Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Howard, Dick

Titel

André Gorz and the Philosophical Foundation of the Political

Ist Teil von

• Between Politics and Antipolitics, p.99-121

Ort / Verlag

New York: Palgrave Macmillan US

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Although André Gorz (1923–2007) came to be known during recent decades as a leading proponent and innovators of left-wing ecological politics, he had been celebrated during the 1960s and 1970s as an innovative critical Marxist rethinking the politics of class in essays published in Les Temps modernes of which he was then the de facto political editor. I will try to show here that the basis of all of his political thought, then and as it evolved with the times and the circumstances, was philosophical. This philosophical foundation is not always evident to the casual reader who will be impressed by the sharp sociological distinctions and crisp use of economic data by a thinker who had earned his living for three decades as a journalist for a weekly magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur. As he explains in the presentation of a collection of his journalistic writings, his analyses of everyday life attempt to bring to light “the logic, the contradictions and the dead-ends of a system, but show also that which announces its transcendence.”1 This is exactly what Marx set as his own goal when he defined Capital as “a presentation [of the capitalist system] and through the presentation a critique of that system.”2 The unifying thread across all of Gorz’s work is a philosophical theory of alienation and the reasons for overcoming it.