The functional neural mechanisms underlying the cognitive benefits of aerobic exercise have been a subject of ongoing research in recent years. However, while most neuroimaging studies to date which examined functional neural correlates of aerobic exercise have used simple stimuli in highly controlled and artificial experimental conditions, our everyday life experiences require a much more complex and dynamic neurocognitive processing. Therefore, we have used a naturalistic complex information processing fMRI paradigm of story comprehension to investigate the role of an aerobically (...) active lifestyle in the processing of real-life cognitive-demanding situations. By employing the inter-subject correlation approach, we have identified differences in reliable stimulus-induced neural responses between groups of aerobically active and non-active cognitively intact older adults. Since cardiorespiratory fitness has previously been suggested to play a key role in the neuroprotective potential of aerobic exercise, we have investigated its dose-response relationship with regional inter-subject neural responses. We found that aerobically active lifestyle and cardiorespiratory fitness were associated with more synchronized inter-subject neural responses during story comprehension in higher order cognitive and linguistic brain regions in the prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortices. In addition, while higher regional inter-SC values were associated with higher performance on a post-listening memory task, this was not translated to a significant between-group difference in task performance. We, therefore, suggest that the modulatory potential of aerobic exercise and cardiorespiratory fitness on cognitive processing may extend beyond simple and highly controlled stimuli to situations in which the brain faces continuous real-life complex information. Additional studies incorporating other aspects of real-life situations such as naturalistic visual stimuli, everyday life decision making, and motor responses in these situations are desired to further validate the observed relationship between aerobic exercise, cardiorespiratory fitness, and complex naturalistic information processing. (shrink)

Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto has become one of the world’s most influential political tracts since its original 1848 publication. Part of the Rethinking the Western Tradition series, this edition of the Manifesto features an extensive introduction by Jeffrey C. Isaac, and essays by Vladimir Tismaneanu, Steven Lukes, Saskia Sassen, and Stephen Eric Bronner, each well known for their writing on questions central to the Manifesto and the history of Marxism. These essays address the Manifesto's historical background, its impact on (...) the development of twentieth-century Communism, its strengths and weaknesses as a form of ethical critique, and its relevance in the post-1989, post-Cold War world. This edition also includes much ancillary material, including the many Prefaces published in the lifetimes of Marx and Engels, and Engels's "Principles of Communism.". (shrink)

This is a new and extensive introduction to Marx for the beginner. It includes selections from all of Marx's major works; each section is preceded by an editors' introduction.

Anti-racist debate today remains polarised between ‘class reductionist’ (any attempt to address racial disparities reinforces capitalist class relations) and ‘liberal identity’ (disparities in racial representation can be resolved without questioning class inequality) politics. Both positions share a common perspective – racial oppression and class exploitation are the products of distinctive social dynamics whose relationship is historically contingent. This essay is an initial step toward characterising a structurally necessary relationship between capitalism and racial oppression. The essay draws upon Anwar Shaikh and (...) Howard Botwinick’s elaboration of Marx’s political economy, and Ellen Wood’s analysis of the specificity of capitalist imperialism. (shrink)

Hegel 's classic Phenomenology of Spirit is considered by many to be the most difficult text in all of philosophical literature. In interpreting the work, scholars have often used the Phenomenology to justify the ideology that has tempered their approach to it, whether existential, ontological, or, particularly, Marxist. Werner Marx deftly avoids this trap of misinterpretation by rendering lucid the objectives that Hegel delineates in the Preface and Introduction and using these to examine the whole of the Phenomenology. Marx considers (...) selected materials from Hegel 's text in order both to clarify Hegel 's own view of it and to set the stage for an examination of post-Hegelian philosophy. The primary focus of Marx's book is on the account. Hegel gives of the phenomenological journey from natural consciousness to philosophical wisdom. In showing that Hegel 's many statements concerning consciousness 'finding itself' or 'knowing itself' in its world can be understood as discovering the rationality of the conditioning world, Marx offers a solution to several sets of interrelated problems that have troubled students of Hegel. His book contains valuable analyses of the relation between Hegel 's thought and that of Descartes and Kant as well as that of Karl Marx, and it also sheds considerable light on the question of the internal unity or coherence of the Phenomenology. (shrink)

