Althusser’s reception within Argentinian psychoanalytic culture assumed a variety of different forms. For the purposes of delimiting mediations between Marxism, structuralism and psychoanalysis in Argentina during the 1960s and ’70s, this work seeks to reconstruct historical readings of Althusser according to his reception within three distinct interpretative communities. The first group, centring on the figure of Oscar Masotta, concerns Althusser’s role in the development of Argentina’s incipient Lacanian groups. For the second group, primarily dissident-psychoanalytic and Freudo-Marxist, the reception (...) of Althusser will be considered in tandem with ensuing debates between Freudo-Marxism and Althussero-Lacanism. The third group asks us to consider the role of Althusserianism in discussions around the professionalisation of psychology, where the careers of Carlos Sastre and Roberto Harari showed the strongest connections to Althusser’s work. (shrink)

Can deconstruction be accomplished not through the close reading of just one discourse, but through its combination with another? This paper aims at exploring this second way of performing deconstruction through a particular case study: Marxism and psychoanalysis. In the body of the essay, the history of Freudo-Marxism is divided into two parts, depending on which psychoanalyst stands as point of reference: Freud or Lacan. We proceed by studying the four main strategies by virtue of which a (...) genuine combination between Marxism and psychoanalysis has been historically attempted: separation (Reich), domination (Marcuse), contradiction (Althusser) and, finally, deconstruction (Laclau). (shrink)

One of sexologist Wilhelm Reich's most ambitious and enduring theories claims that sexuality and sexual repression play a central role in the production and reproduction of class structures and hierarchies. From 1927–1933, Reich combined his sexological work with his communist political convictions in a movement that became known as sex-pol. Reich developed some of his most provocative and potentially emancipatory theories through this empirical work with members of working-class communities. Though they often remain anonymous in his writings, the traces of (...) their voices remain audible throughout. In this paper, I employ a Gramscian method, developed by post-colonial scholars, to read for the trace of proletarian voices in Reich's archive. I argue that these subjects helped to theorize the role of sex in producing and reproducing class oppression. Reading for the trace of proletarian voices in the archive expands our understanding of how working-class subjects in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria helped to produce concrete sexological knowledge from below. (shrink)

