Suchergebnisse

A response to the crisis in Marxism & to the collapse of bourgeois philosophical criteria for valid knowledge. Drawing on dialectical insights from the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno & poststructuralist Julia Kristeva, a critical materialist paradigm for sociology is proposed. The role of consciousness in radical practice is emphasized & the understanding of materialism is broadened to include not only external historical conditions, but somatic factors that activate the subject from inside as well. A critical materialism would: (1) reject the principle of nonidentity, (2) use psychoanalysis to account for the way in which ideology works through the subject, & (3) apply a phenomenology of deconstruction based on personal suffering. It is agreed that the only genuinely sociological perception is had by those who are personally lodged within contradictory & unlivable ideological/material conditions. The experience of dislocation or pain becomes a phenomenological laser, fracturing appearance & the false commonsense consciousness that rests on it, letting the subject(s) glimpse the essential relations at work behind the ideological facade. For critical materialism, this process of signifying practice is the basis of dialectical contradiction. AA.