This year, we celebrate the 125th anniversary of Marx’s 1882 Preface to the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, co-authored by Engels, in which he espouses an alternate road toward communism for Russia, one based upon agricultural Russia’s village communes, and different from that outlined in CAPITAL, Vol. I for Western Europe. The 1882 Preface is the culminating point of Marx’s late writings on Russia, which to this day have been unassimilated into the framework of “Marxism” as developed by post-Marx Marxists…
During a visit to Tehran in the spring of 2005, we were impressed by the degree of intellectual freedom Iranians had carved out within the Islamic Republic. The numerous bookstores on Enqelab Avenue across from Tehran University carried an array of newly translated books by Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, among others. A lecture on “Foucault and Feminism” at Alzahra Women’s University elicited enthusiastic responses, including one from a high university official clad from head to toe in a black chador. A visit to the literary editors of the country’s most prestigious newspaper, Shargh (daily circulation 100,000), led to a conversation that ranged easily from religion and politics to Continental philosophers like Foucault, Theodor Adorno and Giorgio Agamben.
Erich Fromm’s work is unfortunately neglected in academia today, in no small part because his expansive humanism is out of joint with many forms of radical thought popular in those quarters. In addition, university psychology and psychiatry departments have almost completely excluded Freudians or psychoanalysts of any kind, which leaves no room for Fromm there [...]
Published in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Zizek (Duke University Press, 2007)
With the death of Pope John Paul II, a major pillar of the retrogressive politics of the past 25 years has left the scene. Unfortunately, his replacement, Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), is the one that progressives within the Roman Catholic Church had feared the most. While no one can predict all of the specific policies that Benedict XVI will put forth, it seems clear that the leadership of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful religious institution will continue along the general pathway laid out by John Paul II…
“Islamisticka pokuseni: Novy pohled na vztah Michela Foucaulta a iranske revoluce” (trans. of “Seductions of Islamism: Revisiting Foucault on the Iranian Revolution”)