Jean-Philippe Deranty

Drawing on existential phenomenology, particularly Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein, and combining it with a developmental perspective, the paper focuses on those moments of crisis, in which a self faces the question of its own truth, and in the process posits the conditions for disclosing key aspects about the world and society. Late adolescence and early adulthood are the ‘ages of life’ in which such possibility of disclosure occurs most eminently, and this is relayed expressively and reflectively, the paper further argues, in the few examples of popular music that act as genuine outlets for young people’s desires and anxieties. The poetic work of Morrissey is a particularly eloquent case in point. However, a succinct analysis of Morrissey’s poetics reveals that underneath the explicit thread of sexuality, it is violence and cruelty that shape the young soul into becoming a channel for world and social disclosure.

From John Maynard Keynes’s prediction of a fifteen-hour workweek to present-day speculation about automation, we have not stopped forecasting the end of work. Critical theory and political philosophy have turned their attention away from the workplace to focus on other realms of domination and emancipation. But far from coming to an end, work continues to occupy a central place in our lives. This is not only because of the amount of time people spend on the job. Many of our deepest hopes and fears are bound up in our labor—what jobs we perform, how we relate to others, how we might flourish. The Return of Work in Critical Theory presents a bold new account of the human significance of work and the human costs of contemporary forms of work organization. A collaboration among experts in philosophy, social theory, and clinical psychology, it brings together empirical research with incisive analysis of the political stakes of contemporary work. The Return of Work in Critical Theory begins by looking in detail at the ways in which work today fails to meet our expectations. It then sketches a phenomenological description of work and examines the normative premises that underlie the experience of work. Finally, it puts forward a novel conception of work that can renew critical theory’s engagement with work and point toward possibilities for transformation. Inspired by Max Horkheimer’s vision of critical theory as empirically informed reflection on the sources of social suffering with emancipatory intent, The Return of Work in Critical Theory is a lucid diagnosis of the malaise and pathologies of contemporary work that proposes powerful remedies.

If we compare it with the fellow notion of liberty, equality has an ambivalent place in modern political thinking. Whilst it counts as one of the fundamental norms, many think that equality is valuable only as a way to realise some features of liberty. I take a historical perspective on this issue, and try to identify some of the pre-modern roots of such an ambivalent attitude towards equality. I do this by using Jacques Rancière’s political model as an analytical framework and by taking a visual route, focusing on classical iconographic representations in which equality was present in the images’ subtexts. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s allegory of good government is one iconic exposition of equality as a positive condition of civil peace. Already there, however, the positive value of equality is counterposed to the figure of violent retributive justice. Similarly, in the Christian narrative, equality is endorsed as the original condition of creatures under God, but is also associated with violent death. This signals one pre-modern root behind the ambivalence towards equality, particularly when the latter is understood dynamically, as levelling. Such a reversal of value finds an apotheosis, I suggest, in the revolutionary icon of the guillotine, a dramatic representation of equalisation that had a strong influence on modern political thinking. In J. E. Millais’ first painting, of Jesus in the House of his Parents, I find a more positive legacy of Christian equality in modern political thinking.

For a brief period, between the years immediately preceding the Second World War and for about a decade thereafter, the most important authors in French philosophy (Weil, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre) conducted their reflections within a “work paradigm”, that is, within theoretical frameworks in which the concept of work played the central, organising role. The first three sections of the paper identify the different meanings of work, which, brought together under the umbrella concept of “praxis”, underpinned this paradigm. The central claim advanced by the paper in section 4 is that the rise of a new paradigm in the following generation of French philosophy (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze), around the concepts of structure, text and discourse, was explicitly directed against work. In the final section I identify a “return to work” in French philosophy (notably via Rancière), brought about, I argue, by the problematic severing of theory and practice that is inherent in structuralist methods.

