L’année 2013 marquera le centenaire de la naissance de Paul Ricœur, décédé en 2005. A cette occasion, de nombreux colloques et événements culturels ont été et seront organisés tout au long de l’année en France et à l’étranger, afin de rendre hommage à celui que l’on peut bien tenir pour l’un des derniers grands penseurs de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle.

A l’heure de la publication de cette brève, le premier grand colloque international consacré à l’œuvre de Ricœur vient tout juste de s’achever. Ce colloque, organisé par Michaël Fœssel et Camille Riquier, qui s’est tenu du 11 au 14 février sous le titre de “Les mondes de Paul Ricœur” et qui s’est déroulé sur trois sites (Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Institut Catholique de Paris), a réuni une trentaine de conférenciers, intervenant sur l’œuvre de Ricœur considérée dans son intégralité.

via Hommage à Paul Ricoeur – Nonfiction.fr le portail des livres et des idées.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s meeting with RAF leader Andreas Baader was long considered to be one of the philosopher’s great missteps. A transcript of the meeting, which has only now been released, shows the Nobel laureate actually wanted to persuade him to stop murdering people.

A large entourage of journalists gathered at the Stuttgart airport, awaiting the arrival of the short-statured intellectual. French star philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s visit to Andreas Baader — the top terrorist of Germany’s Red Army Faction (RAF), the radical left-wing group also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang — was a worldwide sensation. It was Dec. 4, 1974.

via Transcript Released of Sartre Visit to RAF Leader Andreas Baader – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Stanley Cavell, born in 1926 and now 86 years old, is one of the greatest American philosophers of the past half-century. He was also something of a musical prodigy and like many prodigies his accomplishments struck him as a matter of fraud. During his freshman year at Berkeley, he writes in Little Did I Know, his 2010 memoir, he walked into one of his first piano courses and was asked to prove he had the requisite chops by playing a piece on the spot. Not having practiced anything but jazz for years—this was 1944, and big band swing was at its peak—the budding pianist sat down at the bench, broke into a half-remembered theme from a Liszt impromptu, and “stopped playing as the theme was about to elaborate itself, as if I could have gone on to the end were there time and need.”

He could not have gone on to the end, nor even a note further, but his teacher, a brilliant young pianist with some of the look of Marlene Dietrich, was nonetheless taken in. “Isn’t it fine to hear a man’s touch at the piano?” she said to the class. Cavell felt smitten, but also unmanned. “It is true that I had really done whatever . . . . I had done, but I could not go on.” Although he could play almost anything on demand—and would later win praise from Ernest Bloch, Milton Babbitt, and Roger Sessions, rescuing the premiere of one of the latter’s works through an emergency mid-concert transposition—for Cavell it was as if each new performance followed only from instinct, without the understanding that promised a way forward. No matter his successes, he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was a fraud.

Two decades later, in 1965, Cavell, having abandoned music for philosophy, returned to the problem of fraudulence in a now classic essay, “Music Discomposed.” (It would become a centerpiece in his landmark first collection, Must We Mean What We Say? [1969].)

n+1: Must We Mean What We Say?.

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a journalist, editor and editorialist, playwright and director, novelist and author of short stories, political essayist and activist—and arguably, although he came to deny it, a philosopher. He ignored or opposed systematic philosophy, had little faith in rationalism, asserted rather than argued many of his main ideas, presented others in metaphors, was preoccupied with immediate and personal experience, and brooded over such questions as the meaning of life in the face of death. Although he forcefully separated himself from existentialism, Camus posed one of the twentieth century’s best-known existentialist questions, which launches The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide” (MS, 3). And his philosophy of the absurd has left us with a striking image of the human fate: Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain only to see it roll back down each time he gains the top. Camus’s philosophy found political expression in The Rebel, which along with his newspaper editorials, political essays, plays, and fiction earned him a reputation as a great moralist. It also embroiled him in conflict with his friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, provoking the major political-intellectual divide of the Cold-War era as Camus and Sartre became, respectively, the leading intellectual voices of the anti-Communist and pro-Communist left. Furthermore, in posing and answering urgent philosophical questions of the day, Camus articulated a critique of religion and of the Enlightenment and all its projects, including Marxism. In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in a car accident in January, 1960, at the age of 46.

via Albert Camus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Voices of Sartre, Lukács, Chomsky, Harvey and others in conversation with New Left Review.

