Judith C.

Existentialism and critical philosophy of race • PhD student @penn_state • Unionized @cge_psu • Member @centrecodsa • “Nothing human is alien to me.”

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

Angelus Novus, 1920

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

My lecture on the “Sexual Initiation” chapter of The Second Sex—Beauvoir’s description of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as social categories that reinforce unfreedom—accidentally became an excursion into phenomenology as a method relentlessly oriented toward the realization of freedom. Oops!

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

@__Liebert_ My point is not mainly about opposing individual analytic philosophers but I do think it needs to be acknowledged that analytic philosophy overwhelmingly has more institutional power in the U.S.

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

There are unfortunately many people who simultaneously accept that ideas are not neutral and theoretical differences express a determinate social content, but whenever the continental-analytic divide is raised as a living issue, immediately fall back onto a conciliatory posture.

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

But all that obscures a more basic lack of commitment to thinking about how ideas are institutionally reproduced, what kind of material inequalities exist between intellectual traditions, what unifying a discipline requires; I am not convinced that we have earned our ‘pluralism.’

[... @tamaranopper]

A reminder that in the intro issue of New Left Review, Stuart Hall noted, “The humanist strengths of socialism—which are the foundations for a genuinely popular socialist movement—must be developed in cultural and social terms, as well as in economic and political.”

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

@comradejumpshot We should have! But lucky we’re not too far from each other (PA <-> NY) and I’m sure we’ll have another chance.

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

I met the man himself.

[Communist Front Of The Dispossessed @LouisABlanqui]

Determination is the weight pressing down on the brains of the living from the tradition of former generations in the form of congealed abstract labor — the intangible trait shared by by all commodities. The living nonetheless act!

[promise li @promise__li]

To be clear, it was the biggest night for Christian liberalism, not leftism. What we actually need is the militant, class-conscious Christianity of Jacques Roux and Ernesto Cardenal.

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

@bendeckdecker Do you mean this in the Deleuzian sense of a minor literature, or as in he doesn’t matter?

[Robert Lucas Scott @_rob_scott]

Here's my review of Jacqueline Rose's new novel, Two Women, which fictionalises and intertwines the lives of Gillian Rose and Edith Stein @PolTheoNetwork

https://t.co/ZJMcQK7fW9

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

Nice hair day + fall weather + a beautiful class teaching undergrads about sexuality and freedom in Merleau-Ponty = 🌝

[Nate Holdren @n_hold]

"Marx was able to develop a more adequate theory of the capitalist mode of production because he took as his starting point the experience of the working class. This is why Marx’s work was able to speak to the experience of the working class." Another Simon Clarke banger.

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

@materialcritic One of my favorite Lenin quotes

[interpretation @materialcritic]

Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility ‘to begin from the beginning’ over and over again in approaching an extremely dificult task, are not doomed (and in all probability will not perish).

— V.I Lenin

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

@NiaFrome My PhD advisor, Robert Bernasconi, has written many great articles on Hegel’s philosophy of history, including his connection to Kant. His article “Why Do the Happy Inhabitants of Tahiti Bother to Exist at All?” specifically confronts their contributions to a culture of genocide.

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

We could all stand to be a little more dialectical about the Enlightenment, and not merely in the hand waving sense of vaguely acknowledging good things and bad things at once. The Enlightenment names many antagonistic historical possibilities, only some of which were realized.

[Nondescript Communist @NondescriptRed]

An issue I have with the modern left™ is that I think the enlightenment was a good thing and a significant portion of them don't

[Educator @DrAnnLopez]

To educate the masses politically... means to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them.

Frantz Fanon

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

@NiaFrome Sure, and I am also interested in Vico particularly. Hegel I read as taking up and crystallizing some of the worst consequences of Kant’s philosophy of history, but certainly he is an ambivalent and worthwhile figure in his own right.

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

@NiaFrome I mentioned Herder in the original thread. He was, it seems to me, Kant’s greatest critic, and rigorously opposed his racism, support of colonialism, and subordination of humanity to the state, while forming his own notion of humanity that amounts to a more concrete universality.

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

@NiaFrome The goal should be to arrive at a committed praxis: to recover emancipatory historical perspectives that remain unrealized and to shake the foundations of sedimented oppressions that ultimately won the day. But this requires a view of the whole of the Enlightenment’s development.

[Judith C. @WithoutJudith]

@NiaFrome That is what I say it should not mean in the first post. My point is that the Enlightenment was an internally antagonistic historical process, that historical agents realized certain ends through those antagonisms, and that abstractly negating or affirming misses all of this.