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Radical Philosophy Review

Volume 16, Issue 2, 2013
Critical Refusals, Part 2

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Displaying: 1-19 of 19 documents


1. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Arnold L. Farr, Douglas Kellner, Andrew T. Lamas, Charles Reitz Critical Refusals in Theory and Practice: The Radical Praxis of Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis
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keynote
2. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Angela Y. Davis Critical Refusals and Occupy
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overcoming
3. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Marge Piercy We May Just Figure Out How to Overcome
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4. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Heather Love Queer Critique, Queer Refusal
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In a moment of widespread assimilation of lesbians and gays, there are also continuing exclusions—of poor queers, queers of color, undocumented queers, disabled queers, nonmonogamous queers, transgender people, and others. Herbert Marcuse’s reflections on sexuality, freedom, and negation are helpful in articulating a strategy and an ethics for a renewed queer criticism—one alive to both new inclusions and ongoing exclusions. Focusing on Marcuse’s concept of the Great Refusal, this paper considers the marginalization of gender and sexual outsiders as a political resource, the basis for a project of difference without limits.
5. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Holly Lewis The Dialectic of Solidarity: Space, Sexuality, and Social Movements in Contemporary Revolutionary Praxis
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The common sense that queer liberation is based upon a linear or progressive trajectory fails to account for the complexities and contradictions surrounding the current demand for LGBT equality and its place within intersecting social movements. This article uses the history of Marxist praxis, including Marcuse’s contributions, to argue for abandoning linear and stagist assumptions of gradual change in favor of a dialectical approach toward the intersection of identity formation and social struggle.
occupations
6. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Peter Marcuse Occupy Consciousness: Reading the 1960s and Occupy Wall Street with Herbert Marcuse
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Herbert Marcuse was concerned with many of the same issues that confront the Occupy Wall Street movement today. Change the militant “students” in the 1960s to the militant “occupiers” today, and his views on their philosophical bases and strategies for change remain similar. Militant protest is reacting to an aggressive, profit-driven system, reducing its subservient population to consumption-fixated one-dimensionality. The ideology-motivated militants cannot by themselves change things all at once, yet the ideological/psychological elements can lead the material bases of the struggle to produce radical change in one area at a time, suggesting an agenda akin to the “long march through the institutions” of the 1960s.
7. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
George Katsiaficas Eros and Revolution
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In his later work, Marcuse concerned himself with the nexus between social movements and unconscious dimensions of human nature. He understood Nature (including instincts) as an “ally” in the revolutionary process. In this paper, I seek to explore his insight through the concept of the “eros effect,” which I first uncovered while analyzing the global revolt of 1968. Forms of direct democracy and collective action developed by the New Left continue to define movement aspirations and structures. Although contemporary rational choice theorists (who emphasize individual gain as the key motivation for people’s actions) cannot comprehend instinctual motivations, a different understanding is central to my conception.
8. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Michael Forman One-Dimensional Man and the Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism: Revisiting Marcuse in the Occupation
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A new wave of global protest movements offers the opportunity to reassess Marcuse’s work in the early twenty-first century. Before engaging with the Occupy movement and its analogs, it is necessary to scrutinize Marcuse’s assumptions about the affluent society. This examination suggests that the conditions of neoliberal accumulation diverge significantly from those Marcuse more or less took for granted as permanently stabilizing capitalist societies in the Global North. While much of what Marcuse offers retains relevance, its appeal to the new movements is not immediate because these can no longer take for granted the prosperity of the earlier era.
9. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Francis Dupuis-Déri Herbert Marcuse and the "Antiglobalization" Movement: Thinking through Radical Opposition to Neoliberal Globalization
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There is at present a broad social movement opposing the advanced capitalist system and the politicians that support it. As in the 1960s, this political current is comprised of reformists (social democrats) on the one hand and radicals (anticapitalists and antiauthoritarians) on the other. In proposing a rereading of Herbert Marcuse, we hope to facilitate a better understanding of the frame of mind of the radicals participating in today’s movement against capitalist globalization. The limitations of Marcuse’s thought may point to the limitations of contemporary radicalism while highlighting its originality when compared to the protest movements of the previous generation.
10. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Sarah Lynn Kleeb The Violence of Tolerance: At the Intersection of Liberation Theology and Critical Theory
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Utilizing insights from liberation theologians and critical theorists, this paper examines the intersection of tolerance and violence, as manifest in contemporary world events, particularly the 2010 G20 protests in Toronto. Connecting Marcuse’s scathing critique of tolerance to first, second, and third forms of violence, elucidated by Dom Hélder Câmara, suggests that the modern conception of tolerance does little to hinder the violence of the state. Câmara asserts that reactionary violence is wholly dependent on the initial engagement of representatives of authority; Marcuse may have considered such reactions a refusal of blind tolerance and an assertion of agency in the face of repression.
11. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Toorjo Ghose Democracy by Day, Police State by Night: What the Eviction of Occupy Philadelphia Revealed about Policing in the United States
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Examining the eviction of Occupy Philadelphia from city hall on November 30, 2011, this paper analyzes police tactics to address public protests in the United States. The results highlight three aspects of the police strategy deployed during the eviction: (1) a preconceived plan to manage protests, (2) the use of militarized tactics to implement this management plan, and (3) the imposition of a state of dissociative meditation triggered by the incarceration that followed the eviction. The strategy of management, militarization, and meditation (or the 3M strategy) demonstrates the Marcusean notion of repressive tolerance and characterizes the police response to public dissent.
12. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Costas Gousis Postcards from Greece!: Rethinking State Theory and Political Strategy of the Twenty-First Century
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With a focus on the social and political conjuncture in Greece following interventions by the troika of the International Monetary Fund, European Union, and European Central Bank, as well as with an analysis of historical trends in Greek capitalism, the end of the Metapolitefsi period, and the rise in authoritarian statism, I argue for a revival of Marxist state theory in understanding the current global crisis. I identify this moment in Greece as a battle for hegemony between the dominant narratives of disaster that perpetuate the vicious cycle of debt-and-austerity and an alternative, radical narrative of here-and-now.
new sensibilities and intersections
13. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Wolfgang Leo Maar Beyond and Within Actual Society: The Dialectics of Power and Liberation
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The materialist approach of One-Dimensional Man emerges in a later work in which Marcuse connects the notion of “new sensibility” to a “complex intermediary function of the intellect.” Revolutionary praxis “is not simply negation but contradiction,” and thus Marcuse’s “new idea of reason” constructs a liberating rationality upon a technological one. This is accomplished by moving from an abstract “concept” of possibility to the perception of possibility as a “social alternative.” Here I examine the “dialectical logic” of human rights, which critiques an unfree world and asserts itself as a political determinant dependent on the rupturing of established power.
14. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Clayton Pierce Educational Life and Death: Reassessing Marcuse's Critical Theory of Education in the Neoliberal Age
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Drawing upon Herbert Marcuse’s lectures and writings on education, I argue that foundational to his critical theory of education is a biopolitical project calling for the pedagogical production of new human beings under counterrevolutionary types of education. In the second section, I put Marcuse’s biopolitically rethought critical theory of education into conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois’s critique of caste education, as both share the demand for an abolition ethic to be the ontological grounding of the educational subject. Ultimately, I argue an abolition politics needs to be the basis for reimagining education in counterrevolutionary times.
15. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Christopher Holman Toward a Politics of Nonidentity: Rethinking the Political Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse
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This paper will provide an immanent critique of the political theory of Herbert Marcuse. I argue that Marcuse’s politics are often inadequate when considered from the standpoint of his theory of socialism, the latter being understood as the realization of the negative human capacity for creation in all those fields within which the human being is active. Although Marcuse’s politics often reveals itself as instrumental and managerialist in orientation, I will argue that there nevertheless remains a certain countertendency in his philosophy, one which can be seen as affirming a negative and nonidentitarian politics of overcoming that looks always toward creation.
16. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Nancy J. Hirschmann Disability, Feminism, and Intersectionability: A Critical Approach
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Critical theorists should turn to disability as an important category of intersectional analysis. I demonstrate this through one type of critical theory—namely, feminism. Disability intersects with all vectors of identity, since disability affects people of all races, ethnicities, religions, genders, sexualities, and classes. Gender and sexuality are particularly illustrative because disability is configured in ways that map onto negative images of femininity (e.g., weakness, dependence). Additionally, the ways in which feminist and disability scholars undertake analysis are complementary. And because these two fields are inherently interdisciplinary, dialogue between them can yield a richer notion of intersectionality within intersectionality.
17. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Nathan Nun Practical Aesthetics: Community Gardens and the New Sensibility
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This paper argues that community gardens, in addition to being economically practical, offer a promising example of an environment that fosters the new sensibility. After exploring Marcuse’s new sensibility and his critique of aesthetic experience under capitalism, the paper turns to some empirical studies of the benefits of the aesthetic qualities of community gardening. These studies correspond to Marcuse’s proposition that aesthetic environments can play a role in challenging domination. The last section of this paper considers how those involved in the D-Town Farm in Detroit self-consciously assert the community garden as a political project that challenges domination.
18. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Contributors
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19. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Call for Papers: Political Theory and Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration
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