In 1936 Samuel Beckett wrote a letter to Sergei Eisenstein - the legendary director of such films as Battleship Potemkin - expressing his own desire to work in the lost tradition of silent film. Drawing on substantial archival material, this is the first book to examine comprehensively the full extent of Beckett's engagement with cinema and its influence on his work for stage and screen. Examining his writing on second wave modernist cinema, including the work of directors such as (...) Eisenstein, Godard, Griffith and Bresson as well as performers such as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo, the book reveals film art to be central to Beckett's modernist aesthetic. In this way, Beckett is revealed to be part of a wider modernist theatrical tradition that stood as an inheritor of early 20th century cinema, alongside Meyerhold, Brecht and Artaud. (shrink)

Györgi Pálfi’s Taxidermia is a landmark work of postsocialist cinema. The film is a study in violent contrasts. It is viscerallycharged and icily allegorical; intimately physical in its exploration ofmasculine desire and bodily disgust, and sardonically distanced in its satiricalportrayal of the successive social and political regimes that dominatedHungary over the course of the twentieth century. On the one hand,Taxidermia is a highly controlled, severely formalist film. In its nearlyinhuman detachment, and its rigorously schematic organization, it is assevere as anything (...) by Kubrick. Yet at the same time, it is filled withuncomfortable and unpredictable details; and it insistently focuses onexcesses of the flesh in a way that rivals early Cronenberg. In what follows, Iconsider Taxidermia in the light of these contradictory extremes. (shrink)

Les années 1960 furent le théâtre de l'un des épisodes les plus brillants de l'histoire de la pensée philosophique en France. Elles s'ouvrirent sur le triomphe public du structuralisme, avec La Pensée sauvage de Lévi-Strauss, se continuèrent par le renouvellement du marxisme proposé par Althusser et de la psychanalyse par Lacan, et s'achevèrent avec une série d'oeuvres comme celles de Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida et Lyotard, qui ont décidé du visage de la philosophie contemporaine. L'héritage de cette période a néanmoins été (...) difficile, suscitant tantôt une fascination mimétique, tantôt un rejet caricatural. Depuis quelques années, les auteurs qui l'ont marquée font individuellement l'objet d'une réception savante plus mesurée et plus profonde, au risque cependant de perdre la dimension collective et transversale qui la caractérisait. Le but de cet ouvrage est de réunir certains des meilleurs spécialistes pour prendre toute la mesure de ce qui a constitué, par son intensité et son ampleur, un "moment philosophique" exceptionnel. Il offre à la fois une traversée de quatre dimensions transversales et une relecture de quatre livres singuliers : La Pensée sauvage de Lévi-Strauss, Lire Le Capital et Pour Marx d'Althusser, les livres de Derrida autour de De la grammatologie, et Discours, Figure de Lyotard. Traversant aussi bien les mathématiques de Bourbaki que la linguistique structurale, l'anthropologie de Lévi-Strauss que la psychanalyse freudienne, le marxisme d'Althusser que celui d'Adorno, le théâtre de Brecht que le cinéma de Godard, ce livre invite à redécouvrir ce moment non pas comme un objet historique à circonscrire, mais comme un mouvement ouvert où se sont décidées certaines des tâches qui nous incombent encore, aujourd'hui. (shrink)

The title of this essay is not to be taken literally: I will not be making the case that Marseille is actually the last working class city in France. My title is a reference to Chris Marker’s 1993 film The Last Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d’Alexandre), a film about Alexander Medvedkin, one of the pioneers of early Soviet cinema. Medvedkin was the inspiration for the Groupe Medvedkine, a film collective founded by Chris Marker and made up of French militant filmmakers who, (...) in December 1967, decided to document the labor unrest that had erupted in factories near Besançon by making experimental films that involved the active participation of the workers themselves. Marker first met Medvedkin at a film festival in Leipzig .. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to discuss Jasmila Žbanić’s Esma’s Secret, On the Path and For Those Who Can Tell No Tales as a trilogy addressing the consequences of Bosnian War. The films are considered in the theoretical framework of women’s cinema as world cinema, exploring their location in relation to globalization. The article hence analyses each film’s aesthetic in light of influential feminist concepts and theories such as Rey Chow’s age of the world target, Adriana Cavarero’s horrorism and (...) caring, E Ann Kaplan’s trauma and Judith Butler’s ethics. In these films the violated body is neither victimized nor considered as a natural being: each character is a biopolitical subject, geo-culturally located, and produced through processes originating from dynamics of power and responsibility, guilt and care. (shrink)

