Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism PDF Download

Author: Andre Vltchek
Publisher: PT. Badak Merah Semesta
ISBN: 9786025095412
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The great Latin American revolutionary writer, Eduardo Galeano, once said toVltchek, "It is time to raise old flags. It is time to un-dust them and once again gather under them." The Revolution is not over. Communism and socialism are far from being defeated. One of the leading left-wing thinkers today, Andre Vltchek, in this collection of philosophical, revolutionary essays, explains why revolutionary optimism is so feared in the nihilistic West and, by taking us to all corners of the world, proves that people everywhere are still capable of dreaming, hoping and fighting for a much better world and for eternal ideals!

Author: Dupont (Monsieur.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Originally self-published in 2003, now edited and designed by Ardent Press, still one of the most hard-nosed books to call the left to account -- with scathing, thoughtful rebuttals to those who continue to believe that the revolution is just a matter of consciousness-raising and recruitment, or that identity politics has anything to do with Marxist thought. Many will reject the materialism inherent in this analysis, but we appreciate the logical consistency (and the occasional brilliance of writing) of Monsieur Dupont; so refreshing in a world in which people withdraw to muddle-headedness in incoherent attempts to fit all topics into some kind of grab bag, attempts seemingly designed to avoid offense rather than to follow ideas through to their logical (or even illogical) conclusions. Unlike so many people who either reject theory all together (rather, who obscure the theory that they work from), or who embrace theory and ignore the ways reality doesn't fit their ideas, Msr Dupont reflected on their experience (and that of others) and changed their theory to suit their lives. We need more people who are willing to be unpopular, who work an idea until it groans, who reflect on real life experiences and then acknowledge the ways in which prevailing theory doesn't make sense, and who are then capable of challenging prevailing theory to be more coherent, more realistic, and more useful. species being could be considered a companion text to Nihilist Communism, or vice versa: reading them together has been helpful for some. Nihilist Communism refers more to specific political occurrences, and species being fleshes out some of the more esoteric ideas.

Author: Nolen Gertz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786607042
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Heidegger, Marcuse, and Ellul warned against the rise of a technological mass culture. Philosophy of technology has since turned away from such dystopic views, promoting instead the view that we shape technologies just as technologies shape us. Yet the rise of Big Data has exceeded our worst fears about Big Brother, leading us to again question whether technologies are empowering us or enslaving us. Rather than engage in endless debates about whether technologies are making us better or making us worse, Nolen Gertz investigates what we think “better” and “worse” mean, and what role this thinking has played in the creation of our technological world. This investigation is carried out by using Nietzsche’s philosophy of nihilism in order to explore the ways in which our values mediate how we design technologies and how we use technologies. Examining our technological practices—practices ranging from Netflix and Chill to Fitbit and Move to Twitter and Rage—reveals how our nihilism and our technologies have become intertwined, creating a world of techno-hypnosis, data-driven activity, pleasure economics, herd networking, and orgies of clicking.

Author: Nolen Gertz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537176
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
An examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters. When someone is labeled a nihilist, it's not usually meant as a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, literally, “an ideology of nothing. “ Is nihilism, then, believing in nothing? Or is it the belief that life is nothing? Or the belief that the beliefs we have amount to nothing? If we can learn to recognize the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can learn to distinguish what is meaningful from what is meaningless. In this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Gertz traces the history of nihilism in Western philosophy from Socrates through Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although the term “nihilism” was first used by Friedrich Jacobi to criticize the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Gertz shows that the concept can illuminate the thinking of Socrates, Descartes, and others. It is Nietzsche, however, who is most associated with nihilism, and Gertz focuses on Nietzsche's thought. Gertz goes on to consider what is not nihilism—pessimism, cynicism, and apathy—and why; he explores theories of nihilism, including those associated with Existentialism and Postmodernism; he considers nihilism as a way of understanding aspects of everyday life, calling on Adorno, Arendt, Marx, and prestige television, among other sources; and he reflects on the future of nihilism. We need to understand nihilism not only from an individual perspective, Gertz tells us, but also from a political one.

