Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) can be called the outsider of German Marxist thought. While the members of the Frankfurt School and its extended circle have practically become household names in American academia, Bloch’s highly individualistic blend of Expressionism, Marxism, “Left” Aristotleanism, and messianism remains acknowledged by, but not assimilated into, the academic canon of Critical Theory. […]
Category Archives: Texts
Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (University Press of Mississippi , 2008, 282 pages) *** While not exactly a new book, Frank Rosengarten’s Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society is an important addition to the large body of James literature and deserves a serious critical […]
Randolph Bourne (1886-1918) was an important and, sadly, now little-known American literary and cultural figure. He was brought to my attention by Franklin Rosemont’s Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism (reviewed earlier on this blog). I provide here a link to a HathiTrust scanned image of his most enduring essay, “The War and the […]
In honor of André Breton’s birthday, I am supplying a link to a scanned full-text image of his book Arcane 17. This image appears in the Hathi Trust Digital Library, which is a consortium of university libraries serving as an academic supplement to the (controversial) Google Books project. I intend to comment on the Google […]
I first saw reference to the connection between the Surrealists and Lenin’s 1914 Hegel Notebooks in David Roegider’s entry on Surrealism in the first edition of the Encyclopedia of the American Left. Martin Jay notes that it was André Breton who first introduced Henri Lefebrve to Hegel’s Science of Logic in 1924 in his book […]
Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) was an extremely important historian and theorist of art who specialized in Romanesque architecture. Schapiro was also a highly independent Marxist thinker and frequently wrote on politics throughout his long career. Among his most important contributions in this area were his interventions in defense of the revolutionary internationalist position on World War […]
What follows is André Breton’s account of his visit to Haiti and the impact his activity had there (described by Franklin Rosemont in an earlier post). This exchange is taken from an interview conducted in 1946 with Jean Duché. The full interview appears in the fascinating book Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism. As with all […]
At this moment of physical devastation in Haiti, recalling an event from the country’s rich revolutionary past is a small gesture of solidarity with its people. This passage is from Franklin Rosemont’s long essay André Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism. “Lescot” is Élie Lescot, staunch ally of Franklin Roosevelt and one of Haiti’s […]
“While public funds evaporate in feasts of fraternity, a bell of rosy fire rings in the clouds.” From the Louise Varèse translation of “Phrases”, one of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.
Criticism &c. 