Appropriate for both academic readers and informed general enthusiasts of the cinema it addresses, the book demonstrates both philosophy's particular usefulness for the analysis of modernist cinema and film form's inherent potential for ...

Synthesizes the work of three titans of mid-century art and critical theory, proposing an aesthetics of the political and artistic left with a deft authority.

This contribution to economic philosophy considers Marx's pronouncements on the organization of future society, and in this context re-examines the long-lasting debate triggered by Mises's argument that modern industrial production requires a system of spontaneously-formed market prices. In an undogmatic, non-technical treatment, Steele contends that both the Marxian conception of future society and the Misesian argument against its feasibility have frequently been misunderstood. The work scrutinizes the replies to Mises, and explores some of the wider issues raised by the economic (...) calculation debate. (shrink)

Introduction -- Marx and postwar French philosophy -- A writer full of affects : Marx through Lyotard -- Messianic without messianism : Marx through Derrida -- The history of the present : Marx through Foucault -- Becoming revolutionary : Marx through Deleuze -- Marx through post-structuralism.

An examination and reinterpretation of the philosophy of Karl Marx, assessing its relevance to contemporary conditions. Discussed are Marx's basic ideas, his view of human life and society, the importance of class, Marx's materialism and his problematic relationship with morality.

_Marx for a Post-Communist Era_ combines a deep understanding of Marxist thought with journalistic engagement in real-world themes. This comprehensive and timely book will be of interest to students and academics in the areas of philosophy, sociology, politics and cultural studies, and to anyone with an interest in Marx and his legacy.

The first issue this essay examines is the articulation of the cinema of the body, the feminine gestus, and the ‘political cinema’, which begins with the philosophical shout, ‘Give me a body, then!’ and ends with the ‘Third World Cinema’ as a cinema of memory. How is this Deleuzian concept in tension with the one proposed here of ‘missing body’? The second issue concerns the importance of the body for theory and practice within feminist film theory and queer theory. The (...) question of the body is introduced in-between these two lines in the context of a series of Latin American documentaries. The final problem is then how to see and show a body that is missing, like an outside of the body image, and of a certain regime of the visible and the audible that tends to be fixed in topics by the production of technologies of memory. (shrink)

Circling Marx is both a window on to the forces and concerns that have shaped Thesis Eleven over four decades and an intellectual portrait of the singular post-Marxism of one of its leading thinkers. Beilharz emphasises the existence of multiple Marxes but leans towards a Marx who suggests an expanded materialism, a non-Bolshevik Marx, and a Marx of motion, rather than laws. Addressing Marxism and socialism more widely, Beilharz again underscores multiplicity, favouring those thinkers and currents that acknowledged complexity (...) and limits, that staged something of a conversation between Marx and Weber, and that took distance from the teleology, vanguardism, and hubris that has marked parts of the Marxist tradition. Moving into more clearly post-Marxist territory, through important encounters with Heller and Feher, Bauman, Smith, and Castoriadis, Beilharz’s optic prioritises place, cultural traffic, and ambivalence, combining categories of ambitious scope with epistemological and normative circumspection, criticism with world affirmation. (shrink)

