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Chapter One: Introduction
- State University of New York Press
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ONE INTRODUCTION Any effort today to revisit the modern dialectical tradition is to set out upon a beleaguered intellectual terrain. To put an ironic twist on the famed words of one of our conversation partners, we might say that the dialectical has become a tradition of dead generations, and one that really only weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.1 Nowadays mention of the dialectical legacy seems only to invoke forlorn specters of closed teleological narratives, presumptuous ontological assumptions, perhaps the delusional hubris of a grand Hegelian style of theorization. We are dealing, it would seem, with a rather forgettable legacy of modernist excess. But of course so much of this is common conjecture, based on a simplistic caricature of an elusive philosophical legacy. And part of the challenge here, a charge that doubles as part of the rationale for this project, is to expose such conjecture for what it is, to tell a broader and richer story about what dialectical thinking entails, in order ultimately to mine a set of intellectual resources that have tended to get buried under the purported dead weight of Hegelian and Marxian modernism. One objective of this book, then, is to confront a historical problem, to pursue a more generous and nuanced reading of a complex and evolving set of ideas. But ultimately the project is stirred by an increasingly unsettling political problem. Marx’s amplification of Hegelian thinking has forever linked the dialectical tradition with revolutionary politics. And this would seem to imply that the tradition sits rather uneasily with the general political ethos of the early twenty-first century. Today we confront a peculiar political moment in which so many seem so fired by discontent and yet so burned by resignation. It is, some have suggested, a kind of postpolitical age, one in which grim prospects for collective action, increasingly fugitive hopes for real structural change, undergird an embrace of the ethical as a preferred site of public engagement. This turn to ethics, to questions of how we might live the established structures rather than contest their hegemony, threatens 1 2 IN THE SPIRIT OF CRITIQUE only to exacerbate a public life increasingly devoid of substance or interest. Certainly the impulse to revisit the legacy of Hegel and Marx, to reconsider a dialectically informed critical theory, is moved by a felt need for some renewed political fervor. But what is referred to here as a spirit of critique is intended to address contemporary discourse on its own terms, to address the essentially ethical question of how we engage the political. The idea, the wager, is that a reconsideration of the dialectical tradition might help to reanimate the critical imagination in our time and to inform a public ethos imbued with a sharper and more politically incisive critical edge. So the argument put forth in this book is moved by a historical problem and by a political one, and this introductory chapter sets out to elaborate on these twin concerns. Insofar as the overarching concern is to engage with the modern dialectical tradition, it is important to note at the outset that we are dealing with a rich, wide-ranging, and still evolving body of work. Any attempt to fully canvas the tradition today would require a rather Sisyphean sense of determination, and what has worked its way into the pages of this book amounts neither to a general introduction nor to a comprehensive survey.2 While I engage initially with Hegel and Marx, with the root sources of the tradition, I focus most intently on Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor W. Adorno, and C. L. R. James, three twentieth-century theorists who have caught my attention in a unique way and who have inspired me to craft a particular story about dialectical thinking and its enduring political import. I will outline the basic contours of this story in a moment. First I will provide some additional context by elaborating further on the two basic concerns that animate the project. THE DIALECTICAL TRADITION If already in the foregoing the term tradition has appeared too often, there are several reasons for this indulgence. In the first instance, the reference serves a kind of ancillary function, allowing us to manage the delicacy and inherent difficulty of the other terms that are, or could be, for our purposes attached to it. By referring to the tradition, we are able initially to simply add the adjective dialectical and to avoid immediate connection with what...