The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Leftbrings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.

Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers.

Lives on the Left includes interviews with Georg Lukács, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Jir?i Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, João Pedro Stédile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi.

via Amazon.com: Lives on the Left: Interviews with New Left Review (9781844676996): Francis Mulhern: Books.

I need to address the influence of Louis Althusser.  There is, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out, a trajectory that can broadly be sketched with Althusser, Poulantzas and Laclau/Mouffe as its three compass points: from Maoism to Eurocommunism to ‘radical democracy’ and the abandonment of class politics as a ‘fundamentalist’, ‘essentialist’ error.

Yet to simply read the failings of his followers back into Althusser’s project would be a travesty as unfair as E P Thompson’s execration of the ‘Stalinist’ Althusser.  It is, in fact, a bitter irony that many of Althusser’s followers ended up in the social-democratic camp, as this was precisely the fate that his audacious and original reconstitution of Marxism was intended to help avoid.  The fact that it didn’t is not necessarily a reflection on the failings of the project; rather, it shows that Althusser was perhaps over-confident in the ability of revolutionary theory to overcome the deficiencies of political practice – particularly on the part of the French communist party (PCF) of which he was a member for most of his political life.  He was to acknowledge a “theoreticist deviation” among his failings when he came to review and rectify his work in later years.

via LENIN’S TOMB: Louis Althusser and socialist strategy.

via Martin Heidegger (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

The classical works of Foucault’s ethics are his historical studies of ancient sexual ethics in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, in addition to the late interviews “On the Genealogy of Ethics” and “The Ethics for the Concern of Self as a Practice of Freedom.”  The publication of his final three lecture courses at the Collège de France in 1982-3 considerably enhance how those texts are to be understood and provide original resources.  The Hermeneutics of the Subject provides greater insight into the ancient ethics of caring for self and how Foucault perceives it in relation to the history of philosophy.  Both The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth – his final courses, respectively – make it manifest that he considered the ancient ethical practice of parrhesia or frank-speech central to ancient ethics and, indeed, important to his own philosophical practice.

via Michel Foucault: Ethics [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy].

(thanks Foucault News)

via Philosophers Zone – 24 September 2011 – The Mind of Jacques Lacan.

English Literature student Alexander Freer and PPE student Danny Smith interview Professor Stephen Shapiro on Foucault’s major theories as part of a series looking at the key thinkers for the social sciences.

Summary

This interview provides an introduction to the revolutionary work of Michel Foucault (1926–1984), French historian and social theorist. Professor Stephen Shapiro talks about Foucault’s major ideas about society, power and the individual, giving examples from history, literary studies and gender theory. Foucault’s insights are located in discussions about the army, the classroom and the prison, and he discusses how ideas about marginal groups and practices impact on normal conversations, our bodies and how we live in society.

Professor Stephen Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He was educated at Williams College and Yale University. He has published many books on the American novel, and his most recent publications include How to Read Marx’s Capital (London: Pluto, 2008) and, with Anne Schwan, How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (London: Pluto 2011).

This podcast was produced by Alexander Freer and Danny Smith as part of a series of interviews offering an introduction to the most important theorists used in the humanities and social science disciplines today. Alexander Freer is a third-year undergraduate English student specialising in Romantic Poetry and editor of Reinvention: A Journal of Undergraduate Research. Danny Smith is a third-year undergraduate PPE student specialising in Modern Germen philosophy.

via Key thinkers – Michel Foucault. Interview with Stephen Shapiro (2011) « Foucault News.