Marxism as an intellectual movement has been one of the most important and fertile contributions to twentieth-century thought. No social theory or political philosophy today can be taken seriously unless it enters a dialogue, not just with the legacy of Marx, but also with the innovations and questions that spring from the movement that his work sparked, Marxism. Marx provided a revolutionary set of ideas about freedom, politics and society. As social and political conditions changed and new intellectual challenges to (...) Marx's social philosophy arose, the Marxist theorists sought to update his social theory, rectify the sociological positions of historical materialism and respond to philosophical challenges with a Marxist reply. This book provides an accessible introduction to Marxism by explaining each of the key concepts of Marxist politics and social theory. The book is organized into three parts, which explore the successive waves of change within Marxist theory and places these in historical context, while the whole provides a clear and comprehensive account of Marxism as an intellectual system. (shrink)

In the wake of paradigm-shifting works on cinematic affect over the last few decades that have challenged psychoanalytically based gaze theory, embodied perception and sensory-affective experience...

In this radical and deliberately controversial re-reading of Brecht, first published in 1989, Elizabeth Wright takes a new view of the playwright, giving us a more ¿Brechtian¿ reading than so far achieved and making his work historically relevant here and now. The author discusses in detail Brecht¿s principle theories and concepts in the light of poststructuralist theory, and reassess the aesthetics and politics with regard to Marxist critics of his own day. Wright includes a re-reading of Brecht¿s early works, (...) which presents them in relation to a postmodern theatre, and gives critical analyses of the work of Pina Bausch, Robert Wilson, and Heiner M¿ller, who use the techniques of performance theatre, showing how they deconstruct Brecht¿s distinction between illusion and reality and point to a postmodern understanding of their dialectical relation. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 557-558, July 2012.

The Bertold Brecht's conception of the theater is not radically opposed to that of Aristotle. Brechtian aesthetics is, in many aspects, heiress of Aristotle's ideas. The epic theater proposed by Brecht opposes naturalistic theater and psychological drama. Mimesis and catharsis don't mean the identification of the public with the scene and the hero.A concepção teatral de Brecht não é radicalmente oposta à de Aristóteles. A estética brechtiana, em muitos aspectos, é herdeira das idéias de Aristóteles. O teatro épico proposto (...) por Brecht tem em seu horizonte de combate o teatro de matriz naturalista e o drama psicológico. Mimese e catarse não significam identificação do público com a cena e com o herói. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch was not only one of post-war Britain's most celebrated and prolific novelists - she was also an influential philosopher, whose work was concerned with the question of the good and how we can see our moral worlds more clearly. Murdoch believed that paying attention to art is a way for us to become less self-centred, and this book argues that cinema is the perfect form of art to enable us to do this. Bringing together Murdoch's moral philosophy (...) and contemporary cinema to build a dialogue about vision, ethics and love, author Lucy Bolton encourages us to view cinema as a way of studying other worlds and moral journeys, and to reflect upon their ethical significance in the world of the film and in our daily lives. (shrink)

Describing Cinema is part theory, part rhetoric, and part pedagogy. It examines and demonstrates acts of describing scenes, shots, and sequences in films, as probably the most common and the most underestimated way viewers respond to movies. Practiced energetically and carefully, descriptions become exceptionally rich ways to demonstrate and celebrate the activities, varieties, and challenges of a central generative movement in the viewing and interpretation of films. My motto might be an inversion of one character's tongue-in-cheek remark in Jean-Luc Godard's (...) First Name, Carmen (played by Godard himself), "badly seen, badly said," rephrased for this project as "badly said, badly seen." Here, that phrase becomes an indication how acts of describing films or parts of films can measure and instantiate complex ways of seeing that are partly about accuracy but also about the mobility of understanding and interpretation. At its best, describing films never simply denotes actions, images, sounds, or styles but rather produces the orchestration of one or more of those dimensions as an often creative and intersubjective movement between images, viewers, and a rhetorical language. Here, especially, writing about film becomes thinking about film. Part I provides a theoretical basis for this argument. Part II features sixteen short essays from landmarks of post-war cinema that demonstrate the energy and movement of precise descriptions. (shrink)

