Marxism, Phenomenology, and the Mythico-Political

Uncorrected draft entry for Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, eds. Ted Toadvine and Nicolas de Warren (Springer)

Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2021

Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World (Lexington Books), 2021

Beginning from the program for phenomenology in Edmund Husserl’s classic text The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology the author investigates the crisis of reason in a contemporary context. The late work of Marx is given an original interpretation that connects it to human motility, natural fecundity (excess), and ecology. The overall conception of phenomenology advanced is Socratic in that it is concerned with the presuppositions and application of knowledge-forms to their lifeworld grounding. The author argues that the crisis produced by the formalization of reason creates an inability to foster differentiated community as expected by both Husserl and Marx (Part II); that the formalization of human motility by the regime of value reveals the ontological productivity of natural fecundity (excess) and shows the priority of ecology as the contemporary exemplary science (Part III). Husserl’s idea of Europe as the home for philosophy is surpassed. The contemporary task for Socratic phenomenology is in the epochal confrontation between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity. Community and labour are shown to depend upon natural fecundity (excess) and their realization to be located in the dialogue between civilizational-cultural lifeworlds especially with respect to their ecological formation and access to transcendentality (Part IV). The book lays out a systematic phenomenological Marxian philosophy by developing a path for phenomenology as a defence of reason (Husserl) understood as reason-in-practice (Marx) that focusses on the crisis of the 21st century (ecology, inter-worldly philosophical dialogue).

Educational Philosophy and Theory Hope, political imagination, and agency in Marxism and beyond: Explicating the transformative worldview and ethico-ontoepistemology, 2019

Given the sociopolitical crisis and turmoil in the world today, there is a great need for philosophical and sociocultural critiques that are not only concerned with deconstructing the present and the past but also with offering forward-looking, radical solutions to the problems and challenges we face. Drastic times call for drastic measures, including in exploring and advancing a flagrantly partisan scholarship with explicitly transformative activist agendas of strengthening the public and personal agency needed to constrain capital for the sake of social and economic justice. The argument advanced in this article is that Marxism – reinvigorated, re-envisioned and infused with insights from recent scholarship in feminism, critical pedagogy, cultural-historical and critical race theories, and new materialism, among others – can offer a new worldview in which political imagination and other phenomena of human subjectivity find their due, that is, central and formative place to thus allow for the advancement of research with activist agendas as a form of resistance. In utilizing such a worldview, research and theoretical constructions can break away from the ethos of adaptation and instead to actively strive for social transformation based in a radical reworking of the status and role of political imagination and associated notions of agency, hope, and commitment.

Marx, Marxism and the Spiritual. Routledge. , 2020

Analecta Hermeneutica, 2020

The aim of this paper is to explore the link that Landgrebe establishes between phenomenology and Marxism in “The Problem of Teleology and Corporeality in Phenomenology and Marxism” (1977) and unfold its more far-reaching implications for both traditions. Landgrebe’s short yet dense paper explores the very basic insight he considers both thinkers to hold in common, namely, that praxis is an essential feature of human consciousness and needs to be grounded in philosophical inquiry. The first step in our research is accordingly to reconstruct Husserlian phenomenology in order to demonstrate the close relationship between corporeality and teleology, between nature and history, and between the human being and the social world. Landgrebe reminds us that “it is not possible even to approach the problem of teleology in an adequate manner if the approach is not based on an analysis of corporeality, i.e. of man as a corporeal being.”What Marxism leaves undone, then, is a transcendental grounding of human embodied praxis, a project that the post-Marxian tradition typically fails to consider

Original uncorrected proofs. Please cite the published version in Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, ed. Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman (Lexington Books, 2021)

This paper departs from the hegemonic notion of truth-the cognitive notion of truth-and arrives at four other notions of truth in Marx, Gandhi, Heidegger, and Foucault. It puts the four to a possible dialogue. It argues that one can get a glimpse of the cusp of Marxism and spirituality in the dialogue among the four. The work at the cusp, in turn, renders Marxism asketic and the spiritual phronetic. Thinking at the cusp also inaugurates the possibility of an anti-Oedipal future for Marxism and a this-worldly present for spirituality.

Critical Research on Religion, 2016

This article responds to Roland Boer's five volume series on Marxism and Theology (2007–13), a series that offers a unique contribution to understanding the current impasse in revolutionary Leftist politics and illustrates the importance of the numerous references to theology in Marxist literature. In this response, I focus on Boer's argument of Marxism and Judaeo-Christian theology occupying a similar contested space with respect to their uses of ''political myth.'' I argue that the key to Boer's critical project is a two-pronged approach: ''materializing'' theology and ''theologizing'' historical materialism. For this critical endeavor to make inroads, I argue relies not just on the ambivalence of political myth, but also that myths are essential to Marxist theories of emancipation as well as to Marx's notion of ''the Aufhebung of Religion.'' To convey this, I focus on two figures in Boer's series: Ernst Bloch as a Marxist who emphasizes myth's emancipatory qualities; and Theodor Adorno as a thinker wary of myth whilst also adhering to the theological motif of the bilderverbot. From this analysis, we can begin to see how much Boer's project depends on a wager on political myth itself.

2016

One of the most important fields of argumentation in modern philosophy is the problematic of the otherness. This problematic, which has exposed different approaches in many disciplines ranging from sociology to political science by overflowing the philosophy, stands as a subject that needs to be dealt with in more detail in today’s world where the global agenda is quite preoccupied by ethnic and sectarian conflicts and the immigration waves that emerge depending on them. Marxist philosophy, which is believed to have declared its defeat since the end of the Cold War and is now regarded only as a “form of interpretation”, has managed to produce a more stirring literature on the otherness than its competitors. The creation of this literature is an intellectual achievement, but it is also true that the ideas put forward here fail to produce a coherent and feasible solution. The aim of this study is to direct criticism towards the building blocks of this philosophy and to present an anal...