Thesis Eleven

This article appraises the political writings of three Polish Marxists from the early 20th century, Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, Stanisław Brzozowski and Rosa Luxemburg. In the specific peripheral conditions and because of the entanglement of different struggles in the Polish Kingdom under Tsarist rule around the 1905 Revolution, it was no longer possible for Marxists and political theorists to refer to any firm political ground: whether the organic unity of the nation, class antagonisms, or laws of history. The construction of revolutionary subjects in Luxemburg, the political rethinking of national community and the realistic ‘agonistic’ conception of democracy in Kelles-Krauz, and Brzozowski’s anti-essentialist Marxism, with its mobilizing power and politically constructed subjects of social change, are peculiar, peripheral forms of political Marxism, today worth looking at one more time.

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including a theory of consent, of political unity, of ‘anti-politics’, and of geopolitical competition. These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of political power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better understood as a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alternative to the dominant forms of political modernity.

This article demonstrates how Adorno and Horkheimer’s turn to psychoanalytic concepts like sublimation and intra-psychic conflict strengthened critical theory. The piecemeal collective psychology they produced was used to understand fascism and anti-Semitism. But the full significance of these psychoanalytic explanations was concealed by Adorno, who elsewhere denied the possibility of psychology proper after the death of the individual. Adorno and Horkheimer’s underhanded borrowing from psychoanalysis for social analysis had the effect of filtering collective psychology through the lens of regression. To amend this, the article analyzes psychoanalytic explanations from an interpretive perspective, building upon Jessica Benjamin’s psychoanalytic feminism, to contest the tactics of immanent criticism and to revitalize the project of a less dystopic collective psychology.

This article examines some of the ways in which the trope of coldness appears in the social theory of Theodor W. Adorno. In the first section, I show how and why Adorno repeatedly criticizes a certain brand of coldness, namely, ‘bourgeois coldness’, which is understood as enacting and encouraging formal abstraction and indifference to sensuous particularity. In this sense, coldness is seen to function as a precondition for severe forms of violence (both symbolic and material). However, in the second section, I argue that stopping short at this one-sided ‘critique of coldness’ remains incomplete and undialectical, and does not do justice to Adorno’s more complicated engagement with the topic. In light of this, I invert the focus of analysis to the ‘coldness of critique’, claiming that there are examples of other forms, internalizations and uses of coldness in Adorno’s work, serving to indefatigably expand the utopian horizons of his social theory above and beyond piecemeal reformism, local pedagogy or pragmatic micro-politics. The aim is not simply to promote ostensibly ‘positive’ alternatives or remedies to the ‘negative’ symptom of coldness, but rather to tarry with the negative, to recognize the coldness within ourselves the better to break through and sublate it. For Adorno, there is no way around coldness; the only way is to go through it.

Explaining the seizure of power by the National Socialist Party and the totalitarian workings of the Nazi regime in the Third Reich is still difficult not only with respect to the atrocities committed but also to understanding whether the German population and society had to be terrorized into complying with the regime or were part and parcel of it. The paper introduces a notion of swarm to advance the idea that the German population was terrorized into a deliberate compliance with the regime. The notion of swarm is sociologically controlled by a complementary notion of form, which serves to reconstruct and model the social calculus realized by the swarm to differentiate and reproduce itself inside a complex society. The data I use are the results of historical research done in the last 60 years.

In this essay we explore Rancière’s ‘politics of equals’ as an alternative conception of the political. Central to this conception is a division between instances of political contestation that address fundamental questions of equality (‘the politics of equals’) and those that are part of the management of the division of resources and positions in society (‘the police’). This distinction provides a new way of thinking about theoretical and empirical questions over logics of political action.

This paper takes as its starting point the fact that Bourdieu’s views on sociology as a science have not been sufficiently and adequately understood and discussed. It traces the links between his conception and that of the French tradition of historical epistemology which is critical of positivism. How Bourdieu extends their views, and those of Bachelard especially, beyond the realm of the natural sciences, to the social sciences and sociology in particular, is discussed. In the process he introduces new concepts and methods, such as that of participant objectivation. His perspective reveals a convergence between the natural sciences and the social sciences as human endeavours striving for universal truths. This is reinforced and widened to include the humanities as well as demonstrated by his analysis of the literary field. The paper concludes with the observation that Bourdieu’s post-positivist science is a salutary alternative to the postmodern critique of science.

The recent, premature death of art critic Robert Hughes registered significant celebrity attention, but little for the extent and depth of his intellectual achievement. Hughes called himself a writer, or else a journalist. He had at least two especial qualifications, in this capacity. He had an Eye, but he also had a Voice. He was a brilliant, if sometimes prolix, writer and presenter. He was a performer, and his work should be seen as performance. This essay, offered as a promissory note, seeks to place Robert Hughes in terms of style and substance but also in terms of centre and periphery, in terms of the cultural traffic between them. It touches on three aspects of his reception. First, on the obituaries, which sought largely to reclaim his body as Australian, even after 50 years of absence. Second, on The Fatal Shore and its reception, itself indicative of the difficulty in neatly placing Hughes in terms of nationalist conceptions. Third, it discusses leading critical interpretations, asking for more, please, and promising to help contribute to the appreciation of Hughes as Tory radical stylist and contrarian.

Current changes in the intimate sphere are denoted by an expansion of emotional vocabularies, of freedom in sex and sexual preference, and the extension of sexual life with neither inhibition, nor obligation, nor marriage for both women and men. This reading of the works of Jean-Claude Kaufmann and Niklas Luhmann suggests that the result of this current revolution of the intimate sphere is mixed. A new differentiated form of the intimate sphere has developed with an internal distinction between sex qua leisure and committed love-relationality. Although sex qua leisure is mediated by the new communications technology, this technological mediation is not what is important here. Rather, the actions are configured and mediated by the neo-liberal paradigm by all participants. Leisure-sex is simply a game that combines autonomy, leisure, power and rational choice – a combination that is open to men and women alike. But there is still love, and in ways that enable it to be expressed beyond traditional forms. From the position of committed love-relationality, rather than marriage, love is between people – but it is a different between to the one of leisure sex. Love is double-sided: whilst heightening a sense of self-orientation, one is also focused on an other. Love involves all kinds of complexity in the everyday because it involves the well-being of an other or others – with joys and heartaches, responsibilities and conflicts.