Radical Philosophy Reader (review)

Reviews 131 from other moments erupt into the moment that Howard locates, even that non-capitalist ideologies, such as the primitivism one can associate with the human animal comparison in the "brute" image, become relevant? If so, in what sense can the historical moment be defined with reference to capitalism and its particular form of class struggle? The problem seems to hinge on the historicity implicit in the ideological function itself. Reliance on the Althusserian definition of ideology, which derives from the psychoanalytical "imaginary" register theorized by Lacan, may obscure the historical development that such a concept presupposes, as well as the possibility that psychic and social mechanisms anterior to the imaginary may be at work here, since a primitive way of looking may enter into the perception of the Other as brute. Indeed, Howard acknowledges the existence of cultural predecessors of this characteristic naturalist image. But a deeper social conflict than the class conflict she identifies may therefore be present through the sedimentation of, or regression to, primitive social forms. From a synchronic perspective on the individual subject, the ritual of "casting out" an evil object would seem to be anterior to the projective identification which constitutes the imaginary. One has the sense that Howard's totalizing method is one of checks and balances, a combination of various models which neutralize and complement each other, offered without a discussion of how these models interact. But then the problem of grounding references to history in a definite model and of using a concept of ideology commensurate with this modd is one that today faces cultural study in general. Howard's main point that naturalism is a class-marked discourse, coupled with her commitment to the "irrevocable openness" of every historical moment, has the effect (at least on me) of placing her reader in that opening, posing anew the problem of the central naturalist antinomy of conscious choice versus determinism , pressing one toward the acknowledgment that the social dilemmas foregrounded in much ofthe fiction written toward the end of the last century have indeed not been resolved. HANS LOFGREN Radical Philosophy Reader edited by Roy Edgley and Richard Osborne. London: Verso, 1985. xvii + 410 pp. $8.95 (paper); $28 (cloth). The Radical Philosophy Reader is a collection of articles from Radical Philosophy, a magazine published in England since 1972 with a circulation of 4000 per issue, larger than any philosophy journal ever. Many of its articles developed into books, and many were reprinted. Published by the Radical Philosophy Group (RPG), it was the expression of a movement to "subvert the philosophy of linguistic analysis. . . " RPG's aim was to develop an alternative to contemporary British philosophy, which remains a narrow academic subject of little interest to anyone outside the profession. The RPG rejected the dominant empiricism and aimed to explore philosophical perspectives neglected in England, including 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy and Marxism, which became "a central object of study and example." It was not analytic philosophy's investigation of language per se that RPG rejected, but the assumptions under which it was done: that it was the whole of philosophy, that it could be done in an a prior fashion, and that the ordinary language criterion of meaningfulness was adequate. While traditionally philosophy's task was to question fundamental and accepted views of reality, today it "leaves everything as it is." Unlike the social sciences, where the political content is explicit, most of philosophy is so abstract and technical (logic, philosophy of language and science, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind are the most prestigious areas) that political implications are difficult to discern. Although analytic philosophy claims, very emphatically, to be politically neutral, its effect has generally been quite conservative. RPG has been critical not only of the content , explicit and implicit, of philosophical orthodoxy, but its institutional contexts within capitalist society, particularly the system of higher education. Philosophy in England is no longer as homogenous as it was when RPG first formed; in fact, there has been a fragmen- 132 the minnesota review tation, and RPG can claim credit for some of the changes. Some Marxist work done in an analytic style, most notably G.A. Cohen's...