Suchergebnisse

THE AUTHOR REJECTS GRAFSTEIN'S CLAIM THAT MARXISM IS A "PARTICULAR EMPIRICAL THEORY" THAT "NEEDS FETISHISM OF A SORT" AS FALSE, ARGUING THAT HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IS A CRITICAL OR DIALECTICAL THEORY THAT DIFFERS IN KIND FROM FETISHIZING THEORIES OF THE SCIENTIFIC TYPE. THE AUTHOR ARGUES FURTHER THAT THE TRUTH OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IS VOUCHSAFED NOT MERELY BY THE EMPIRICAL ACCURACY OF ITS PREDICTIONS BUT BY ITS ABILITY TO ARTICULATE THE REAL OR RATIONAL INTERESTS OF THE ECONOMIC AGENTS TO WHOM IT IS ADDRESSED.

What is the relevance of materialism for thinking the political? Throughout modernity, materialism has been associated with fatalism, naturalism, heresy, and linked to radical ideas such as republicanism and democracy. Despite never having claimed to be a materialist himself, Spinoza early on became associated with materialism, and the highly controversial, even condemned and censored central tenets of his philosophy came to be seen as evidence of a clandestinely held materialism, making Spinoza an emblem of the subversive alliance between materialism and democracy. The revolutionary effects of eighteenth-century French materialism have been widely discussed since the French Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century. The works of Marx and Engels further aligned materialism with progressive politics, anchoring political liberation in concrete social practices. As materialist politics rejects the concept of the subject as a point of departure for social analysis, it draws onthe very materiality of social relationsin order to reflect on collective reality. If humankind is the product of socio-historical circumstances, the political task, for Marx, became one of inquiring into and transforming its environment. The past decades have revived the attention given to materialism and its affiliation with a progressive agenda. At the same time, neoliberalism emerges and poses a challenge to the foundations of citizenship as it expands its control over the materiality of social reproduction, the materialities underlying the reproduction processes of capitalist domination. Neoliberalism actively shapes society and strengthens social logics of exclusion in order to create a growing number of 'sub-citizens' or even 'non-citizens' subjected to new and more aggressive forms of exploitation and dispossession. To what extent can materialism counteract this neoliberal turn, and what are the available resources for a renewal of radical materialism that can energize the contemporary progressive agenda? ; Materialism and ...

In many fields within the social sciences and the humanities, the 'material turn' has inspired fresh debates about human-nature relationships, ecology and the meaning of the social. However, the new materialism also poses some theoretical-political problems. These problems relate to the questions of ontology, epistemology and anthropology, as I argue in the first part of this article. In the second part, I argue that some theoretical-political problems that characterize the 'new' materialism have also been debated within the tradition of historical materialism. By recapitulating different versions of historical materialism, I argue that an important distinction can be drawn between ontological and praxeological forms of materialism. I argue in conclusion that from the perspective of critical social theory, the distinction between 'old' and 'new' materialism does not hold, and that for political as well as epistemological reasons a critical materialism should renounce any ontological turn to matter itself.

The notion of materialism initially appears in the writings of its Christian opponents in late seventeenth-century England. Only in eighteenth-century France materialism is first posthumously claimed by a catholic priest, Meslier, and then by authors such as La Mettrie and d'Holbach, at the risk of persecution and imprisonment: Diderot enjoys the hospitality of the fortress of Vincennes for rearranging the materialist stance within his sensualist multiverse. In the nineteenth century, Marx reshapes materialism as part of his critique to decontextualized knowledge. Stirner's discontent with naturalistic objectivity anticipates Nietzsche's rejection of matter in favour of practices: Engels' historical materialism and his ahistorical dichotomic construction of materialism versus idealism are instead embraced by Lenin via Plekhanov, and they are further simplified by Stalin. Nietzsche's approach is recovered by Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, who challenge both political and theoretical representation. More recently, Barad recasts this challenge into a processual vocabulary, which renews the semantic constellation of realism, materialism, and materiality. Whilst not dismissing Barad's new tools, the essay suggests raising the wager: it proposes to extend its own genealogical practice, which reconnects materialism (and matter) with its historical process of production, to any other theoretical object. This recomposition may not only disentangle us from the lexicon of entities – including materialism and matter – but it may also help to construct a novel and potentially hegemonic language of practices.

Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge. The contributors include leaders in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, who respond ably to the most recent versions and defences of materialism. The modal arguments of Kripke and Chalmers,Jackson&'s knowledge argument, Kim&'s exclusion problem, and Burge&'s anti-individualism all play a part in the building

Chapter 8 The Compass of Beauty: A Search for the MiddlePART III; Chapter 9 Architectures of Air: Media Ecologies of Smart Cities and Pollution; Chapter 10 The Intelligence of Computational Design; Chapter 11 Grothendieck Topoi: Architectural and Plastic Imagination beyond Material Number and Space; Chapter 12 Vicarious Architectonics, Strange Objects, Chance-bound: Michel Serres's Exodus from Methodical Reason; Chapter 13 Transmythologies; Notes on Contributors; Index

This book is the first monograph on the theme of "new materialism," an emerging trend in 21st century thought that has already left its mark in such fields as philosophy, cultural theory, feminism, science studies, and the arts. The first part of the book contains elaborate interviews with some of the most prominent new materialist scholars of today: Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux. The second part situates the new materialist tradition in contemporary thought by singling out its transversal methodology, its position on sexual differing, and by developing the ethical and political consequences of new materialism.

This book is the first monograph on the theme of "new materialism," an emerging trend in 21st century thought that has already left its mark in such fields as philosophy, cultural theory, feminism, science studies, and the arts. The first part of the book contains elaborate interviews with some of the most prominent new materialist scholars of today: Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux. The second part situates the new materialist tradition in contemporary thought by singling out its transversal methodology, its position on sexual differing, and by developing the ethical and political consequences of new materialism.