recurrence of the same–revaluation of values coheres as a single meta-conceptual decision about beings as a whole, one that consummates metaphysics…
S. Gros
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The Collected Works of Karl Marx & Frederick Engels (MECW)
The Marx/Engels Collected Works (MECW) is an unparalleled compendium of the intellectual legacy and revolutionary spirit of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, extending from the early years of their careers in 1835 through to Engels’ death in 1895. This monumental collection, spanning fifty volumes, represents the most extensive and comprehensive translation into English of their…
S. Gros
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G.W.F. Hegel: The Berlin Phenomenology
The Berlin Phenomenology presents, in a compact and rigorously articulated register, a doctrine of consciousness that is at once internal to the Encyclopaedia’s systematic architecture and responsive to the empirical texture of the human sciences. Its distinctive scholarly stake lies in exhibiting how consciousness, treated not as a free-standing tribunal but as a domain continuous…
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Kant, Adorno, and the Forms of History
William S. Allen’s Kant, Adorno, and the Forms of History advances a rigorously argued thesis: that the problem of historical intelligibility is inseparable from the problem of form, and that this inseparability can be brought to conceptual clarity only by threading together Kant’s third Critique, Adorno’s aesthetics and philosophy of history, and the historically saturated…
S. Gros
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The Problem of Religion, Christianity, and the Role of Protestantism in the Philosophy of the Early Hegel (1795–1806)
Hinging its argument on the early Hegel’s struggle to convert religious inheritance into a generative logic of system, Dr. Imre Bártfai’s study isolates religion—Christianity in general and Protestantism in particular—as a constructive problem-space through which moral aspiration, civic motivation, and speculative method are successively refashioned from Tübingen through Bern and Frankfurt into Jena. The work’s…
S. Gros
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Marx’s Not-Capital: Labour and the Contemporary Critique of Political Economy
Benjamin Tetler’s Marx’s Not-Capital: Labour and the Contemporary Critique of Political Economy stakes a precise claim within Marx scholarship: the recovery, systematization, and methodological testing of Marx’s scattered determinations of labour as not-capital and value as not-value, drawn from the preparatory manuscripts to Capital, in order to reorient critique away from the affirmation of labour…
S. Gros
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The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza’s Philosophy: The God-Intoxicated Heretic
Yuval Jobani’s The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza’s Philosophy: The God-Intoxicated Heretic reframes the canonical image of Spinoza’s seamless Euclidean rationalism by arguing, with relentless textual attention, that contradiction is neither an embarrassment to be harmonized away nor an exoteric smokescreen, but a constitutive motor of Spinoza’s project—governing the political architecture of revised religion in…
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Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution
Rebecca Comay’s Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution stakes a precise claim: that the philosophical architecture of German Idealism, and Hegel’s in particular, bears the imprint of a revolution experienced at once intimately and vicariously, as an event whose terror and promise were registered in Germany through displacement, delay, and symptomatic re-enactment. Its distinctive…
S. Gros
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Marxian Totality: Inverting Hegel to Expound Worldly Matters
The declared ambition of Marxian Totality: Inverting Hegel to Expound Worldly Matters is methodological before it is doctrinal. Its opening gesture situates the project in a landscape where Marx’s intellectual preeminence sits uneasily alongside theoretical disarray on the Left; from this discrepancy Boveiri extracts a single wager: that clarity about totality—what it is, how it…
S. Gros
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Franz Kafka: The Castle
The Castle advances a rigorously meditated problem of access, authorization, and interpretability, elaborated with a precision that binds the sensory density of village life to an ever-receding horizon of jurisdiction housed, by communal consensus, on the hill. Its distinctive contribution is to bind the phenomenology of waiting, the grammar of petition and reply, and the…
S. Gros
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‘On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: The 1934-35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays’ by Martin Heidegger
On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: The 1934–35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays is one of the most unsettling and indispensable documents of twentieth-century philosophy, precisely because it places Martin Heidegger’s thought at the crossroads where metaphysics, politics, and history converge in a moment of fateful intensity. Emerging from the winter semester of 1934–35 at Freiburg, just…
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Letters: 1925-1975 by Hannah Arendt & Martin Heidegger
The volume that gathers the correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger from 1925 to 1975 is not simply a compendium of private sentiments made public, but an exacting, often disquieting dossier of the twentieth century’s conceptual crises refracted through the most intimate medium two thinkers share: a practice of writing that tests the limits…
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Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin-Heidegger-Celan
In Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin–Heidegger–Celan, the reader is drawn into an unusually deep reflection that insists on bringing poetry and philosophy face to face with the most pressing questions of ethics, law, and the hidden exigencies of what it means to measure the immeasurable. The volume ventures beyond any conventional moral or…
S. Gros
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The Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a book that resists every straightforward description while obliging the reader to submit to its singular logic of unfolding, a logic that moves neither by pure exposition nor by narrative in the ordinary sense, but by a methodical, internally impelled transition through shapes of consciousness that are at once lived…
S. Gros
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‘Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism’ by Slavoj Žižek
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism presents itself less as a commentary redundantly installed upon the edifice of German Idealism than as the staging ground for an experiment in the conditions of thinking when the ground itself is withdrawn. The book’s wager holds that the only way to register the philosophical…
S. Gros
