The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, And The Making Of A New Political Subject

by John Sanbonmatsu

Overview

John Sanbonmatsu's Postmodern Prince is a work of political theory with a focus on questions of strategy. At the same time it provides an original and illuminating intellectual history of the Left from the 1960s to the present. It examines the politics of the New Left in the 1960s, showing how its expressivism led to political division and also prepared the ground for postmodernism. It shows also how the political economy of academic life in an increasingly commodified society strengthened the basis of postmodernism.
The Postmodern Prince provides a historically grounded critique of postmodernism, and a history of how the socialist Left has helped to create its ideas. In the course of this two-sided critique, it develops a brilliant account of a Marxism that sets itself the task of building a collective political subject—a successor to Machiavelli's Prince and Gramsci's Modern Prince—capable of challenging capitalism in its moment of global crisis.
Sanbonmatsu demonstrates the limitations of the work of Foucault, and more recently, Hardt and Negri's much-acclaimed Empire. In the process he validates for Marxism the classical idea of politics as hegemonic in scope, revolutionary in aspiration, and dependent on the capacity of leadership to rise to unforeseen challenges. He draws on an extraordinary range of historical, political, and philosophical analyses to set out the preconditions for a renewal of strategic and theoretical vision for the Left.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583670897
Publisher:	Monthly Review Press
Publication date:	08/01/2003
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.92(d)

About the Author

John Sanbonmatsu is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. He is the editor of Critical Theory and Animal Liberation and The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	7
	Introduction	9
1	Romancing the Left	21
	A Romantic Structure of Feeling	23
	Faith vs. Works	31
	The Pentecostal Mysticism of Norman O. Brown	37
	Morbid Symptoms Appear	46
	The Expressivist Legacy	48
2	Speaking in Tongues	51
	The Cyborg Speaks in Tongues	55
	"Breaking the Silence": Postmodernist Identity Politics	63
	La Lingua Continua	66
	Expressivism as Reification	68
3	Baroque Theory	71
	"Use Value" and the Baroque Arsenal of Theory	76
	Commodity Aesthetics	87
	Trend Innovation in Theory	90
	Against the Autonomy of Theory	96
	Theory as Practice	98
4	The French Ideology	101
	Althusser, Foucault, and the Liquidation of Experience	103
	"Two, Three ... Many Geists": Reification and the Automaton Empire	114
	The Catechism of Praxis	119
5	The Prince and the Archaeologist	125
	Exemplary Lives	125
	The Virtu of the Modern Prince	131
	Strategy and the Modern Prince	134
	Foucault's "Great Refusal" of Strategy	137
	Teaching Literacies of Power	143
	Against Pedagogy	147
	Reversal of Fortune	153
6	The Postmodern Prince	157
	Form in Modern Political Thought	160
	Lenin's Leviathan	168
	Enter, Stage Left: The Modern Prince	172
	Unity and Difference: The Challenge of Translation	178
	The Postmodern Prince	182
	Totality and Perception	191
	Toward a New Theory of the Whole	199
7	Metahumanism	203
	Empathy and Attentiveness to Others	208
	Humanism, Suffering, and Love	214
	New Gnosis	218
	The Fight for Eros	223
	Epilogue	224
	Notes	228
	Index	262