This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with 'Freudo-Marxism'. In Yannis Stavrakakis's The Lacanian Left this anti-utopianism slides towards a left reformism, in which the emphasis on constitutive lack prevents any thinking of transformation. Ian Parker's Revolution in Psychology presents a bracing but reductive polemic, in which psychology and psychoanalysis seem to function as mere reflections of capitalist ideology. What (...) goes missing in both accounts is the possibility of a re-thinking of subjectivity, both individual and collective, posed between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across SpeciesExpanding the Ethical Scope of ErosCynthia WillettCompelling glimpses into the ethical capacities of our animal kin reveal new possibilities for ethical relationships encompassing humans with other animal species. Consider the remarkable report of a female bonobo in a British zoo who assists a bird found in her cage by retrieving the fallen bird, and spreading its wings so that this fellow (...) creature might fly away to its freedom. Or the report of a cat in a nursing home who curls up around dying elderly patients, and remains steadily by their side as they, unbeknownst to the medical personnel, pass away.1 Or of a sacred moment of silence by a stream for baboons in East Africa.2 Or of the ethics that spontaneously emerges among wolves at play.3 On the basis of extensive studies, biologist Frans de Waal argues that such anecdotes are far from rare, and that some core elements of moral understanding and compassion occur among a significant range of nonhuman as well as the human animal species. Apes, monkeys, and perhaps all nonhuman animals fail to display a distinctly human capacity for abstract moral reasoning. As de Waal (2006) remarks, it is difficult to tell (173–75). But our furry and feathery kin do without a doubt demonstrate rich elements of ethical response, and they often enough extend their moral concern to creatures beyond their own species. Of course, they will also bite each other’s heads off or eat their own young as well. But this is just to say that animals are neither natural [End Page 111] innocents nor savage brutes. Like us, they belong to what post-Nietzschean philosophers might frame, somewhat ironically, as a postlapsarian world of good and evil.What kind of philosophical approach could account for these postlapsarian genealogies of ethics? Biologists, primatologists, and anthropologists are drawing upon investigations of prosocial behavior to remap the boundaries of ethics, as for example in Isabelle Stengers’s call for cosmopolitical ecologies of relationships (2010, 33). Such a cosmopolitics aims to encompass our kin and kind from diverse species within the ethical boundaries of common worlds. Donna Haraway discovers an opening for Stengers’s ecology of relationships in the intimate encounters among co-evolving species, especially those she calls companion species (2008, 83). She argues, following Derrida, that the abstract reasoning processes of Stoic and Kantian cosmopolitan ethics remain closed to the participation of nonhuman animals as anything more than dependents, failing to observe the ways in which they act as companions, if not moral subjects. But then, what normative force might bind together an ethically attuned biosocial sphere that we as humans co-inhabit with other animal species?To explore this question, this essay takes its cues from well-established research on the responsive, preverbal connection of the human infant and adult caregiver (Bateson 1979; Trevarthen 1984; Stern 1985, 2010; Gibbs 2001, 2010; Hansen 2004; Anderson 2006; Papoulias and Callard 2010; Willett 1995, 2001). To this research we can add new animal studies (Smuts 1999, 2001; Fudge 2002; de Waal 2006, 2009; Bekoff 2007; Molnar 2008; Haraway 2008). These animal studies provide a basis for extending an “ethics of eros” with roots in Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Enrique Dussel, Africana feminism, Freudo-Marxist critical theory, and Plato (for discussions of this tradition, see Bergoffen 1997; Huffer 2009; Willett 2001)—but reconfigured in terms of social bonds across multiple animal species. In this tradition of ethics, the lack of a cognitive-based moral subjectivity that can translate into human terms does not consign nonhuman species to a mute moral status. On the contrary, some more primordial basis for relationship and meaning may weave thin but substantial threads of a postmoral ethics across regions of the biosphere.Given the diverse modes of subjectivity among animal species, and even the lack of what we call a moral subject altogether in many species, neither ordinary modes of empathy nor of moral understanding go very far in forging multispecies social bonds. For this reason, we turn to research on “the attunement of affects” in the infant-caregiver relationship (Stern 1985). As we shall see, this... (shrink)

“Great refusals,” the progressive movements that shattered the status quo, can be best understood through the prism of critical theory that sees these mobilizations as responses to the legitimation crises of advanced capitalism that migrated into the realms of subjectivity, rendering identity a contested terrain while eliciting powerful emotions that impelled social mobilizations. Among these emotions, rooted in the Freudo-Marxist philosophical anthropology that enabled the critique of alienated labor, is the capacity for hope. And central to that notion of (...) hope is a vision of utopian possibility in which membership in democratic, identity granting/recognizing communities of meaning allows for the creative self-realization of all. (shrink)

This article is a response by the author to the contributions to the Historical Materialism symposium on Allegory and Ideology. The reply is framed in terms of the different theoretical strategies through which the articulation of ‘Marx’ and ‘Freud’ has been carried out, namely the precarious syntheses of Freudo-Marxism, the homological method pioneered by Lucien Goldmann, and the theory of allegorical levels and transcoding explored in Allegory and Ideology. It critically engages with the openings and challenges posed by (...) the various contributions to the symposium, focusing in particular on matters of periodisation, and concluding with a reflection on how a theory of allegorical levels can be complemented by a materialist understanding of the ‘category’. (shrink)

The most productive theoretical contribution I can make to this topic is to explain my thoughts about the by now rather traditional Freudo-Marxist project and to assess Lacanianism in that light. It will be understood that in this form which approximates that of the interview – my positions will be little more than opinions, a form of ideological expression I don’t much care for. Nor will I even try to give an opinion of Slavoj Žižek’s extraordinary production, which I (...) admire, learn from, and above all consider energizing, this last being certainly the ultimate aim of intellectual work. (shrink)

