Fall 2018 Seminar: Democracy and Marxism with Peter Bratsis

Giv­en the mul­ti­ple Left, Lib­er­al and Neo-con­ser­v­a­tive inter­pre­ta­tions of Ger­man ide­al­ism in terms of the end(s) of his­to­ry and or its new begin­ning, we will inter­pret the world his­tor­i­cal spir­it 1. in the light of the enlight­en­ment 2. a close read­ing of Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy engage the con­tem­po­rary world and its mul­ti­ple vari­a­tions. By think­ing through the after­math of the clo­sure of West­ern philo­soph­i­cal thought and its mean­ing for the neo-lib­er­al epoch, we will encounter some of the poet­ic respons­es to this clo­sure and the attempts made philo­soph­i­cal­ly to reori­ent thought. Authors read will include Kant, Hegel, Mal­larme, and Rim­baud among oth­ers.

Much has been said about “dialec­tics” in the con­text of left­ist think­ing about pol­i­tics, yet often the con­ver­sa­tion is often vague on the specifics of what is it that dialec­tics in think­ing actu­al­ly means? What is gained by deploy­ing “dialec­ti­cal thought”? To counter this ten­den­cy, we will trace spe­cif­ic artic­u­la­tions of dialec­ti­cal move­ment in thought, with the aim of gain­ing a clear­er under­stand­ing of the fun­da­men­tal con­cepts, ideas and meth­ods that relate to this mode of think­ing.

Our focus is on build­ing a ground­ing in think­ing about every­day life that seeks (rather than avoids) con­tra­dic­tions, and is capa­ble of sur­viv­ing (as Hegel said) the ten­sions that arise with­in it.

Read­ings will begin with a dis­cus­sion of sec­tions from Aristotle’s “Pri­or Ana­lyt­ics” and “Cat­e­gories”. We will then fol­low with a few excerpts from Hegel’s stud­ies of log­ic, while mak­ing explic­it Hegel’s con­ver­sa­tion with Aris­to­tle. We will con­clude with a close read­ing of Sovi­et philoso­pher Evald Ilyenkov’s pre­sen­ta­tion of dialec­ti­cal think­ing, in the con­text of the thread run­ning from Aris­to­tle, through Hegel and Marx.

In recent times, left schol­ars, mil­i­tants, and the­o­rists have returned to Marx in the hope of
find­ing the rev­o­lu­tion­ary truth. Although the study of Marx and his immense pro­duc­tion of
crit­i­cal analy­sis is nec­es­sary and demand­ing, it alone can­not replace the more cur­rent
the­o­ret­i­cal inter­ven­tions of the mid­dle twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry through the first two decades of the
21st cen­tu­ry. This course will focus on three of the most orig­i­nal con­tem­po­rary ver­sions of
Marx­ism which have tak­en into account cur­rent con­di­tions. We will encounter and focus on the
exem­plary and orig­i­nal work of the Frank­furt School, Hen­ri Lefeb­vre, and Anto­nio Negri. The
hope is to think in our times with new con­cepts and cat­e­gories need­ed for under­stand­ing and
mak­ing rad­i­cal change.