When, in Telos #55, we sought to evaluate the meaning and impact of French socialism in power, the verdict turned out to be peculiarly disappointing. The rhetorical question in the Introduction: “Beyond Reform or Revolution?” had already been effectively answered. As early as 1982 French socialism had revealed itself to be a “Gaullism with a Human Face” which did not have much to do either widi reform or revolution, and could provide nothing more -above and beyond the usual cliches—than a (...) continuation of the same berated but unsurpassed technocratic management of the given. Socialism had turned out to be a bad idea whose time had past. (shrink)

Suenan timbres, by the Colombian poet Luis Vidales, is an urbanely rural work. The fact that flowers, spiders, cats and landscapes are found in these short poems-vignettes –all of which are a reflection of a city in the process of modernization–; confirms how interested was the author in the idea that his poetic project could erode the barrier separating the cultural and natural spheres. Bearing this in mind, the article attempts to show that the intersubjective dialogue between the two spheres (...) is not peaceful, balanced or horizontal. On the contrary, the article, through a philosophical analysis based on the ideas of ecocriticism, seeks to reveal that underlying this dialogue, there is the desire of modern men to dominate, control and subdue nature to the laws and rule of culture. (shrink)

He was almost a year older than my father. Yet when I learned of his death on February 12 in Paris I did not have the sense of an orderly passing of generations. Julio Cortázar had the personal as well as the literary ability of remaining young. It was the combination of a nimble mind, the experimental quality of his narrative, and the uncanny resilience of his lean figure to the routine ravages of time (he looked a good 25 years (...) younger than his age). He stood tall in a generation of splendid Latin American writers. As Carlos Fuentes has remarked, he is the first figure of what is known as the Latin American boom to go. (shrink)

Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut are political philosophers in Lyon and Nantes, respectively. They have jointly directed the Collège de philosophie since 1975 and have recently collaborated in a study titled From Human Rights to the Republican Idea. In La pensée 68, which was published in Paris last October, they seek to settle scores with some of the most influential French thinkers of the past twenty years. Their book purports to deal with the intellectual heritage of the sixties in France. (...) Its central thesis claims that humanism remains the philosophical question of our times and that, from this perspective, the sixties must be revisited with a great many apologies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of (...) disalienation, that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

E. San Juan Jr. examines Peirce’s discourses on semiotics, ethics, and aesthetics and suggests their analogies with the radical critiques of Marx and other progressive trends.

Desde la llegada al poder de Hugo Chávez, en las elecciones de 1998, comenzó la configuración de unas nuevas relaciones de poder en el sistema político venezolano (SPV). Estas relaciones estaban determinadas por la naturaleza de los actores políticos que accedieron al poder, el funcionamiento ..