What's Left of Philosophy

In this episode, we unpack tensions between theories of equality that emphasize opportunity and outcomes in a discussion based upon Christine Sypnowich’s recent Boston Review article, “Is Equal Opportunity Enough?” We also discuss our very own William Paris’s response to Sypnowich in his essay “The Art of Equality.” We debate whether liberalism is tied to capitalist institutions, what it means to lead a flourishing life, and why French social clubs may contain part of the answer. We end with a stirring defense of equality as the best concept for social transformation.leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Christine Sypnowich, “Is Equal Opportunity Enough?” https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/is-equal-opportunity-enough/William Paris, “The Art of Equality” https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/the-art-of-equality/ Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

In this episode we talk about Antonio Gramsci’s book The Modern Prince. Written while imprisoned by the fascists in Mussolini’s Italy, the work is a reflection on the party as a form of organization and the importance of leadership for revolutionary socialist politics. We discuss Gramsci’s realist approach to politics as an art and science, his insistence on partisanship as a condition for objectivity in socio-political analysis, and what he might have to say about the sad state of leftist movement today. We are also joined by Owen’s adorable baby Eleni, who makes her presence known on more than one occasion.leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971)Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Dr. Michael Thomas discusses Black aesthetics and hip hop as a 'problem space' challenging societal contradictions. They delve into the complexities of hip-hop storytelling, the concept of signifying in black experience, Nicki Minaj's personal struggles, the shift towards vibe in the music industry, the art of listening and responding in hip hop culture, and the evolution of taste in hip-hop and black aesthetics.

In this patrons-only episode we discuss Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 The State and Revolution. When he’s not snarkily dragging his political opponents for their opportunism and philistinism, Lenin tries to work through some of the most hotly contested ideas in Marxian political theory, including the role of the state in capitalist society and its ‘withering away’ after the revolution, the problems of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bureaucracy, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. How could this polemical intervention still be relevant for us today, over a hundred years after the October Revolution and in a very different world than Lenin’s own? Join us and find out, tovarisch!This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:patreon.com/leftofphilosophyReferences:Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution, trans. Robert Service (New York: Penguin, 1992)Ralph Miliband, “Lenin’s The State and Revolution”, at Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/2018/08/lenin-state-and-revolution-miliband Music:Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

In this inaugural episode of our new series on aesthetics, we discuss Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. We begin with his assessment of the French Revolution and its perceived failure to deliver on its lofty republican ideals, focusing on his ascription of this failure to the fragmentation of the modern self and society. We then attempt to wrap our minds around Schiller’s proposed corrective: an ‘aesthetic education’ that mobilizes art and beauty toward the end of dialectically unifying sensuous life and Reason, nature and moral freedom, the ‘coarser’ class of ‘savages’ and the refined ‘barbarians’. We end, frankly, by trashing the current state of cultural production and fine art, caustically noting the contemporary shortage of Schillerian aesthetic education.leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, eds. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (New York: Oxford University Press)Jacques Rancière, "Schiller and the Aesthetic Promise," trans. Owen Glyn-Williams, in Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom, eds. María del Rosario Acosta López & Jeffrey L. Powell (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018)Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

In this episode, we take a deep dive into Frantz Fanon’s first book Black Skin, White Masks. We discuss his views on racism as a form of alienation and narcissism, assess that status of reason throughout his argument, and interrogate his emphasis on futurity over history. Throughout we defend his theory of social pathology and his embrace of reason and universal humanism. This episode should be a stimulating introduction to the anticolonial and revolutionary work of Fanon for both newcomers and experts!leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008).Frantz Fanon, Œuvres (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2011).Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” in Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967).Liam Kofi Bright, “White Psychodrama,” The Journal of Political Philosophy, 2023. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopp.12290Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

In this episode we are joined by Devin Zane Shaw to talk about his book Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy. We discuss the concept of the ‘three-way fight’, what Beauvoir’s analysis of the antinomies of action can teach us about emancipatory violence, and the necessity of community self-defense. Ambiguity may be an inescapable condition for those of us who truly care about freedom, but you just cannot have dinner with nazis, comrades.leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Devin Zane Shaw, Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2020)Devin Zane Shaw, “Seven Theses on the Three-Way Fight”, at threewayfight: https://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2021/08/seven-theses-on-three-way-fight.htmlGlen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism (New York: Routledge, 2021)Leanne Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021)Shane Burley, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021)Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Feeling alienated? In this episode, we are here for you. We dig into three periods of Herbert Marcuse’s thought. Marcuse was Martin Heidegger’s student in the 1920s, a member of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, the philosopher of the New Left in the 1960s, and stays haunting the petit bourgeois in the 2020s. We pay our respects and get to the bottom of his influence on critical theory, social movements, and the culture. leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

In this episode we dig into some early writings by the incomparable black radical feminist and communist Angela Davis. We reflect on some of the contradictions involved in the transformation of women’s labor in the development of patriarchal capitalism and the latent potentials for the emancipated life in common that these developments nevertheless carry within themselves. We talk about the radical potential of industrializing housework, discuss strategies for the formation of effective solidarity, and—as usual—find a way to drag American suburbia. Get out there and contest capitalist power at the point of production! Those potentialities won’t actualize themselves, after all.This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:patreon.com/leftofphilosophyReferences:Angela Y. Davis, "Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation," in The Black Feminist Reader, eds. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Malden: Blackwell, 2000)Angela Y. Davis, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective”, in Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1983)Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

We couldn't put together a new episode for you this week, so we thought we'd unlock an old Patreon exclusive! Thanks to everyone who helped us pick which one by voting in our Twitter poll. We'll be back with a brand new ep next Monday.--In this episode, the crew takes on a beloved figure of the academic 'left': Michel Foucault. The discussion gravitates around Foucault’s work in the early 1970’s on the ‘punitive society’, power as civil war, and popular rebellion. This post-‘68 period of his life and work is often seen as his most politically radical, both because of his activist involvement in the Prisons Information Group (GIP) and because he directly engages with Marxist discourse and thought. Nevertheless, the conversation quickly turns skeptical (to put it mildly). We question both the explanatory power and the political stakes of his historical studies: What is the principle of connection between the often remote historical discourses and events he examines and present conditions of life? What are the consequences of rejecting causal explanations of historical development? Above all, how salient and clarifying are his histories for emancipatory struggles in the present? We try to answer these questions, while poking a bit of fun at our Foucauldian friends and comrades. Oh and we talk about the CIA’s alleged awareness of the increasing hegemony of French theory in the academic left—apparently they loved that for us.leftofphilosophy.com Follow us @leftofphilReferences:Michel Foucault, Penal Theories and Institutions: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1971-1972, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt et. al., trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador)Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972-1973, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan)Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com