Cet article revient, à partir de la pensée de Jean-François Lyotard, sur la façon dont la première Théorie critique a mobilisé la psychanalyse à des fins de critique de la raison moderne. Dans ses textes des années 1970, Lyotard a proposé de croiser psychanalyse et économie politique en dialoguant de façon critique avec le croisement proposé par Adorno dans les années 40. L’article vise, par une lecture croisée d’Adorno et de Lyotard à propos du rapport entre psychanalyse et économie politique, (...) à mettre en relief les enjeux et les difficultés soulevés par cette approche critique opérant avec des concepts psychanalytiques. (shrink)

_Marx After Marxism _encourages readers to understand Karl Marx in new ways, unencumbered by political Marxist interpretations that have long dominated the discussions of both Marxists and non-Marxists. This volume gives a broad and accessible account of Marx's philosophy and emphasizes his relationship to Hegel.

Many different versions of cultural studies have emerged in the past decades. While during its dramatic period of global expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies was often identified with...

This book familiarizes the English-speaking reader with the debate on the originality of Gramsci’s thought and its importance for the development of Marxist theory. The contributors present the principal viewpoints regarding Gramsci’s theoretical contribution to Marxism, focussing in particular on his advances in the study of the superstructures, and discussing his relation to Marx and Lenin and his influence in Eurocommunism. Different interpretations are put forward concerning the elucidation of Gramsci’s key concepts, namely: hegemony, integral state, war of position (...) and passive revolution. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century German science was frequently involved in philosophical disputes and also in political issues. Most thinkers wanted their systems to be considered ‘scientific’, and Marx and Engels were no exceptions. However, they sharply distinguished their approach from that of the popularizing ‘materialist’ philosophers, Büchner, Vogt and Moleschott. In this paper we review the relation of Marx and Engels to these and other tendencies, both in ideas and in personal contacts, and show how they distinguished their ‘dialectical’ materialism from that which (...) they described as ‘vulgar’. (shrink)

Elster's work unstably combines Leibnizian and utilitarian conceptions of action and offers various deconstructions of rationality and individuality. His method ological individualism gives an inadequate account of its privileged object, individual teleologies, and a distorted account of the relational framework of social reproduction and transformation. Elster has not properly conceptualized the relation of the teleological act to patterns of material and social causality, and his rational choice theory proves unable to accommodate the interactions of his postulated monadic individuals. His most (...) recent work dearly illustrates the limits of an individualist approach, while remaining committed to its principles. (shrink)

Marxism and Moral Advocacy Socialist thought in the late twentieth century is assailed by inner uncertainty as never before. In view of earlier attitudes ...

Andrew Collier analyses recent cooperation between Christianity and Marxism after earlier years of antagonism. He first discusses the nature of Christianity and Marxism and their place amongst contemporary world views, before looking at areas of apparent conflict and possible reconciliation. This groundbreaking work will be of interest to those involved in philosophy, theology, politics and Marxism.

The institutional guarantees of modern labour law, that provide the keystone of progressive liberalism, are often only reactionary to the entrenched concepts of socialist law. Adoption of institutions of “workers rights”, and employment protection based upon contract, inevitably nullify the ideological promise of the inalienable “right to work”. China, among the last bastions of theoretical Marxist socialism, and among the first socialist countries ready to accept that it has been in desperate need of reforming uneconomical state enterprises, seems willing to (...) sacrifice ideological purity for economic development. Yet, if economic turnaround requires enterprise rationalisation in a market economy, it is understandable that Chinese labour requires the same kinds of protection against unbridled capitalism as progressive labour movements elsewhere. Doubtless, for those who have enjoyed no such institutional guarantees in the past, official commitment to improvement of labour conditions is better than no acknowledgment of need for reform of social policy whatever. Yet, the real question for students of social change is “Are these legislated reforms effective policy guides for local administration and the courts?”“|Or are they merely regulations for licensing compliance – primarily for foreign invested enterprises?”. In brief, “... to what extent are the new ‘workers’ rights’ realistically attainable sources of judicial remedies for individual workers?”. (shrink)

Book synopsis: A Companion to Metaphysics provides a survey of the whole of metaphysics and includes articles by many of the most distinguished scholars in the field.