Erich Fromm’s Contribution to Critical Theory
Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1900, Erich Fromm completed a sociological dissertation with Alfred Weber at the University of Heidelberg in 1922 and then became acquainted with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis (for Fromm’s biography, see Funk 2000, pp. 78-103; 2019; Hardeck 2005, pp. 30-40; Friedman 2013, pp. 28-62). In 1930, he completed his therapeutic training…
Read MoreJoy James’s New Bones Abolition
New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (after)life of Erica Garner is an urgent and cogent addition to the literature about protest and movement generally and Black mobilizing and resistance specifically. Joy James harnesses the tragic story of Erica Garner’s death from a broken heart – a heart that could not withstand the unequal…
Read MoreDeterminism and Freedom: A Review of Michael Löwy’s Rosa Luxemburg: The Incendiary Spark
Few thinkers in the radical left have had a more sustained and creative engagement with the thought of Rosa Luxemburg than Michael Löwy. After encountering several of her works as a teenager in Brazil in the mid-1950s, he arrived in France in the early 1960s with the “conscious and deliberate objective”[1] of providing a “Luxemburgist”…
Read MoreFred Camper’s Seeking Brakhage
Early in the volume of Fred Camper’s collected writings on the films of Stan Brakhage, an essay appears titled “Senses Working Overtime.” Published shortly after Brakhage’s death, Camper’s essay presents testimonials and anecdotes from students and filmmakers who knew him. As the flaws of Brakhage the human are shared alongside moments of awe, present-day readers…
Read MoreChelsea Schields’s Offshore Attachments
“The offshore accounts for the archipelagos of legal pluralism, extraterritoriality, and supposed exception forged by colonial powers and redefined in the context of contemporary capitalism to reproduce wealth. Even as these spaces appear as expectations, they are, in fact, intimately imbricated in and make possible their seemingly anti-theses: the ‘normal’ business of onshore capitalism and…
Read MoreAfter October 7th: Israel’s Search for Victory
Prologue: A Personal Statement on the War I am not neutral. As a citizen of Israel, I hurt and cry with my fellow Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs, victims of Hamas’ barbaric attack. Struggle for national liberation does not justify a crime against humanity and war crime. Glorifying the murder and abuse of innocent human…
Read MoreThe Dangerous Mythology That Still Surrounds Justice Antonin Scalia
Justice Antonin Scalia passed away in 2016 but his legacy and the myths surrounding his jurisprudence still impact our politics and our courts despite his often controversial and bigoted views on most of the important civil rights issues of our day. For example, not long after his death, George Mason University received a substantial amount…
Read MorePolitical Violence Against Women: A Form of Misogyny?
Misogyny — contempt for women — is as old as patriarchy. However, it has taken new forms globally as women have increasingly gained prominence in fields like politics. Assertions of women’s power in domains that were traditionally the purview of men have given rise to new anxieties among some men, resulting in verbal, digital, and…
Read More“The People Who Are Nothing” Strike Back: The 2023 Retirement Age Protests in France
Shortly after he was elected, Emmanuel Macron mused about “successful people” and “people who are nothing.” To his critics, these remarks—made before an audience of entrepreneurs at the inauguration of a “start-up” campus—distilled everything they disliked about France’s new president, a former investment banker who assumed the nation’s highest office at the age of thirty-nine.…
Read MoreThe (Sad) Fable of Humanity
Adorno’s humanism is radical both in its stubborn desire to retain the human coupled with its willingness to concede the end of the fable of humanity.[1] There was once a small tribe of primates… “Archaeology is demolishing a sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of…
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