In this essay, we argue for administrative abolition,
that is, the elimination of all college pre... more In this essay, we argue for administrative abolition, that is, the elimination of all college presidents, provosts, deans and other top level administrators who we argue form a parasitical group that was developed over time in order to exercise both political and financial control over faculty, staff and students. We examine the way that the idea of “shared governance” disguises the de facto dictatorship of administration over faculty self-governance, explore the history of how this power grab took place and furthermore explore alternative forms of faculty self-management in both US history and abroad (especially in Latin America).
To illuminate the debates among socialists on the present Ukraine War (2022–2023), this article p... more To illuminate the debates among socialists on the present Ukraine War (2022–2023), this article proposes to review the debates among Marxists in the 1930s, and in particular the debate with and in the Trotskyist tradition, to both analyze the dual nature of pre-WWII wars of national liberation and the tasks of socialists both in semi-colonial and imperialist countries. Marxists saw that two different yet intertwined political contradictions were unfolding in both the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), those of national liberation and of inter-imperialist rivalries. They thus warned against any attempt to analyze the war without acknowledging one of these two dynamics, for it would produce a one-sided and biased analysis of a complex reality. Instead, they urged fellow socialists and working people to develop a concrete and regular study of the changing relations of class forces during the wars to adjust their policies. This Marxist methodology was concretized in the reasoning and policy of revolutionary socialists in relation to government economic sanctions, to imperialist material aid packages, and to war budgets and rapid rearmament which the article reviews.
Dernier opus d’une entreprise débutée en 2001 visant à retracer l’histoire et la diffusion des Lu... more Dernier opus d’une entreprise débutée en 2001 visant à retracer l’histoire et la diffusion des Lumières radicales, ce nouvel ouvrage constitue une entreprise ambitieuse puisqu’il s’agit de relire l’histoire politique de la Révolution française à travers les divers courants des Lumières (radicaux/modérés) qui continueraient de jouer avec force dans la construction des oppositions politiques et des affrontements idéologiques pendant la période. Dans la continuité de son approche présentée de ma..
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press... more Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
Much unlike Machine Man (1747) La Mettrie’s best-known
work, his Man as Plant (1748) undertakes t... more Much unlike Machine Man (1747) La Mettrie’s best-known work, his Man as Plant (1748) undertakes the undoing of the metaphysical foundations of our human species’ difference from other forms of natural life. La Mettrie is not opposed to the recognition of what is properly human in nature. What he contests is our self-aggrandized sense of species superiority rooted in a supposed ontological difference between human and other natural beings. Man as Plant works toward challenging this conception by insisting on the “analogies we find in the two major kingdoms”—plants and animals, as he states—for “there is in our Species, like in Plants, a principal Root, and capillary roots.”1 La Mettrie’s natural history is in fact an invitation to reengage with our natural roots, our plant and animal roots, from a materialist point of view. Returning to the root also means here allowing and performing a series of identifications between Man and Nature, in order to produce a different, non-metaphysical genealogy of the “I” or the Self, and to bring new desires to consciousness.
Cet article propose une voie d’issue pour sortir de l’antinomie dans laquelle se trouvent souvent... more Cet article propose une voie d’issue pour sortir de l’antinomie dans laquelle se trouvent souvent les défenseurs de la liberté académique, celle du libéralisme ou du « républicanisme » d’État, et donc de la penser autrement que comme un cas particulier de la liberté d’expression tout en évitant d’en faire le privilège d’un corps social (les universitaires) dont le peuple serait exclu. La philosophie de Spinoza nous permet de redéfinir la liberté académique comme une modalité de la liberté de penser, et plus précisément de la liberté de philosopher, et nous offre un cadre utile pour comprendre le rôle des universités publiques dans le développement de la puissance de penser des masses citoyennes et leur centralité dans la conservation d’un État démocratique.
Author(s): Misse, Blanca | Advisor(s): Blocker, Deborah | Abstract: This dissertation is a study ... more Author(s): Misse, Blanca | Advisor(s): Blocker, Deborah | Abstract: This dissertation is a study of the materialist current of the French Enlightenment. Far from assuming that early modern materialism constituted a homogenous philosophical current, my dissertation applies the materialist method of critique to the category of "materialism" itself. I argue that "Materialism" was invented in the 18th century, and it had little to do with the simple affirmation of the primacy of matter or the reductionist "one -substance monism", as its detractors at the time wanted the public to believe. I show that the adjective "materialist" was coined in the context of a social transformation of philosophy (a social reconfiguration of philosophical activity with the rise of the bourgeois public sphere) and in the midst of an ideological crisis of French absolutism. I argue that religious and political authorities labeled a set of public philosophical intervent...
