|
Showing 1 - 10 of
10 matches in All Departments
This book mainly reads the three works of early Baudrillard, and
challenges the current research findings on his philosophical
journey. Zhang Yibing also reads Baudrillard's other works to fully
situate him theoretically. He asserts that Baudrillard's texts
cannot be classified as postmodernist or neo-Marxist in any period.
Zhang belongs to the third generation of Marxist philosophers in
China and is renowned for his textological researches, having
developed a unique reading methodology. Since the end of 1960s,
Baudrillard wrote three important works: For a Critique of
Political Economy of the Sign, The Mirror of Production and
Symbolic Exchange and Death, which furiously attacked Marx, aiming
to refute historical materialism and deconstruct Marx's theory of
labour value. The Mirror of Production in particular was intended
to demolish the logic of Marxist theories from within, by
deconstructing and disordering them. This was ignored by many
Marxist researchers. What was real thinking behind, and historical
context of, the shift in his critique, and how was symbolic
exchange combined with death? The author with his sharp insight
shows that the Early Baudrillard's thought is trapped in the logic
of symbolic exchange, based on the grassroots' romanticism
(radicalism) of Mauss-Bataille. He then keenly follows the secret
of Baudrillard's transformation process in his critical logic, his
passage from the dissolution of the ideographic material to the
symbolic value of coding structure, then to quasi-real existence
without a model, until finally his symbolic miscoding of death
becomes a hopeless waiting for Baudrillard's tentative salvation of
the world. This is indeed a death trilogy, which occurs in
Baudrillard's academic scenery and in which the real existence is
murdered. The thinking of late Baudrillard is a discourse like
virus and paranoia. This kind of logical violence of theoretical
terrorism has become an absurd modern academic caricature of
excessive rational interpretation. In this book the reader will
also find Zhang's innovative interpretation and updating of Marx's
historical materialism.
This original textological analysis work reads the epoch making
texts of outstanding Marxist philosopher, Althusser's For Marx
(1965), Reading Capital (1965), Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays (1971) which includes, Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses and the author delves into other texts of him to
support the analysis. Althusser, again and again becomes a major
topic of discussion. Behind him stood two others: the young, morbid
Catholic one and the older, gloomy Pre-Modernity classical
materialist one. Putting it more precisely, these existential
figures are factual images that Althusser had, in the past,
intentionally concealed. This leads to an interpretative
dramatization and an inexplicable mystery. A formerly dazzling yet
fictive sage and a multi-faceted yet intentionally-concealed person
both present themselves in the research realm. Traditional academic
circles were thrown into disorder and discomfiture when the
accepted, singular conception of a scientific, Marxist Althusser's
original consistent image is destroyed, leaving only a mist that
gradually dissipates. As Lacan put it, with the shedding of its
coverings, the original vacancy further revealed itself. This is
another victory of "the Other." Nanjing's keen researcher Zhang
Yibing, whom we know from his three other successful textological
readings, discovers Marxist Althusser shifting to an Althusser with
four distinct facets. Zhang argues, the precondition of exploring
this mystery is to demonstrate Althusser's complex, painful and
obscure life and the mystery of his paradoxical thoughts.
Contemporary researchers only make a distinction between the four
different Althussers, but they fail to find integrated research
logic. According to my understanding, there still exists continuity
between the four Althussers. This is an anti-teleological viewpoint
of non-subject and pseudo-subject that takes the absence of
individual subject as the core.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|