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The History and Theory of Fetishism
The History and Theory of Fetishism, the expanded version of Iacono's enduring classic Teorie del feticismo and available for the first time in English, aims to provide the historical context necessary to understanding the concept of "fetishism" and offers an overview of the ideologies, prejudices, and critical senses that shaped the Western observer's view of otherness and of his own world. Iacono examines the moment when the Western observer turned his colonizing and evangelizing gaze to continents such as Africa and the Americas, while attempting to simultaneously destabilize and look at his own world critically.
The Bourgeois and the Savage
This classic text in Italian history of political philosophy, translated into English for the first time, investigates the philosophical and ideological conceptions hidden beneath the modern image of the isolated individual. In The Bourgeois and the Savage, Alfonso Maurizio Iacono reveals that this apparently simple and transparent image is imbued with a profound complexity containing human and social relationships, which are intertwined with relationships of power, domination, inequality, colonisation and servitude. As Karl Marx argued, and as was later confirmed by twentieth-century anthropology, the isolated individual does not stand at the beginning of history; he can emerge only where social relationships are already very developed and where society appears as a tool used for private purposes. Considering the writings of Daniel Defoe, the great French Enlightenment philosopher Turgot, and the father of political economy Adam Smith, The Bourgeois and the Savage critically analyses the process which led to the naturalisation of the image of the isolated man and traces its development and transformation into a still dominant paradigm.
The Patient as a Person
In the current era, evidence-based medicine and various supporting technologies dominate everyday clinical practice, according to a disease-centred, as opposed to patient-centred, approach. They have obviously improved the clinical management of diseases and it is therefore unreasonable to think of a medicine in which they are not considered fundamental. In fact, the strength of the new medicine should be to adapt scientific knowledge to a specific clinical case. This book therefore looks at the prospect of a new 'person' centred medicine, which stands alongside the 'disease' and 'patient' centred medicine, which pays special attention to the subjectivity of scientific knowledge and the rela...
A New Introduction to Karl Marx
This book provides a concise overview of Marx’s philosophy and political economy, tracing various changes of his theoretical views over time through his practical and theoretical engagements with contradictions of capitalism from the unique perspective of Japanese Marxism. While it offers an objective introduction to Marx’s critique of capitalism, Sasaki uniquely pays particular attention to the concept of “metabolism,” whose disruption under the capitalist mode of production causes exhaustion of labour-power as well as natural resources. Sasaki reconstructs Marx as a revolutionary thinker, whose devoted his entire life for the sake of establishing a more free and equal society beyond capitalism. Sasaki’s book shows that Marx’s passion for the socialist revolution in his last years is recorded in his late excerpt notebooks that become available through the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe.
Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory
This edited volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the traces of the idea of “Real Abstraction” in Marx’s thought from the early to late writings, as well as the theoretical and practical consequences of this notion in the capitalist social system. Divided into two main parts, Part One reconstructs Marx’s notion of “Real Abstraction” and the influences of earlier thinkers (Berkley, Petty, Franklin, Feuerbach, Hegel) on his thoughts, as well as the further elaborations of this concept in later Marxist thinkers (Sohn-Rethel, Lukács, Lefebvre, Adorno and Postone). Part Two then considers the reverberations of the notion in the field of critical theory from a more abstract critique of capitalist social relations, to a more concrete understanding of historical movements. Taken together, the chapters in this volume offer a focused look at the concept of “Real Abstraction” in Marx.
Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature
Reading different or controversial intentions into Marx and Engels’ works has been a common but somewhat unquestioned practice in the history of Marxist scholarship. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, a torso for some and a great book for others, is a case in point. The entire Engels debate separates into two opposite views: Engels the contaminator of Marx’s “new materialism” vs. Engels the self-educated genius of dialectical materialism. What Engels, unlike Marx, has not enjoyed so far is a critical reading that considers the relationship between different layers of this standard text: authorial, textual, editorial, and interpretational. Informed by a historical hermeneutic, this book ...
Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics
This book is a complete presentation of the most important themes of Theodor W. Adorno’s critical theory, and of its relevance for the understanding of the modern society. After an Introduction, which traces Adorno’s biographical and intellectual profile, the book is structured in three parts. The first is devoted to theoretical philosophy, and in particular to the concepts of philosophy, negative dialectics and metaphysics, and his aim is to clarify the Adornian understanding of such difficult concepts. The second is devoted to the main themes of Adorno’s social theory: the concept of domination, the relationship with Marxism, the theory of the decay of the individual, the critique of mass manipulation. The third part is devoted to aesthetics and culture criticism, and entails a conclusion in which the author outlines a confrontation between the Adornian and the Habermasian critique of modernity.
Marxism and Historiography
Eminent Italian historian Giovanni Levi once notably remarked that “no one is a Marxist anymore,” pointing to a paradox in Italian cultural history. While what is called "Marxism" was supposedly hegemonic over Italian culture, and especially history writing, for decades in the postwar period, it then seems to have suddenly disappeared. This study questions such a vision of a monolithic and hegemonic Marxism. It starts from the most effective anecdote to all ideologising narratives—that is, research into the texts themselves. It sees the Marxist historiography of the post-1945 period as a "history in the making," in which references to Marxian theory were a fundamental factor driving historiographical innovation. This allows the book to bring to light a highly original experience in the development of historiography, based on the long Italian tradition of reflection on historical knowledge.
The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy
This book analyzes the dynamics through which the two major communist parties of the capitalist world—which in the 1970s had great influence on their respective national political contexts since the 1980s are increasing their marginality and, although in different forms and with different timeframes are unable to stem the decline of their political and cultural influences on the working classes.
One Hundred Years of History of the French Communist Party
The Communist Party appeared a hundred years ago on the French political and social scene. According to opinions and moments, it has been the party of Moscow, of those shot, of the working class, of the union of the left, the party of the foreigner or that of the nation. It has been underground, in government, in town halls, in factories or in the streets. Some considered it too revolutionary, others not enough. More than others, it aroused passions, positive or negative. It attracted many and repelled just as many. After the fall of the USSR, it decided to remain a communist party, while many others gave it up. But it no longer has the place it once had, in reality as in the imagination. This book does not intend to judge, but to provide keys to understanding. It is based on a considerable number of archives that are now available and is an ordered and distanced look at an object that is not lacking in complexity and no doubt even in mystery. This book has been translated from French to English thanks to a financial help from the Gabriel Péri Foundation and the LIR3S UMR Cnrs 7366 of Dijon.
