I'm not a Marxist. I believe that Marxism is deeply flawed at its base and no amount of recasting it in new terms will be able to salvage it. Still, all of the philosophers, literary critics, historians, thinkers, etc. whose work I read on a regular basis, enjoy profoundly and use in my own work almost exclusively are Marxists. Terry Eagleton, Perry Anderson, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Eric Hobsbawm, Zygmunt Bauman, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson - these are the most brilliant thinkers of our times, and they are all Marxists.
I have been searching for a long time for a serious philosopher, critic or historian of global significance who would not be a Marxist. Of course, I don't mean a clown of Francis Fukuyama's ilk. I mean a real thinker who can construct a good argument and who actually knows how to write well. I have had no luck so far.
So if any of my readers have any suggestions, I will definitely welcome them.
16 comments:
I'm not a free-market capitalist by any means, but my guess is that most people who are thinkers are found in academia, or at least have spent in the past a long, long time in academia, and are thus insulated in large part from the marketplace.
It's easier to believe in full-bore Marxism when you have not been exposed to any form of capitalism, or even a true mixed system like most countries have (including the US).
-Mike
"Global significance" would seem to be determined by the marketplace for ones writings. I would argue that Steven Barnes (http://www.darkush.blogspot.com) qualifies, for example, but he is well known only in certain circles.
I think part of the intellectual attraction of Marxism is that it offers a comprehensive narrative of the entire world, bringing together history, philosophy, politics, art and science in ways that no competing secular doctrine does. If you recall Hannah Arendt’s comments to Gershom Scholem, she gives this explanation for turning toward Marx even though she was not an ideological Marxist. In terms of non Marxist big narrative thinkers I would suggest Allan Bloom and Karl Popper, particularly as they have this whole debate about the legitimacy of Plato in the liberal canon.
Not sure what the rub is against Marxism, but there are plenty of alternatives in cultural studies...
Foucault? Some of his cultural criticism seems similar to Zizek's without some of the Marxist methodology. Edward Said's also good, though of course he's not the best advocate for some of his causes.
Also, the philosophers you cite are almost exclusively continental. Dworkin and Rawls undeniably have global significance without being "clowns" or anything near what Fukuyama is. I think it would be very interesting to see somebody on the continental side look to analytic thinkers (and vice versa, for that matter), given how little interaction already exists.
For that matter, a guy like Rorty manages to cross this divide and still be smart about it, too.
Foucault? Some of his cultural criticism seems similar to Zizek's without some of the Marxist methodology. Edward Said's also good, though of course he's not the best advocate for some of his causes.
Also, the philosophers you cite are almost exclusively continental. Dworkin and Rawls undeniably have global significance without being "clowns" or anything near what Fukuyama is. I think it would be very interesting to see somebody on the continental side look to analytic thinkers (and vice versa, for that matter), given how little interaction already exists.
For that matter, a guy like Rorty manages to cross this divide and still be smart about it, too.
Thank you everybody for keeping the discussion alive while I was immersed in an autistic fugue. :-)
Foucault and Said are great but they are, unfortunately, dead. I was aiming more towards people who are still alive and working and can address the issues that arise today.
Rorty and Alan Bloom are somehow not the kind of people whose latest masterpiece you await dancing around your mailbox in eager expectation.
Touche. And sorry about the double-post there :)
How about Judith Butler? Or would you consider her a little too third-wave for you?
I recommend Stanley Cavell. He has an idea of justice (Emerson), he writes about aesthetics, he is highly conversant with continental philosophy (Heidegger, Wittegenstein, Derrida), and he is still alive. Not a Marxist.
That said, I believe Marxism is still, as a thinker you mention above put it, the 'untranscendable horizon' of our time. That is, I think as long as capitalism and its contradictions exist, so shall thinkers and philosophers turn to Marxism - which is a vast, self-critical explanatory/critical system. Marxism is not the enemy, and it certainly is not cloistered in academi; it is radically touched, implicated, and co-constituted by capital.
So, check out Stanley Cavell, a great thinker 'outside' the Marxist tradition.
- scott b.
I like Judith Butler's ideas but her writing style is hopeless. What can be said in one sentence occupies a page. It's not for nothing she won the worst sentence ever prize with the following gem: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
scott b.: To my shame, I have never heard of Stanley Cavell. Thanks for the suggestion, I will check him out right now.
It always astonishes me just how many super intellectual people read my blog. Thank you, my friends!
Very happy to suggest Stanley Cavell. An unpretentious thinker.
I am tempted to offer another suggestion: Jacques Ranciere. He comes from the Marxist tradition - he studied under Althusser - but since the early seventies has developed his own kind of philosophy of dissensus, as it were. I suppose he is a kind lateral anarchist thinker now, thinking through logics of radical, horizontal politcal action - he believes Marxist critique is too vertical, hierarchical, deep structured. He writes about everything too; interesting things to say about education and the internet, in fact. And Zizek and Agamben really like him. A truly political thinker.
- scott b.
Now I understand why Amazon keeps recommending Jacques Ranciere to me. :-) I've been wondering whether I should take him up and now you have decided that for me.
Thanks!
RIght on, Scott B.
You may appreciate Rancière's ideas about aesthetics and politics, Clarissa. I think that Rancière may be an important building block in your work on nationalism and literature.
Read him in original French, as you should.
Ol.
For a refreshing and original use of Foucault's biopolitics (once again, he may be key to your work), I recommend Roberto Esposito, still somehow unknown in the US academia.
Ol.
Foucault was once a Marxist, too, though.
The attraction to Marxism in academia is not as much political as it is philosophical. Firstly, there is no more comprehensive study of capitalism than Capital, at least not from a dissenting stance. Secondly, as Althusser discovered and later concluded that Marx himself was unaware, Marx made a serious scientific attempt at history, at understanding what was really at stake in the story of humanity. Not only that, but he really turned science on its head with the epistemological break. Without the epistemological break, string theory would be gibberish. Then again, I'm biased because I care more for Althusser's Marx than for Marx's Marx.
A little late to the post, but regarding Stanley Cavell, check his book "Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage", the most brilliant analysis I even found on screwball comedies (one of my favorite genres). His book on 1940s melodramas is not so good, though.
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