Author: Augusto Del Noce
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773596747
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In his native Italy Augusto Del Noce is regarded as one of the preeminent political thinkers and philosophers of the period after the Second World War. The Crisis of Modernity makes available for the first time in English a selection of Del Noce's essays and lectures on the cultural history of the twentieth century. Del Noce maintained that twentieth-century history must be understood specifically as a philosophical history, because Western culture was profoundly affected by the major philosophies of the previous century such as idealism, Marxism, and positivism. Such philosophies became the secular, neo-gnostic surrogate of Christianity for the European educated classes after the French Revolution, and the next century put them to the practical test, bringing to light their ultimate and necessary consequences. One of the first thinkers to recognize the failure of Marxism, Del Noce posited that this failure set the stage for a new secular, technocratic society that had taken up Marx’s historical materialism and atheism while rejecting his revolutionary doctrine. Displaying Del Noce's rare ability to reconstruct intellectual genealogies and to expose the deep metaphysical premises of social and political movements, The Crisis of Modernity presents an original reading of secularization, scientism, the sexual revolution, and the history of modern Western culture.

Author: al-Haj Saleh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1787380513
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a leftist dissident who spent sixteen years as a political prisoner and now lives in exile. He describes with precision and fervour the events that led to Syria’s 2011 uprising, the metamorphosis of the popular revolution into a regional war, and the ‘three monsters’ Saleh sees ‘treading on Syria’s corpse’: the Assad regime and its allies, ISIS and other jihadists, and Russia and the US. Where conventional wisdom has it that Assad’s army is now battling religious fanatics for control of the country, Saleh argues that the emancipatory, democratic mass movement that ignited the revolution still exists, though it is beset on all sides. The Impossible Revolution is a powerful, compelling critique of Syria’s catastrophic war, which has profoundly reshaped the lives of millions of Syrians.

Author: Devon R. Johnson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538153505
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
This is an innovative work in Africana philosophical thought that links the phenomenon of nihilism in black America, in particular black American youth, to modern traditions of Western philosophy. Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism engages defining themes of black existential life by offering a framework for considering the relationships between antiblack racism, pessimism, nihilism, weakness, strength, maturity, freedom, and hope in the 21st century. This book readdresses themes popularly raised by Cornel West in 1994 regarding the nature, causes, evaluations, diagnoses, and prognoses of what has been called, “nihilism in black America.” Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism seeks to recontextualize discussions of nihilism and its possibilities for American cultural life. As a result, this book bears important questions, offers unique analyses, and suggests radical responses that are relevant for studies of black life and theories of justice in twenty-first century America.

Author: Georg Lukacs
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839761849
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 929

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Book Description
How Western philosophy lost its innocence: from Enlightenment to fascism The Destruction of Reason is Georg Lukács’s trenchant criticism of certain strands of philosophy after Marx and the role they played in the rise of National Socialism: ‘Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy,’ as he put it. Starting with the revolutions of 1848, his analysis spans post-Hegelian philosophy and sociology. The great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, neo-Hegelians such as Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm Dilthey, and the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre come in for a share of criticism, but the principal targets are Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Through these thinkers he shows in an unsparing analysis that, with almost no exceptions, the post-Hegelian tradition prepared the ground for fascist thought. Originally published in 1952, the book has been unjustly overlooked despite its centrality in Lukács’s work and its being one of the key texts in Western Marxism. This new edition features a historical introduction by Enzo Traverso, addressing the current rise of the far right across the world today.

Author: Ailton Krenak
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 148700852X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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“Ailton Krenak’s ideas inspire, washing over you with every truth-telling sentence. Read this book.” — Tanya Talaga, bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective march towards the abyss. Global pandemics, extreme weather, and massive wildfires define this era many now call the Anthropocene. From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society’s flawed concept of “humanity” — that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it as we please. To stop environmental disaster, Krenak argues that we must reject the homogenizing effect of this perspective and embrace a new form of “dreaming” that allows us to regain our place within nature. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, he shows us the way.

Author: Eugene Thacker
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1937561879
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
“We’re doomed.” So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific hopes, desires, and disappointments. In the Anthropocene, pessimism is felt everywhere but rarely given its proper place. Though pessimism may be, as Eugene Thacker says, the lowest form of philosophy, it may also contain an enigma central to understanding the horizon of the human. Written in a series of fragments, aphorisms, and prose poems, Thacker’s Cosmic Pessimism explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. “Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?”