Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
J. Moufawad-Paul is professor of philosophy at York University and is the author of Continuity and Rupture, The Communist Necessity, Politics in Command, and other books.<p>Provocative insurgent philosophy! <i>Being Subjects: Preliminary Materials of the Person </i>is a comprehensive intervention on the question of human subjectivity. J. Moufawad Paul challenges the reader with a rigorous interrogation of the Subject driven by an emancipatory imperative towards ongoing class struggle mediated by Black liberation discourse and anti-colonial thought. </p>
- A. Shahid Stover, author of <i>Being and Insurrection</i> and <i>Epistemic Ruptures, Insurgent Philosophy</i>,
<p><i>Being Subjects </i>clears ground for thinking a revolutionary subject by tracking modern subjectivity through its ideological entanglements and interrogating the reactionary thesis of the exhaustion of subject-as-freedom. Moufawad-Paul is a gadfly of and for the Left, essential reading for the way forward!</p>
- Matthew McLennan, Saint Paul University,
The concept of the subject remains one of the most important and debated notions in social theory and philosophy. Whether it is adopted as a central notion of personhood or rejected as a product of ideology or fiction, its usage has been a theme in a variety of political and speculative thought. Unfortunately, the prevalence of the term has often rendered its meaning opaque.
Being Subjects examines the history of this notion from Descartes to the present and discusses its emergence as a philosophical category as well as its connection to related notions such as essence and being. Drawing from the tradition of Fanon’s revolutionary existentialism and a historical materialist approach to thought, J. Moufawad-Paul argues that despite the rejection of the subject by thinkers such as Althusser and Foucault, thinking the subject remains a meaningful philosophical practice for a politics dedicated to radical social transformation. If we can think through the category of the subject, we can also think through the legacy of modernity which includes settler-colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. We can also think through a conception of transformative subjectivity and the path to a new personhood and collective agency beyond this legacy’s weight of dead generations.
Foreword, D.Z. Shaw
Prologue
Chapter 1: The Meaning of Subject
Chapter 2: Subject and Ideology
Chapter 3: Subject and Being
Chapter 4: Subject as Assemblage, Partisan, Collective
Epilogue: The Subjective Factor
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Existentialism is a living, practical philosophy, engaged in contemporary events and responsive to other currents of philosophy across the globe. It can be instrumental to an individual’s understanding of themselves as well as to examinations of political, societal, and ecological phenomena. This series focuses on creative, generative scholarship that expands discussions of existentialism in order to foster an intellectual space for articulating the diverse lineages of existentialism -- from Beauvoir’s feminist philosophy, to the anticolonial, black existentialism of thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis who composed their views of freedom, self, and other from the lived experience of racism and colonialism. Existentialism has often been miscategorised as a European tradition, limited by the gravitational pull of a few thinkers. Part of the work of this series is to dismantle this incorrect impression of where Existentialism comes from and what its potential is. Existential thought offers a valuable vocabulary for expressing the lived perspectives of colonized, indigenous, and othered peoples. As such, it is increasingly relevant to the ongoing struggle for human freedom the world over.
Series Editors: T. Storm Heter, East Stroudsburg University, and Devin Zane Shaw, Douglas College
Advisory Board: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University, USA, Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Université Paris Diderot, France, Lewis Gordon, University of Connecticut, USA , Paget Henry, Brown University, USA, Sonia Kruks, Oberlin College, USA, Mabogo Percy More, University of Limpopo, South Africa, Jean-Paul Rocchi, University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France, Hanétha Vété-Congolo, Bowdoin University, USA, Jonathan Webber, Cardiff University, UK, Gail Weiss, George Washington University, USA