Eğitici Öğretici Boyama Serisi: Meyveler Sebzeler kitap serbest oDF biçim

Mohamed Kamal magekali19dd15 — I remember getting this book from the library as a child and how much i loved it. Thank God for that little public library near the projects where i lived.

Alexander Kopylov _lex_op — When Žižek and others at the Birkbeck Centre for the Humanities conceived of their conference exploring the Idea of Communism and related topics emerging from debates on the left (such as Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis) they seriously underestimated demand. As a result, for this 2009 gathering they had to twice move rooms from their initial 180 to finish up in a room holding 900 and with a further 300 on a video feed. There are at least two ways to read this error – the less charitable one suggests that it demonstrates these scholars’ distance from activist movements, the more charitable one sees it as a sign of a need for rigorous theoretical discussion on the left: I suspect that it is a combination of the two alongside the almost celebrity status of philosophers including Žižek , Hardt & Negri (of Multitude fame), Badiou and their ilk. This book is a collection, only slightly edited, of the papers presented at the conference, and as with any set of conference proceedings it is uneven – with high & low points depending on your politics and position on the left (for those on the Right, I suspect it is all low…..). From my perspective, the highlights are those papers that have, for the most part, returned to Marx in various ways. This means that, although I quite like some of his other work, Badiou’s opening paper (they are arranged alphabetically by author) is close to the collection’s low point even if challenging, stimulating and invigorating – but lost in abstraction. There are, however, several papers that I will keep coming back to – Susan Buck-Morss for instance demands that we look beyond the Eurocentric left to, for instance, some of Islam’s internal leftist critics – not for their message but for 1) their methods, and 2) to better tailor messages to the diverse global conditions we occupy. It is fabulous piece of post-colonial Hegelian thinking. Equally, Bruno Bosteels unsettles by demanding that we abandon a ‘Leftist’ hypothesis and reassert a communism grounded in its liberatory promise, not its false practice; an idea he develops through a critical reading of prison writing by Álvaro García Linera – currently Vice President of Bolivia. Most surprising for me was my response to Michael Hardt’s paper – I am generally uncomfortable with the autonomist approach he has been developing with Antonio Negri in recent years, but his paper here is one of the best discussions of the political significance of the ‘commons’ and one I know that I will return to for other work. Amid all this, however, the collection is woven through with Žižek’s and Badiou’s ongoing case for a step beyond the limitation of Formerly Existing Socialism and a return to communism’s promise of emancipation, as well as the role that communism as a utopian goal continues to play in motivating and inspiring activist and other political projects. Don’t read this if you are looking for a political programme; read this to be reminded that while there is much that we need to move beyond in some of the old politics of the Left, there is much that remains important, useful and essential to making sense of and changing the world for the better – and to be reminded that the current crisis of capitalism is a failure of its neo-liberal utopia of the ‘free market’.