This paper seeks to clarify some of the methodological and conceptual stakes involved in the attempt to think about politics from the point of view of "living labour". In order to avoid confusions further down the track, a formal analysis of the different possible meanings of "politics" is proposed. Politics is first defined as the series of problems that arise when separate individual lives attempt to organise a common life in common. Four types of problems can be identified on the basis of this initial definition, beyond the questions concerning the origin and justification of power, or the structure of the institutions of government. Following a brief characterisation of the paradigm of living labour, with reference to key texts by Marx and Dejours, this paradigm is then put into practice to provide initial answers to the questions raised in the preliminary analysis. First, the meaning of the fundamental norms of social life (equality, liberty, solidarity) is transformed from the point of view of living labour. Secondly, the implicit social ontology on the basis of which political questions are raised is also altered if viewed from the perspective of living labour, as social partitioning acquires a more specific dimension once conflicts around work are taken into account. Finally, the experience of living labour is a condition of democratic life as it determines the acquisition of personal dispositions which represent not only a prepolitical foundation of democratic activity, but are in fact directly involved in the actual process of collective decision-making.

In the following, I want to examine the structure and the significance of the notion of value in Hegel’s philosophy of right. In the first part, I use the 1817 version to define the category itself. Hegel sees the concept of value as a formal conceptual scheme, which can be applied with full justification to the most diverse contexts. It is striking that he should use the same word, in the same structural sense, in fields as diverse as economic exchange, crime and its punishment, indi-vidual action, individual worth, the social recognition of the person, and general social–cultural beliefs. Hegel deliberately exploits the full extent of the homonymy of “value,” to suggest the synonymy of its logical meaning in all these different contexts. This, however, has profound implications for the concept of value. My claim is that the homonymy of value rests on Hegel’s understanding of value as grounded in sociality. Before substantiating this claim in the conclusion, I will attempt to show, in the second part, how the definition of value found in the 1817 lectures is the counterpart in the social–philosophical of the Measure category analyzed in the Logic. In the third part, I study the different occurrences of value in the 1820 "Philosophy of Right" in order to highlight the extent of the homonymy and synonymy of the concept in Hegel’s mature thinking.

This article aims to present some of the main results of contemporary French psychodynamics of work. The writings of Christophe Dejours constitute the central references in this area. His psychoanalytical approach, which is initially concerned with the impact of contemporary work practices on individual health, has implications that go well beyond the narrow psycho-pathological interest. The most significant theoretical development to have come out of Dejours's research is that of Yves Clot, whose writings will constitute the second reference point in this article. The article attempts to demonstrate that the thick definition of work that Dejours and Clot operate with, as a result of their focus on its psychological function, speaks directly, in substantial and critical ways, to all disciplines with an interest in work, to philosophers, social theorists and social scientists, including economic theorists.

In this article, we argue that the usual restriction of critical theory to ‘modern’ norms is subject to problems of coherence, historical accuracy and moral obligation. First, we illustrate how critical theory opposes itself to societies designated as pre-modern, through a summary of Honneth’s recognition theory. We then show how an over-emphasis on modernity’s normative novelty obscures counter-currents in ethical life that threaten the unity of the modern era. Those two steps prepare the main analysis: that the ‘exceptionalist’ modernism of critical theory distorts our view of history and ignores normative dimensions of the past. We show how medieval and early-modern societies in Europe experienced many conflicts and possessed institutions that create illuminating configurations with modern norms. As a result, we articulate several kinds of moral and political link to the past that should lead critical theorists to expand the historical reach of their analyses.

This paper analyses the model of interaction at the heart of Axel Honneth's social philosophy. It argues that interaction in his mature ethics of recognition has been reduced to intercourse between human persons and that the role of nature is now missing from it. The ethics of recognition takes into account neither the material dimensions of individual and social action, nor the normative meaning of non-human persons and natural environments. The loss of nature in the mature ethics of recognition is made visible through a comparison with Honneth's initial formulation of his project. As an anthropology of intersubjectivity combining the teaching of the German philosophical anthropologists and G.H. Mead, his first model sought to ground social theory in the natural preconditions of human action. The last part of the article argues that a return to Mead's theory of practical intersubjectivity informed by Merleau-Ponty's germane theory of intercorporeity provides essential conceptual tools to enable the integration of the natural and the material within the theory of recognition.