André Gorz – författare

Over the last twenty-five years, Western societies have been reversing into the future.

'You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable' – so begins André Gorz's 'open love letter' to the woman he has lived with for 58 years and who lies dying next to him. As one of France's leading post-war philosophers, André Gorz wrote many influential books, but nothing he wrote will be read as widely or remembered as long as this simple, passionate, beautiful letter to his dying wife.In a bittersweet postscript a year after Letter to D was published, a note pinned to the door for the cleaning lady marked the final chapter in an extraordinary love story. André Gorz and his terminally ill wife, Dorine, were found lying peacefully side by side, having taken their lives together. They simply could not live without one another.An international bestseller, Letter to D is the ultimate love story – and all the more poignant because it's true.

Autobiography, philosophical inquiry, confession-The Traitor is an unclassifiable and unforgettable book from one of France's most inspiring social critics. Written when André Gorz was 32 and rising to prominence in the Parisian existentialist milieu, The Traitor starts from an acute personal crisis, "a state of absolute subjective misery," rooted in social and political alienation. Using psychoanalysis and Marxism, Gorz explores the origins and symptoms of this crisis and struggles towards a resolution which he finds at last in political commitment and self-affirmation.Few personal documents have ever been so rigorously analytical; few philosophical texts so vividly illuminated by the honest recall of painful experience. Gorz's father was Jewish, his mother Catholic: his tormented childhood in Austria during the Anschluss, when he took refuge first in religious asceticism, then in a self-destructive identification with Nazism, is scrupulously recorded. So, too, is his adolescent exile in Switzerland, his early encounters with Sartre-who, as "Morel", is a constant reference point-and the conflicts of his first love affairs.Sartre called The Traitor "an invitation to life." It remains the most intimate and profound book to emerge from the existentialist movement, while providing remarkable insights into André Gorz's subsequent work.

Andre Gorz argues that changes in the role of the work and labour process in the closing decades of the twentieth century have, once and for all, weakened the power of skilled industrial workers. Their place has been taken, says Gorz, by social movements such as the women’s movement and the green movement, and all those who refuse to accept the work ethic so fundamental to early capitalist societies. Provocative and heretical, Farewell to the Working Class is a classic study of labour and unemployment in the post-industrial world.

'You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable' – so begins André Gorz's 'open love letter' to the woman he has lived with for 58 years and who lies dying next to him. As one of France's leading post-war philosophers, André Gorz wrote many influential books, but nothing he wrote will be read as widely or remembered as long as this simple, passionate, beautiful letter to his dying wife.In a bittersweet postscript a year after Letter to D was published, a note pinned to the door for the cleaning lady marked the final chapter in an extraordinary love story. André Gorz and his terminally ill wife, Dorine, were found lying peacefully side by side, having taken their lives together. They simply could not live without one another.An international bestseller, Letter to D is the ultimate love story – and all the more poignant because it's true.

In this major new book, Andre Gorz expands on the political implications of his prescient and influential Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason. Against the background of technological developments which have transformed the nature of work and the structure of the workforce, Gorz explores the new political agendas facing both left and right. Each is in disarray: the right, torn between the demands of capital and the 'traditional values' of its supporters, can only offer illusory solutions, while the left either capitulates to these or remains tempted by regressive, 'fundamentalist' projects inappropriate to complex modern societies. Identifying the grave risks posed by a dual society with a hyperactive minority of full-time workers confronting a silenced majority who are, at best, precariously employed, Gorz proposes a new definition of a key social conflict within Western societies in terms of the distribution of work and the form and content of non-working time.Taking into account changing cultural attitudes to work, he re-examines socialism's historical project-which, he contends, has always properly been to lay down the rules and limits within which economic raitonality may be permitted to function, not to create some statist, productivist countersystem. Above all, he offers a vital fresh perspective for the left, whose objective, in his view, must be to extend the sphere to autonomous human activity, and increase the possibilities for individual self-fulfilment.

André Gorz's earlier books-from Ecology as Politics to Farewell to the Working Class and Paths to Paradise-have informed and inspired the most radical currents in Green movements in Europe and America over the last two decades. In Critique of Economic Reason, he offers his fullest account to date of the terminal crisis of a system where every activity and aspiration has been subjected to the rule of the market. By carefully delineating the existential and cultural limits of economic rationality, he emphasizes the urgent need to create a society which rejects the work ethic in favor of an emancipatory ethic of free time.At the heart of his alternative is an advocacy not of "full employment," but of an equal distribution of the diminishing amount of necessary paid work. He presents a practical strategy for reducing the working week, and develops a radical version of a guaranteed wage for all. Above all, he argues that a utopian vision is now the only realistic proposal, and that "economic reason must be returned to its true-that is subordinate-place."