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Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency
Allen Speight’s Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency can be approached as a rigorous attempt to recover the inner architecture of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by taking at face value what many readers have treated as merely ornamental: Hegel’s insistent, even obstinate, recourse to literature at decisive junctures of the argument. The wager is…
S. Gros
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Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life
Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life by Robert B. Pippin can be read as an exacting reconstruction of a simple but disconcerting thesis: there is no intelligible way to describe free human action that does not already presuppose a social form of mindedness within which agents hold one another to account. In Pippin’s…
S. Gros
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Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason
Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason appears, by its title, to submit to a Kantian discipline it simultaneously resists. The borrowed syntagm—Critique of … Reason—signals continuity with the most canonical genre of modern philosophy, yet in Sloterdijk’s hands it functions less as homage than as strategic détournement. The allusion is a gesture, not a pledge:…
S. Gros
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‘Zero Point’ by Slavoj Žižek
The title announces a limit-experience and a method at once. Zero point here names neither a melodramatic terminus nor the consoling trough before an inevitable rebound; it names the station where the fantasy of uninterrupted progress collapses, and the temptation to disavow collapse by acting out — in moralistic fury or cynical resignation — is…
S. Gros
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Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud
Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud appears, in this great English translation by Jonathan E. Abel, Darwin H. Tsen, and Hiroki Yoshikuni, as a sustained experiment in re-plotting the coordinates through which we have learned to read the modern: not along the now-familiar axis that runs from economy to culture by way of a…
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‘Against Progress’ by Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek’s Against Progress is not a conventional monograph so much as a deliberately fissured surface that refuses to heal: a collection of analytic incursions that turn the received object—“progress”—into a problem that will not stop returning as symptom, screen, and compulsion. The wager is that only a description that never quite stabilizes can meet…
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Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
The provocation of Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle is announced in its title, and the title in turn is anchored in the old Freudian joke that stages denial by multiplication rather than refutation: I never borrowed your kettle; I returned it unbroken; it was already broken when I borrowed it. The enumeration negates nothing; it confesses…
S. Gros
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Sometimes, We Are Eternal
Sometimes, We Are Eternal presents itself less as a tidy primer than as a deliberately knotted threshold to a system that aspires, paradoxically, to clarity about the very conditions under which clarity becomes possible. The volume gathers three compact but far-ranging seminars in which Alain Badiou retraces and tests the arc of the Being and…
S. Gros
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Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates is a small book with an outsized philosophical voltage, a compact intervention whose density is not an ornament but a method. What begins as a meditation on a single historical rupture is exposed as a laboratory for testing the internal…
S. Gros
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Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
Slavoj Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce appears, on first approach, to be a slender intervention into the disorientation of the first post–Cold War decade, yet it insists on staging a wholesale rectification of how that decade should be named, remembered, and used. It is a book anchored in the shock of two emblematic…
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‘Violence: Six Sideways Reflections’ by Slavoj Žižek
Using history, philosophy, books, movies, Lacanian psychiatry, and jokes, Slavoj Žižek examines the ways we perceive and misperceive violence. Drawing from his unique cultural vision, Žižek brings new light to the Paris riots of 2005; he questions the permissiveness of violence in philanthropy; in daring terms, he reflects on the powerful image and determination of…
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The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form and Matter
James Hutchison Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel is a monumental philosophical text that renders the elusive details of Hegelian thought intelligible to the English-speaking reader, while simultaneously preserving the dense, challenging fabric of Hegel’s own language. Stirling’s work is a formidable mediation between the obtuse lexicon of Hegelian German and the prevailing intellectual climate of…
S. Gros
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Collapse without Sovereignty: Reading History through Quantum Ontology and Hegelian Negativity in Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Politics
A certain relief, in Slavoj Žižek’s view, announces itself at the outset, not in the content of a new doctrine but in the fact that one can still form, across disciplines that typically repel one another, an honest connection. To approach quantum theory as ontology rather than a mere computational apparatus, and to bring its…
S. Gros
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‘Political Jouissance’ by Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek’s Political Jouissance is not a treatise that cordons enjoyment off from politics as an embarrassing excess to be evacuated in the name of sober normativity; rather, it stages the paradox that politics is already traversed by enjoyment at its very core, such that any attempt at a purely dispassionate civic rationality is itself…
S. Gros
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A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: III. The Three-Dimensional Structure
A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: III. The Three-Dimensional Structure gathers, concentrates, and then deliberately disperses the accumulated tensions of Hegel’s system by insisting that what most commentaries treat as parallel tracks—logic, epistemology, ontology—are not three separate rails but the self-differentiating planes of a single medium that folds back upon itself. Deng Xiaomang names this…
S. Gros
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A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: I. Origin & Beginning
