The Entire Archives of Radical Philosophy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972-2018)
Were non-academic
critics to take academic work seriously, they might notice that debates over
“political correctness,” "thought policing," "identity
politics," etc. have been going on for thirty years now, and among left
intellectuals themselves. Contrary to what many seem to think, criticism of
liberal ideology has not been banned in the academy. It is absolutely the case
that the humanities have become increasingly hostile to irresponsible opinions
that dehumanize people, like emergency room doctors become hostile to drunk
driving. But it does not follow therefore that one cannot disagree with the
establishment, as though the University system were still beholden to the
Vatican.
Understanding this
requires work many people are unwilling to do, either because they’re busy and
distracted or, perhaps more often, because they have other, bad faith agendas.
Should one decide to survey the philosophical debates on the left, however, an
excellent place to start would be Radical Philosophy, which
describes itself as a “UK-based journal of socialist and feminist philosophy.”
Founded in 1972, in response to “the widely-felt discontent with the sterility
of academic philosophy at the time,” the journal was itself an act of protest
against the culture of academia.
Radical Philosophy has
published essays and interviews with nearly all of the big names in academic
philosophy on the left—from Marxists, to post-structuralists, to
post-colonialists, to phenomeno-logists, to critical theorists, to Lacanians, to
queer theorists, to radical theologians, to the pragmatist Richard Rorty,
who made
arguments for national pride and made several critiques of critical
theory as an illiberal enterprise. The full range of radical critical theory
over the past 45 years appears here, as well as contrarian responses from
philosophers on the left.
Rorty was hardly the
only one in the journal’s pages to critique certain prominent trends.
Sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant launched a 2001
protest against what they called “a strange Newspeak,” or
“NewLiberalSpeak” that included words like “globalization,” “governance,”
“employability,” “underclass,” “communitarianism,” “multiculturalism” and
“their so-called postmodern cousins.” Bourdieu and Wacquant argued that this
discourse obscures “the terms ‘capitalism,’ ‘class,’ ‘exploitation,’
‘domination,’ and ‘inequality,’” as part of a “neoliberal revolution,” that
intends to “remake the world by sweeping away the social and economic conquests
of a century of social struggles.”
One can also find in
the pages of Radical
Philosophy philosopher Alain
Badiou’s 2005 critique of “democratic materialism,” which he
identifies as a “postmodernism” that “recognizes the objective existence of
bodies alone. Who would ever speak today, other than to conform to a certain
rhetoric? Of the separability of our immortal soul?” Badiou identifies the
ideal of maximum tolerance as one that also, paradoxically, “guides us,
irresistibly” to war. But he refuses to counter democratic materialism’s maxim
that “there are only bodies and languages” with what he calls “its formal
opposite… ‘aristocratic idealism.’” Instead, he adds the supplementary phrase,
“except that there are truths.”
Badiou’s polemic
includes an oblique swipe at Stalinism, a critique Michel
Foucault makes in more depth in a 1975 interview, in which he approvingly
cites phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty’s “argument against the Communism of the
time… that it has destroyed the dialectic of individual and history—and hence
the possibility of a humanistic society and individual freedom.” Foucault made
a case for this “dialectical relationship” as that “in which the free and open
human project consists.” In an interview
two years later, he talks of prisons as institutions “no less perfect than
school or barracks or hospital” for repressing and transforming individuals.
Foucault’s political
philosophy inspired feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler, whose arguments
inspired many of today’s gender theorists, and who is deeply concerned with
questions of ethics, morality, and social responsibility. Her Adorno
Prize Lecture, published in a 2012 issue, took up Theodor Adorno’s
challenge of how it is possible to live a good life in bad circumstances (under
fascism, for example)—a classical political question that she engages through
the work of Orlando Patterson, Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Hegel.
Her lecture ends with a discussion of the ethical duty to actively resist and
protest an intolerable status quo.
You can now read for
free all of these essays and hundreds more at the Radical Philosophy archive,
either on the site itself or in downloadable PDFs. The journal, run by an
‘Editorial Collective,” still appears three times a year. The most recent issue
features an essay by Lars T. Lih on the Russian
Revolution through the lens of Thomas Hobbes, a detailed
historical account by Nathan Brown of the term “postmodern,” and its
inapplicability to the present moment, and an essay by Jamila M.H. Mascat on
the problem
of Hegelian abstraction.
If nothing else, these
essays and many others should upend facile notions of leftist academic
philosophy as dominated by “postmodern” denials of truth, morality, freedom,
and Enlightenment thought, as doctrinaire Stalinism, or little more than
thought policing through dogmatic political correctness. For every argument in
the pages of Radical Philosophy that might confirm certain
readers' biases, there are dozens more that will challenge their assumptions,
bearing out Foucault’s observation that “philosophy cannot be an endless
scrutiny of its own propositions.”
Explore free resources at openculture
Enter the Radical Philosophy archive
here
Related Content:
Also see
Articles on ideology in East Europe
Andrew Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the liberal left
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