Cinema Derrida charts Jacques Derrida's collaborations and appearances in film, video, and television beginning with 1983's Ghost Dance (dir. Ken McMullen, West Germany/UK) and ending with 2002's biographical documentary Derrida (dir. Dick and Ziering, USA). In the last half of his working life, Derrida embraced popular art forms and media in more ways than one: not only did he start making more media appearances after years of refusing to have his photo taken in the 1960s and 1970s, but his philosophy (...) started to draw more explicitly from visual culture and artistic endeavours. While this book offers explanations of this transition, it contends the image of "Jacques Derrida" that emerges from film and TV appearances remains spectral, constantly deferring a complete grasp of him. Tyson Stewart draws out the main tenets of spectrality from Derrida's seminal texts Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx and other writings, like Echographies of Television, in order to fill a gap in studies of Derrida and film. Throughout the book, he explains how various techniques and spectral effects such as slow motion, stillness, repetition, mise-en-abîme, direct address, and focus on body parts/bodily presence bring about a structure of spectrality wherein the past other returns to make impressions and ethical demands on the viewer. Drawing on communication theory and film and media studies, Cinema Derrida makes a major intervention in classical communication thought. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” advances the claim that, for the first time in history, the “function” of the work of art is political, as evidenced by cinema. For Benjamin, film is the “first art form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility” and Giorgio Agamben, a contemporary Benjaminian philosopher, further elucidates this “function,” positing that cinema essentially ranks with ethics and politics, not solely with aesthetics, and, (...) consequently, is proximate to philosophy itself. Whereas Deleuze’s Cinema books posed cinema as enacting time in a pure state, Agamben, in his “Notes on Gesture,” breaches from Deleuze’s spatial and cartographic theory of cinema, drawing on Guy Debord’s “détournement via montage,” Simone Weil’s “decreation” and, perhaps most implicitly, from Benjamin. Agamben’s political theory of cinema, motivated by cinema’s “stoppage and repetition of time,” is directly informed by Benjamin’s: “optical unconscious,” appropriation of Brecht’s “social Gestus,” and the relationship between technological reproducibility and aura. Agamben’s “gesture” fastens cinema’s aesthetics not only to ethics and politics, but to the “ontological consistency of human experience,” or to a way of being. (shrink)

L’émergence de l’installation au milieu du xxe siècle se fait de manière concomitante avec l’art de la performance et de la vidéo. Les artistes de l’installation se sont donc emparés de l’image en mouvement et ont développé des dispositifs au caractère performatif vis-à-vis du visiteur. Dans les années 1970, Dan Graham révèle la visibilité et la perception d’un « invu », à savoir le temps comme matière et l’espace comme vecteur proprioceptif dans ses installations vidéographiques reposant sur l’effet de time (...) delay. Face à l’enregistrement et à la retransmission en décalé de sa propre image, le visiteur prend conscience de son existence et de son rapport aux autres. Plus récemment, les installations « post-cinématographiques » ont permis de renouveler ces questionnements. L’exposition Servitudes de Jesper Just témoigne de ce dialogue entre installation audiovisuelle, espace architectural et perception du visiteur. Projeté sur des écrans, disséminé dans les sous-sols du Palais de Tokyo, le film de Just n’est visible que par fragments, le visiteur devenant le « monteur » d’une narration ambiguë et hétérodoxe, et devant pour cela se déplacer à travers les enchevêtrements de rampes métalliques, créant une « architecture spectatorielle de l’installation ». The emergence of installation art in the middle of the twentieth century is concomitant with the art of performance and video. The artists therefore took possession of the moving image and developed devices with a performative character vis-à-vis the visitor. In the 1970s, Dan Graham manifests the visibility and the perception of an “invu” which is time as matter and space as a proprioceptive vector in his video installations based on the effect of time delay. Faced with the recording and retransmission of his/her own image, the visitor becomes aware of his/her existence and its relationship to others. More recently, the “post-cinematographic” installations made it possible to investigate anew these questions. The exhibition Servitudes by Jesper Just testify of this dialogue between an audiovisual installation, an architectural space and the visitor’s perception. Shown on screens, scattered in the basements of the Palais de Tokyo, the film of Just was visible only in fragments. Hence the visitor became the “editor” of an ambiguous and heterodox narration. To do so he/she had to move through the entanglements of metal ramps, creating a “spectatorial architecture of the installation”. (shrink)