Radical Thinkers Set 04 – serie

Reveals the convergence of perception and destruction in the parallel technologies of warfare and cinema.

Establishing a rigorous program of "symptomatic reading" that cuts through the silences and lacunae of Capital to reveal its philosophical core, Louis Althusser interprets Marx's structural analysis of production as a revolutionary break-the basis of a completely new science. Building on a series of Althussers's conceptual innovations that includes "overdetermination" and "social formation," Étienne Balibar explores the historical and structural facets of production as Marx understood them, scrutinizing many of the most fundamental points in Capital, as though for the first time.

Fredric Jameson, a leading voice on the subject of postmodernism, assembles his most powerful writings on the culture of late capitalism in this essential volume. Classic insights on pastiche, nostalgia, and architecture stand alongside essays on the status of history, theory, Marxism, and the subject in an age propelled by finance capital and endless spectacle. Surveying the debates that blazed up around his earlier essays, Jameson responds to critics and maps out the theoretical positions of postmodernism's prominent friends and foes.

In Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity, Simon Critchley takes up three questions at the centre of contemporary theoretical debate: What is ethical experience? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? What, if any, is the relation of ethical experience to politics? Through spirited confrontations with major thinkers, such as Lacan, Nancy, Rorty, and, in particular, Levinas and Derrida, Critchley finds answers in a nuanced "ethics of finitude" and defends the political possibilities of deconstruction. Democracy, economics, friendship, and technology are all considered anew in Critchley's bold excursions on the meaning and value of recent French philosophy.

Out of the chaos following Lenin's death and the mounting fury against Lukács and his freshly penned History and Class Consciousness (1923), this book bears an assessment of Lenin as "the only theoretical equal to Marx." Lukács shows, with unprecedented clarity, how Lenin's historical interventions-from his vanguard politics and repurposing of the state to his detection of a new, imperialist stage of capitalism-advanced the conjunction of theory and practice, class consciousness and class struggle. A postscript from 1967 reflects on how this picture of Lenin, which both shattered failed Marxism and preserved certain prejudices of its day, became even more inspirational after the oppressions of Stalin. Lukács's study remains indispensable to an understanding of the contemporary significance of Lenin's life and work.