Deng Xiaomang’s A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: I. Origin & Beginning appears, at first contact, to be a compact treatise on a familiar question in Hegel studies—the problem of how the system must begin and with what—but its distinctive contribution lies in the way it binds that question to an archeology of dialectic whose…
S. Gros
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Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Edited Anthology
The very premise of an edited anthology of Nietzsche’s political writings is bound to irritate habits of reading that still treat “politics” as either a contaminant to be quarantined from “culture” or a marginal afterthought to the “real” philosophical work. Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky turn that irritation into method. Their Political Writings of Friedrich…
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Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks
What Charles Bambach examines in Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks is not yet another catalogue of incriminating biographical episodes nor a gesture of apologetic compartmentalization, but a tightly wound reconstruction of a discursive field—linguistic, philological, philosophical, and political—within which Martin Heidegger’s thinking from 1933 to 1945 was composed, staged, and made to…
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The Perfection of Freedom: Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns
D. C. Schindler’s The Perfection of Freedom: Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns presents a sustained philosophical attempt to unseat the tacit hegemony of a merely possibilistic conception of freedom and to recover, through an exacting dialogue with Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, an account of freedom as actuality, completion, and form.…
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Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic: Marxist-Humanism and Critical Theory in the United States
Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic: Marxist-Humanism and Critical Theory in the United States is a closely argued reconstruction of a problem that is at once conceptual and historical: how the Hegelian dialectic of necessity and freedom is taken up, transformed, and made socially determinate within Marx’s critique of political economy—and how that…
S. Gros
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‘Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin’ by C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin presents itself less as a commentary on a fixed philosophical canon than as an extended exercise in the practice of dialectical cognition, a strenuous attempt to think the historical movement of the laboring masses and their forms of organization as the living content from which philosophical categories…
S. Gros
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‘Hegel: Three Studies’ by Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies arrives in English as a carefully structured intervention into the legacy of German Idealism and into the present of critical theory. Appearing in the MIT Press translation by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, with an introduction by Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro, the volume collects three essays—“Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,” “The…
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Žizek’s Œuvre, Over and Over
Slavoj Žižek appears at once amused and wary as he confronts a journal issue devoted to his own corpus, a sentiment that sets the scene for a compact yet many-layered exchange with the editors and podcast hosts Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza. He confesses to postponing a close reading out of a characteristic fear of…
S. Gros
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‘First Philosophy, Last Philosophy: Western Knowledge between Metaphysics and the Sciences’ by Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben’s First Philosophy, Last Philosophy: Western Knowledge between Metaphysics and the Sciences undertakes an archaeological inquiry into the very concept that once named philosophy’s primacy among the epistēmai. What appears, on the surface, as a historical reconstruction of a technical term becomes, under his method, a strategic analysis of how the West sought to…
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Interview with Nick Land, the Father of Accelerationism: Capitalism, and the Transformative Power of Technology
The Interview situates itself as a long, unhurried encounter with a thinker who long ago abandoned the safety rails of inherited philosophical diction in favor of a thermodynamic lexicon keyed to markets, code, circuitry, and the machinic appetites of a world already departing from us. Hosted by Theory Underground and released in mid-October 2024 as…
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Žižek’s Heaven in Disorder | 天上大乱
Comrades of the interval—neither before nor after, but in the thickening middle—what follows keeps faith with a specifically 2021 mood: an in-between composition framed by emergency, written when vaccination queues braided with border queues, when lockdown routines folded into supply-chain algorithms, and when a pathogen taught political economy at scale. The temporal setting matters. Numbers,…
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Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians
Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians is a rigorous, architectonic reconstruction of a philosophical problem that remains decisive for any contemporary science of society: how to read Capital as a positive, apodictic demonstration rather than as an echo chamber of Hegelian negation. Nick Nesbitt stages this reconstruction with an unusual clarity of…
S. Gros
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‘On the History of Modern Philosophy’ by F. W. J. von Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s On the History of Modern Philosophy appears, in Andrew Bowie’s lucid English translation, as both a retrospective cartography of the main line of early-modern and post-Kantian philosophy and a programmatic intervention in the fate of Idealism itself. Not a mere chronicle, the work offers a disciplined reconstruction of the inner…
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The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature
Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel is a meditation on the evolution and nature of the novel, written against the backdrop of a world on the cusp of dramatic transformation. Emerging from the intellectual milieu of Central Europe in the early 20th century—a time when Marxism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism were beginning to shape the…
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The Hegel-Marx Connection
The Hegel–Marx Connection, edited by Tony Burns and Ian Fraser, is a rigorously composed, richly argued, and conceptually expansive inquiry into one of the most enduring and difficult problems in modern social and political thought: how Hegel’s speculative system and dialectical logic were taken up, inverted, preserved, and transformed within Marxist theory. The volume rejects…
S. Gros
Simon Gros 