Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article critically surveys Georges Bataille's multiple engagements with G. W. F. Hegel from the early 1930s to the 1950s. It homes in on how Bataille's conceptual, experiential, and parodic demarcation from Hegel targets not the German philosopher's aspiration to totality but (via Bataille's dialogue with Alexandre Kojève) his action-centered framing of the movement of history and the character of actuality. Against the dialectical mastery of history, Bataille seeks to articulate an unpolitical image of sovereignty and play that is ultimately poetic or literary in kind.

Abstract
Most theorisations of fascism, Marxist and otherwise, have taken for granted its idolatry of the state and phobia of freedom. This analytical common sense has also inhibited the identification of continuities with contemporary movements of the far Right, with their libertarian and anti-statist affectations, not to mention their embeddedness in neoliberal policies and subjectivities. Drawing on a range of diverse sources – from Johann Chapoutot's histories of Nazi intellectuals to Ruth Wilson Gilmore's theorisation of the anti-state state, and from Marcuse's explorations of fascist competitive individualism to debates on neoliberal authoritarianism – this essay sketches the counter-intuitive but disturbingly timely image of a fascism enamoured of freedom and at odds with the state.

Abstract
This text introduces the symposium on Fredric Jameson's Allegory and Ideology (2019), the second volume in his six-part The Poetics of Social Forms. It frames the debate with a brief exploration of some of the figures and problems of allegory that appear across Jameson's œuvre, and surveys some of the Marxist conceptualisations of allegory that have shaped Jameson's approach, as it straddles allegories of the commodity and allegories of utopia. The musical investigation of the nexus of allegory and affect, and the presentation of political allegory as primarily concerned with the disjunction between (national and international) levels are also touched upon as salient dimensions of Jameson's theorising.

Abstract
This essay explores Jameson's reading of Goethe's Faust II in Allegory and Ideology, putting it into dialogue with enquiries into Goethian allegory by other Marxist critics, namely Georg Lukács, Cesare Cases and Franco Fortini. Allegories of monetisation and dispossession in Faust II are explored, along with the limits of Lukács's partial devaluation of the allegorical. The essay focuses in particular on how Jameson's reading of Faust II can be interpreted as an allegory of theory itself, and in particular of the dialectic, thereby returning us to Lukács's own parallel reading of Faust and Hegel's Phenomenology, albeit in a different key.

Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has further intensified a crisis in the functions and the perception of the state. It has also revealed underlying contradictions in both mainstream and radical ideologies of the state. A desire for the state as guarantor of public welfare vies with fear of the state's hypertrophic capacities for surveillance and control. Following a brief exploration of the intimate modern connection between plagues and the state, the article tries to map some of the ways in which the state has been at stake in political and theoretical commentaries on the pandemic. Is an epidemiological politics from below, beyond the plague state, possible? Can recent emergency measures be seen as incomplete or inverted anticipations of a communist use of the state of exception? Or is the primacy of the political we are currently experiencing a mere fetish, indissociable from the rule of capital?

Abstract
Beginning with his engagement with Alfred Sohn-Rethel's seminal treatment of 'real abstraction', Intellectual and Manual Labour, Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly thematised and excavated the proposition that capitalism is innervated by a kind of actually-existing metaphysics, the scandal of an abstract form external to human cognition. This essay investigates Žižek's use and criticism of Sohn-Rethel and outlines some of the developments and contradictions in his effort to confront capital's challenge to philosophy's self-sufficiency. It problematizes Žižek's tendency to elide a model of abstraction as a hollowing-out or evacuation of social content (rooted in The Communist Manifesto) with a much more promising conception of real abstraction as its re-articulation or re-functioning, while querying Žižek's recent efforts to transcend the purported limitations of Marx's conceptualisation of capital in the direction of a ('Lacanised') Hegel.

Članek preučuje umeščenost državljanske vojne znotraj nedavnih razprav o politični ikonografiji. Prične z dvema nedavnima teoretičnima in kuratorskima intervencijama v umetnostno zgodovino T. J. Clarka in Georgesa Didi-Hubermana, ki krožita okoli vprašanja tragedije, preizkušata meje tragedije kot miselnega okvira politike podob in zoperstavlja Clarkovo in Didi-Hubermanovo analizo nedavnim ponovnim branjem Picassove Guernice Carla Ginzburga. Članek nato spelje temo državljanske vojne do samih začetkov moderne politične misli s kritičnim raziskovanjem nekaterih nedavnih branj slike na platnici Hobbsovega Leviathana, predvsem tistega, ki ga je predlagal Giorgio Agamben v svoji knjigi o paradigmi državljanske vojne. Članek se sklene z refleksijo negativne politične ikone, ki v očeh mnogih tako kristalizira kot obsoja vstajniška gibanja v Italiji poznih 70ih let 20. stoletja. ; This article explores the place of civil war in recent debates on political iconography. It begins with two recent theoretical and curatorial interventions into art history, by T. J. Clark and Georges Didi-Huberman, which orbit around the question of the tragic, probing the limits of tragedy as a frame to think the politics of images and contrasting Clark and Didi-Huberman's analyses with Carlo Ginzburg's recent re-reading of Picasso's Guernica. The article then takes the theme of civil war to the origins of modern political thought, through a critical exploration of some recent readings of the frontispiece to Hobbes's Leviathan, chief among them the one proposed by Giorgio Agamben in his book on the paradigm of civil war. The article concludes with a reflection on a negative political icon that came to both crystallise and condemn, in the eyes of many, the insurrectionary movements of Italy's late 1970s.