The point of departure of this study is Walter Benjamin’s last text, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin appeals to the significance of theology for historical materialism in order to overcome one of the decisive reasons why Marx’s unique theoretical project, in its positivistic interpretations, was not understood with the necessary radicality and had been in danger of losing its explanatory power and revolutionary impulse. The necessity of looking back to the past constitutes the basic theme of the study, and it is analyzed at the epistemological, ontological and political levels. The view backwards is also necessary because the past shows how all its atrocities, which we think have been overcome, may at any time return in a way which we are unable to imagine.

This article explores how the notion of obesity as health problem (1) functions to obscure or justify global inequities related to food production and access and (2) indicates still deeper problems of injustice and the neglected role of embodiment in analyses of justice and injustice, and notions of political subjecthood. Food, the need to eat, and the food system shape social existence profoundly yet are underexplored in philosophy, especially political philosophy. Drawing on disability theory and food studies, this article uses the crisis of body weight to explore relationships between neoliberalism, transnational capitalism, the industrialized agro-food system, and world health. Obesity discourse spotlights lifestyle choices of individuals, casting women especially as making irresponsible decisions for their families. A politically informed (and more medically sophisticated) perspective suggests that the real crisis is a social pact, which I term the ThinContract, predicating personhood and full social inclusion on body type.

The conventional view is that analytic philosophy has dominated American philosophy departments since 1950 and that continental philosophy and pragmatism have been marginalized almost out of existence due to philosophical inferiority or McCarthyist persecution. But a precise historical treatment of transformations in the field shows that this is, in fact, the golden age of continental philosophy and pragmatist scholarship, that McCarthyism had nothing to do with pragmatism’s fall from dominance, and that the shape of the field depends more on larger academic-historical trends. However, McCarthyism likely had lasting effects on analytic control of powerful qualifying institutions.

En rapport with Jürgen Habermas, this paper argues for an environmental ethics that formalistically links the “good-for-nature” to the communicatively conceived “good-for-humanity.” This orientation guards against the possibility of humanity’s “knowledge-constitutive interest” in the instrumentalization of the environment being pressed forth as a project of limitless domination and mastery. Such an ethics is nonetheless well supplemented with Axel Honneth’s idea of an “indirect” recognitional attitude toward the world of objects, which accommodates the impulse of “care” for nature without succumbing to the aporias of a naturalistic ethic. The essay contends that the categorical resources needed to avert the slide toward naturalism are dissolved in the antifoundationalist “critiques of nature” advanced by Steven Vogel and Jacques Derrida.

This essay examines multiple iterations of anti-juridicalism in relation to shifting forms of postwar imperialism and decolonization. The anti-juridical designates a differential political praxis of rights and law grounded in conditions of subalternity and revolutionary struggle. It stands in opposition to the abstract, neutraluniversality advanced by dominant theories of liberallegalism and hegemonic conceptions of the rule of law. In contemporary modalities, anti-juridical praxis serves as a necessary, critical supplement to the articulation of constituent power in the postcolony with profound implications for constructing a state of law and justice, and for building of a new internationalism of peoples.

Recently Slavoj Žižek has critiqued certain "feminist" readings of Lacan's feminine structure of desire, including Julia Kristeva, for postulating a feminine discourse which is supposedly beyond the phallic economy. This paper defends Kristeva's position, both by noting how Žižek Hegelian ontology prevents him from utilizing the resources of sexual difference and by clarifying Kristeva's double account of maternity. One consequence of this investigation is that a Kristevean theory of desire will provide one with a new form of political intervention by isolating sites of resistence that Žižek disavows. Another consequence is a refiguration of "feminist" psychoanalytic practice.

Discourses on the “event” today mark a profound opportunity for philosophic thought to change direction in its focus, particularly for those interested in the prospect of rehabilitating the communist hypothesis. Of the thinkers that have come to write on this topic Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have emerged as leading the way. Their joint proposal aims to subvert the need for epistemological reflection by (re)turning to a totally new sense of ontology, one that results in a new account of revolutionary, or “evental,” political action. Yet while animated by a joint aim, both thinkers propose utterly distinct paths to their conclusion: Žižek proposes a "finite" account of evental change, Badiou an "infinite" account. The aim of the present essay is thus to evaluate these competing claims, and it is argued that while Žižek's work is laudable in many respects, it nevertheless fails to grasp the full scope of Badiou's critique of finitude. Žižek's proposed revival of Post-Kantian Idealism, then, is exposed as highly problematic, so that the only reasonable path for philosophic thought is to follow Badiou's turn to infinite thought in some way.

The creation of the prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is part of a historical continuity of colonialism on the island. Over two hundred years before the United States sent the first "enemy combatants" to Cuba, the Spanish Empire began sending "enemy Indians" to the island. The rationales and circumstances that gave rise to the prison complex in Guantánamo share much in common with those that motivated Spain to imprison Apaches and other Native people on Cuba. This essay argues that the policies of both Spain and the United States have roots in a similar logic of colonialism.

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.

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.

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.

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.