New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Macropolitics, Micropolitics, and the French Unions

This article (make sure you read the comments as well) at Richard Seymour's blog, Lenin's Tomb, is a bit of inside baseball, leftist politics version, but worth the read. The author reads a Le Monde article on a recent meeting of French trade union leaders which signal their desire (their resignation, in the eyes of the blog post author) to working within the parliamentary system, their desire to avoid a widening of the struggle beyond their control. The author's key points: 

[From a union leader]: “Our responsibility as trade unionists is to construct compromises that make sense, and not to threaten the legitimacy of parliament or politics.” The intersyndicale communiqué reminds that the mobilisations will continue “respecting property and people” and makes no mention of other actions and strikes concurrently underway, making links with other confrontations and thus generalising the movement.

What's interesting is the push-back in the comments, where readers criticize the piece: 

Jean-Luc Nancy discovers the Leibnizian inspiration of the SUNY Albany administration!

"A single language alone, cleansed of the bugs of reflection, would make the perfect university subject: smooth, harmonious, easily submitted to pedagogical control."

Read the whole thing. 

Power Point on what the French are striking about: "ce qu'on ne nous dit pas ..."

From the Collectif villefranchois « Faire entendre les exigences citoyennes sur les retraites » (which seems to be w/o its own website, though info on their activities can be found here), comes a PDF version of a Power Point poking holes in the Sarkozy line about the "necessity" of "reform," as well as in lazy inherited narratives about the strikers inability to "understand" the economic situation. Good reading when coupled with Bob Vallier's post. 

What Have The French Got Their Culottes In A Bunch About ?

By now everyone has heard that various sectors of France’s working class are, once again, on strike, and that there have been several large-scale demonstrations and other smaller-scale but perhaps more effective strike actions for the last six weeks.  The last week or so has witnessed a series of headlines screaming that “The French Strikes Escalate,” or “French Strikes Turn Violent,” or “France Paralyzed.”  Such headlines are of course designed to sell newspapers, but also to sway public opinion.  This latter is evident in  many responses to the French strikes on various blogs and in the comment sections of articles in major media websites outside of France, which have tended to trade on popular stereotypes—aka misconceptions—about the French, their right to strike, and that horribly dangerous political formation known as “European socialism.”   So what’s really going on?  What’s at stake in this battle, and why do all French, not just the working class (72% of those polled support or strongly support the actions, according to the latest data) so strongly believe that this battle is worth fighting?

Claude Lefort has died

A student of Merleau-Ponty, Lefort was an important political philosopher. He co-founded, with Cornelius Castoriadis, the noteworthy postwar journal Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1965), in which an anti-capitalist support of direct democracy was coupled with a critique of the USSR as "bureaucratic capitalism." 

A collection of translated essays is available here, and Bernard Flynn wrote The Philosophy of Claude Lefort with Northwestern University Press; Fred Dallmayr's NDPR review of Flynn's book is here. 

Brief notice here from Le Monde. 

SUNY Albany French program terminated; why do we have French (or philosophy) in universities anyway?

[UPDATED below fold with addresses of SUNY administrators to write to in protest and links to further news.]

I received an email yesterday telling how the entire French program at SUNY Albany has been cancelled. I'll reprint the email below the fold. But I want to frame the news by examining the stated criterion for the decision: the ratio of undergrad majors to faculty. 

As Harry Brighouse, whom I had the pleasure of meeting the other day while I was visiting Wisconsin-Madison to give a talk to the Geography Department, writes in this highly recommended Crooked Timber post, making the production of majors the criterion for justifying a program severely distorts clear thinking on the role of the humanities in higher education.