Interview with Richard Rorty, April 1997, Amsterdam. Occasion for the interview was Rorty being the occupant of the Spinoza Chair in 1997. The interview is mostly about Rorty's paper 'The Intellectuals and the Poor', in which he criticises the politics of left-wing academics.

En contra de la interpretación de Anselm Jappe del fetichismo de la mercancía como contradicción principal del capitalismo, sostengo que su obra adolece de un sobredimensionamiento del fetichismo que resulta determinista y reduccionista, y que comprende la contradicción en la obra de Marx de un modo simplista. Ofrezco, en cambio, una interpretación del fetichismo que parte de la noción de que la mercancía es una cristalización de las relaciones sociales de las sociedades capitalistas junto con una defensa de la (...) contradicción como motor dinámico del capitalismo antes que como aspecto paradójico del mismo. (shrink)

A presente entrevista foi realizada no primeiro semestre de 2022 parcialmente em forma escrita (e-mail) e parcialmente através de uma conversa por videochamada com o autor. Em ambas, os entrevistadores indagaram o filósofo sobre uma grande quantidade de temas, todos presentes em suas diversas obras. Ao mesmo tempo, deu-se particular atenção à questão que se aproxima de sua pesquisa mais recente, i. e., o vínculo entre desenvolvimento capitalista da forma-valor e as formas patológicas de narcisismo em sua acepção psicanalítica. Tal (...) pesquisa encontra-se cristalizada amplamente em seu livro, recentemente publicado no Brasil, A sociedade autofágica: capitalismo, desmedida e autodestruição (2021). O objetivo da entrevista é, de modo geral, contribuir para a divulgação da crítica do valor e, em particular, do pensamento de Anselm Jappe. Consideramos que as respostas aqui apresentadas possam oferecer instrumentos conceituais, se não suficientes, ao menos necessários, para construir uma correta compreensão dos problemas que os tempos atuais de crise permanente põem. (shrink)

Proclaiming Louis Pasteur as the “Founder of Stereochemistry”, the distinguished Scottish chemist, Crum Brown, addressing a late nineteenth-century audience of Edinburgh savants, drew attention—as Pasteur had incessantly done—to the intimate relationship between living organisms and the optical activity of compounds sustaining them. It seemed to Crum Brown “that we must go very much further down in the scale of animate existence than Buridan's ass, before we come to a being incapable of giving practical expression to a distinct preference for one (...) of two objects differing only in being one to the right and the other to the left”. Crum Brown's lecture must have been entertaining, but it was also motivated by a serious desire to do justice to a particular assertion of Pasteur—an assertion which had, moreover, been misunderstood and dismissed by no less a chemical genius than Wilhelm Ostwald. Writing at a time when the majority of his colleagues were stressing the resemblances between inorganic and organic compounds, Pasteur had insisted that he “could not point out the existence of any more profound distinction between the products formed under the influence of life and all others” than that “artificial products have … no molecular asymmetry”. Pasteur was obliged to concede that the chemist might produce enantiomorphic pairs of isomers, but without resorting to a manual separation of crystals he was powerless to imitate Nature's performance, powerless to fabricate by chemical means a separate optical isomer, divorced from its partner. Now it was not only Crum Brown who felt that chemists had brushed aside this proposition of Pasteur. In his 1898 Presidential Address to the chemical section of the British Association, Professor F. R. Japp also complained that the possible vitalistic implications of Pasteur's distinction between natural and artificial products had been misapprehended or tacitly ignored. (shrink)

This is the first serious intellectual biography of Guy Debord, prime mover of the Situationist International and author of _The Society of the Spectacle_, perhaps the seminal book of May 1968 in France. Anselm Jappe rejects recent attempts to set Debord up as a "postmodern" icon, arguing that he was a social theorist in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition—not a precursor of Jean Baudrillard but an heir of the young Georg Lukács of _History and Class Consciousness _. Neither hagiographical nor sectarian, (...) _Guy Debord_ places its subject squarely in his historical context: the politicizing Letterist and Situationist "anti-artists" who, in the European aftermath of World War II, sought to criticize and transcend the Surrealist legacy. The book offers a lively, critical, and unusually reliable account of Debord's "last avant-garde" on its way from radical bohemianism to revolutionary theory. Jappe also discusses Debord's films, which are largely inaccessible at present. This English language edition of the book has been revised by the author and features an updated critical bibliography of Debord and the Situationists. (shrink)

Cet article discute, à travers le parcours critique d’un récent ouvrage d’Anselm Jappe, la thèse d’une illimitation « narcissique » constitutive de la forme subjective propre aux rapports de production capitalistes contemporains. Montrant que cette perspective est fondée sur une conception monolithique et unilatérale de l’histoire du capital et de ses sujets, ainsi que sur une réduction illégitime de toute forme d’in????inité au « mauvais in????ini » de l’illimitation, nous soutenons la nécessité de penser un infini positif irréductible tant (...) à l’illimitation abstraite de la valorisation qu’aux dispositifs capitalistes qui limitent les puissances d’autodétermination et d’autoactivation des individus.This article critically discusses the thesis, recently developed by Anselm Jappe, of a “narcissistic” illimitation constitutive of the subjective form typical of contemporary capitalist relations of production. By showing that this perspective is grounded on a monolithic and one-sided conception of the history of capital and its subjects, as well as on an illegitimate reduction of every form of infinity to the “bad infinity” of illimitation, we defend the necessity to conceive a positive form of infinity, irreducible to both the abstract illimitation of valorization and the capitalist apparatuses that limit the individual power of self-determination and self-activity. (shrink)