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.

It is a hallmark of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory that it has consistently made philosophical reflection a central component of its overall project. Indeed, the core identity that this tradition has been able to maintain arguably stems from the fact that a number of key philosophical assumptions have been shared by the generations of thinkers involved in it. These assumptions form a basic ‘philosophical matrix’, whose main aim is to allow for a ‘critique of reason’, the heart of the critique of modern society, which emphasises the collective, historically situated and naturalistically grounded nature of rationality. In this matrix, Feuerbach's place has been only a minor one. This paper aims to show that there is more to be retrieved from Feuerbach for critical theory than at first meets the eye. The first section identifies key conceptual features that are shared by the central authors of the Frankfurt School. They signal a collectivist and materialist shift from Kant to Marx via Hege..

This essay discusses four books recently published by Christophe Dejours with the aim of extracting their most significant social-theoretical and philosophical implications. The first two books are two contributions by Dejours in current debates and public policy initiatives in France through the application of his psychodynamic approach to work related issues (work and violence; work and suicide). Even though these texts are shaped by the specific contexts in which they were written, they also contain broader social-theoretical insights that are quite significant. In the other two books, the two volumes of his sum Travail vivant, Dejours makes explicit the fundamental theoretical foundation upon which his psychodynamic approach is based. I will attempt to demonstrate that these books have significant implications for contemporary social theory and philosophy, notably as they establish the indissoluble continuity between the corporeal and cognitive capacities of the human subject, and the importance of this insight for moral and political reflection.

The paper examines briefly Kant's and Fichte's, and more thoroughly, Hegel's theses on womanhood and their social and political consequences. It shows, taking Hegel as a case study, that the idealists' conceptual frameworks should have led them to recognize the rights of women, and, importantly, in Kant's and Hegel's case, that they implicitly did so. However, they chose to repress these unwanted outcomes behind teachings that were more in line with the beliefs of their time. This tension, it is argued in conclusion, is indicative of a conceptual crux that is specific to German idealism, but whose effects can still be perceived today.