Une histoire intellectuelle de la Révolution française. Jonathan Israel et les déplacements des r... more Une histoire intellectuelle de la Révolution française. Jonathan Israel et les déplacements des radicalités politiques
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press... more Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
Whiteness, Power, and Resisting Change in US Higher Education, 2020
the culture wars in such scientific fields as health and the environment" (AAUP 2011; Bilgrami an... more the culture wars in such scientific fields as health and the environment" (AAUP 2011; Bilgrami and Cole 2015). 2 See Hagopian (2004).
In this article, I analyse Diderot's enigmatic dialogue, Rameau's Nephew through a different 'ado... more In this article, I analyse Diderot's enigmatic dialogue, Rameau's Nephew through a different 'adornian' lens. Against the canonical Hegelian reading of this dialogue as a symptom of the decadence of critical thinking in enlightenment philosophy, and the Frankfurt School emphasis on the systematic character of Enlightenment thought, I argue that the paradoxical and sometimes pessimistic nature of Rameau's Nephew contains also some elements for an Enlightenment cure through its aesthetic form. By analysing the philosophical value of the pantomimes and musical performances by the character Rameau, I hope to unveil an aspect of the materialist aesthetics Diderot developed to oppose systematic thinking and the reification of thought at work in the Enlightenment movement of which he was a part.
In this essay, we argue for administrative abolition,
that is, the elimination of all college pre... more In this essay, we argue for administrative abolition, that is, the elimination of all college presidents, provosts, deans and other top level administrators who we argue form a parasitical group that was developed over time in order to exercise both political and financial control over faculty, staff and students. We examine the way that the idea of “shared governance” disguises the de facto dictatorship of administration over faculty self-governance, explore the history of how this power grab took place and furthermore explore alternative forms of faculty self-management in both US history and abroad (especially in Latin America).
To illuminate the debates among socialists on the present Ukraine War (2022–2023), this article p... more To illuminate the debates among socialists on the present Ukraine War (2022–2023), this article proposes to review the debates among Marxists in the 1930s, and in particular the debate with and in the Trotskyist tradition, to both analyze the dual nature of pre-WWII wars of national liberation and the tasks of socialists both in semi-colonial and imperialist countries. Marxists saw that two different yet intertwined political contradictions were unfolding in both the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), those of national liberation and of inter-imperialist rivalries. They thus warned against any attempt to analyze the war without acknowledging one of these two dynamics, for it would produce a one-sided and biased analysis of a complex reality. Instead, they urged fellow socialists and working people to develop a concrete and regular study of the changing relations of class forces during the wars to adjust their policies. This Marxist methodology was concretized in the reasoning and policy of revolutionary socialists in relation to government economic sanctions, to imperialist material aid packages, and to war budgets and rapid rearmament which the article reviews.
Dernier opus d’une entreprise débutée en 2001 visant à retracer l’histoire et la diffusion des Lu... more Dernier opus d’une entreprise débutée en 2001 visant à retracer l’histoire et la diffusion des Lumières radicales, ce nouvel ouvrage constitue une entreprise ambitieuse puisqu’il s’agit de relire l’histoire politique de la Révolution française à travers les divers courants des Lumières (radicaux/modérés) qui continueraient de jouer avec force dans la construction des oppositions politiques et des affrontements idéologiques pendant la période. Dans la continuité de son approche présentée de ma..
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press... more Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
Much unlike Machine Man (1747) La Mettrie’s best-known
work, his Man as Plant (1748) undertakes t... more Much unlike Machine Man (1747) La Mettrie’s best-known work, his Man as Plant (1748) undertakes the undoing of the metaphysical foundations of our human species’ difference from other forms of natural life. La Mettrie is not opposed to the recognition of what is properly human in nature. What he contests is our self-aggrandized sense of species superiority rooted in a supposed ontological difference between human and other natural beings. Man as Plant works toward challenging this conception by insisting on the “analogies we find in the two major kingdoms”—plants and animals, as he states—for “there is in our Species, like in Plants, a principal Root, and capillary roots.”1 La Mettrie’s natural history is in fact an invitation to reengage with our natural roots, our plant and animal roots, from a materialist point of view. Returning to the root also means here allowing and performing a series of identifications between Man and Nature, in order to produce a different, non-metaphysical genealogy of the “I” or the Self, and to bring new desires to consciousness.
Cet article propose une voie d’issue pour sortir de l’antinomie dans laquelle se trouvent souvent... more Cet article propose une voie d’issue pour sortir de l’antinomie dans laquelle se trouvent souvent les défenseurs de la liberté académique, celle du libéralisme ou du « républicanisme » d’État, et donc de la penser autrement que comme un cas particulier de la liberté d’expression tout en évitant d’en faire le privilège d’un corps social (les universitaires) dont le peuple serait exclu. La philosophie de Spinoza nous permet de redéfinir la liberté académique comme une modalité de la liberté de penser, et plus précisément de la liberté de philosopher, et nous offre un cadre utile pour comprendre le rôle des universités publiques dans le développement de la puissance de penser des masses citoyennes et leur centralité dans la conservation d’un État démocratique.
Author(s): Misse, Blanca | Advisor(s): Blocker, Deborah | Abstract: This dissertation is a study ... more Author(s): Misse, Blanca | Advisor(s): Blocker, Deborah | Abstract: This dissertation is a study of the materialist current of the French Enlightenment. Far from assuming that early modern materialism constituted a homogenous philosophical current, my dissertation applies the materialist method of critique to the category of "materialism" itself. I argue that "Materialism" was invented in the 18th century, and it had little to do with the simple affirmation of the primacy of matter or the reductionist "one -substance monism", as its detractors at the time wanted the public to believe. I show that the adjective "materialist" was coined in the context of a social transformation of philosophy (a social reconfiguration of philosophical activity with the rise of the bourgeois public sphere) and in the midst of an ideological crisis of French absolutism. I argue that religious and political authorities labeled a set of public philosophical intervent...
Une histoire intellectuelle de la Révolution française. Jonathan Israel et les déplacements des r... more Une histoire intellectuelle de la Révolution française. Jonathan Israel et les déplacements des radicalités politiques
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press... more Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
Whiteness, Power, and Resisting Change in US Higher Education, 2020
the culture wars in such scientific fields as health and the environment" (AAUP 2011; Bilgrami an... more the culture wars in such scientific fields as health and the environment" (AAUP 2011; Bilgrami and Cole 2015). 2 See Hagopian (2004).
In this article, I analyse Diderot's enigmatic dialogue, Rameau's Nephew through a different 'ado... more In this article, I analyse Diderot's enigmatic dialogue, Rameau's Nephew through a different 'adornian' lens. Against the canonical Hegelian reading of this dialogue as a symptom of the decadence of critical thinking in enlightenment philosophy, and the Frankfurt School emphasis on the systematic character of Enlightenment thought, I argue that the paradoxical and sometimes pessimistic nature of Rameau's Nephew contains also some elements for an Enlightenment cure through its aesthetic form. By analysing the philosophical value of the pantomimes and musical performances by the character Rameau, I hope to unveil an aspect of the materialist aesthetics Diderot developed to oppose systematic thinking and the reification of thought at work in the Enlightenment movement of which he was a part.
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Papers by Blanca Misse
that is, the elimination of all college presidents, provosts, deans
and other top level administrators who we argue form a parasitical group that was developed over time in order to exercise both
political and financial control over faculty, staff and students. We
examine the way that the idea of “shared governance” disguises
the de facto dictatorship of administration over faculty self-governance, explore the history of how this power grab took place and
furthermore explore alternative forms of faculty self-management
in both US history and abroad (especially in Latin America).
work, his Man as Plant (1748) undertakes the undoing of the
metaphysical foundations of our human species’ difference
from other forms of natural life. La Mettrie is not opposed to the
recognition of what is properly human in nature. What he contests is our
self-aggrandized sense of species superiority rooted in a supposed
ontological difference between human and other natural beings. Man as
Plant works toward challenging this conception by insisting on the
“analogies we find in the two major kingdoms”—plants and animals, as he
states—for “there is in our Species, like in Plants, a principal Root, and
capillary roots.”1 La Mettrie’s natural history is in fact an invitation to reengage with our natural roots, our plant and animal roots, from a materialist point of view. Returning to the root also means here allowing and
performing a series of identifications between Man and Nature, in order to
produce a different, non-metaphysical genealogy of the “I” or the Self, and
to bring new desires to consciousness.
that is, the elimination of all college presidents, provosts, deans
and other top level administrators who we argue form a parasitical group that was developed over time in order to exercise both
political and financial control over faculty, staff and students. We
examine the way that the idea of “shared governance” disguises
the de facto dictatorship of administration over faculty self-governance, explore the history of how this power grab took place and
furthermore explore alternative forms of faculty self-management
in both US history and abroad (especially in Latin America).
work, his Man as Plant (1748) undertakes the undoing of the
metaphysical foundations of our human species’ difference
from other forms of natural life. La Mettrie is not opposed to the
recognition of what is properly human in nature. What he contests is our
self-aggrandized sense of species superiority rooted in a supposed
ontological difference between human and other natural beings. Man as
Plant works toward challenging this conception by insisting on the
“analogies we find in the two major kingdoms”—plants and animals, as he
states—for “there is in our Species, like in Plants, a principal Root, and
capillary roots.”1 La Mettrie’s natural history is in fact an invitation to reengage with our natural roots, our plant and animal roots, from a materialist point of view. Returning to the root also means here allowing and
performing a series of identifications between Man and Nature, in order to
produce a different, non-metaphysical genealogy of the “I” or the Self, and
to bring new desires to consciousness.