Cornel West

The New Cultural Politics of Difference

In these last few years of the 20th century, there is emerging a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists. In fact, I would go so far as to claim that a new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of difference. These new forms of intellectual consciousness advance reconceptions of the vocation of critic and artist, attempting to undermine the prevailing disciplinary divisions of labor in the academy, museum, mass media and gallery networks, while preserving modes of critique within the ubiquitous commodification of culture in the global village. Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing. Needless to say, these gestures are not new in the history of criticism or art, yet what makes them novel – along with the cultural politics they produce – is how and what constitutes difference, the weight and gravity it is given in representation and the way in which highlighting issues like exterminism, empire, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, nation, nature, and region at this historical moment acknowledges some discontinuity and disruntion from previous forms of cultural critique.

Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity

In this, his premiere work, Cornel West provides readers with a new understanding of the African American experience based largely on his own political and cultural perspectives borne out of his own lifes experiences. He challenges African Americans to consider the incorporation of Marxism into their theological perspectives, thereby adopting the mindset that it is class more so than race that renders one powerless in America. Armed with a new introduction by the author, this Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Prophesy Deliverance! is a must have.

Post-Analytic Philosophy

1. Solidarity or Objectivity?, by Richard Rorty2. After Empiricism, by Hilary Putnam3. Subjective and Objective, by Thomas Nagel4. Dewey, Democracy: The Task Ahead of Us, by Richard J. Bernstein5. Philosophy as/and/of Literature, by Arthur C. Danto6. Emerson, Coleridge, Kant, by Stanley Cavell7. The Pragmatics of Contemporary Jewish Culture, by Harold Bloom8. On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, by Donald Davidson9. Styles of Scientific Reasoning, by Ian Hacking10. Mathematical Versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science, by Thomas S. Kuhn11. A Kantian Conception of Equality, by John Rawls12. Contractualism and Utilitarianism, by T.M. Scanlon13. Revolutionary Action Today, by Sheldon S. Wolin

Interview with Cornel West

Anders Stephanson: Philosophically speaking, you come out of the American tradition of pragmatism. In everyday parlance, pragmatism is often understood as adjusting in an almost opportunistic manner to existing circumstances. Philosophical pragmatism is something quite different. Cornel West: When philosophers talk about pragmatism, they are talking about Charles Peirce, William James, andJohn Dewey For me, it is principally Dewey Three theses are basic: (1) antirealism in ontology, so that the correspondence theory of truth is called into question and one no longer can appeal to Reality as a court of appeal to adjudicate between conflicting theories of the world; (2) antifoundationalism in epistemology, so that one cannot in fact invoke noninferential, intrinsically credible elements in experience to justify claims about experience; and (3) detranscendentalizing of the subject, the elimination of mind itself as a sphere of inquiry These three theses (mainly Deweys) are underpinned by the basic claim that social practices contingent, power-laden, structured social practiceslie at the very center of knowledge. In other words, knowledge is produced, acquired, and achieved. Here, the link to the marxist tradition, especially that of Antonio Gramsci, looms large for

Nietzsche’s Prefiguration of Postmodern American Philosophy

You ask me about the idiosyncracies of philosophers?... There is their lack of historical sense, their hatred of even the idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing honour when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterniwhen they make a mummy of it. All the philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive. They kill, they stuff, when they worship, these conceptual idolaters-they become a mortal danger to everything when they worship. Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are for them objections-refutations even. What is, does not become; what becomes, is not... Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Religion and the Left: Introduction

Notwithstanding the secular sensibilities of most leftist intellectuals and activists, religion permeates and pervades the lives of the majority of people in the capitalist world. And all signs indicate that the prevailing crisis in the capitalist world is not solely an economic or political one. Recent inquiries into the specificity of racism, patriarchy, homophobia, state repression, bureaucratic domination, ecological subjugation, and nuclear exterminism suggest that we need to understand this crisis as that of capitalist civilization. To extend leftist discourses about political economy and the state to a discourse about capitalist civilization is to accent a sphere rarely scrutinized by Marxist thinkers: the sphere of culture and everyday life. And any serious scrutiny of this sphere sooner or later must come to terms with religious ways of life and religious ways of struggle.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Reconstructing the American Left: The Challenge of Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jacksons bid for the Democratic nomination constituted the most important challenge to the American left since the emergence of the civil rights movement in the fifties and the feminist movement in the seventies. Unfortunately, the American left, for the most part, missed this grand opportunity. In this essay, I will argue that this failure to respond in a serious and sustained manner to the contemporary black political upsurge signifies the need for a reassessment and reconstruction of the American left-a rearticulation of progressive forces centered on antiimperialist struggles (against U.S. and Soviet forms) and black unity (a unity open to nonblack allies yet subordinate to no nonblack groups).

Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition

Review of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J. Robinson.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents by Jeffrey Stout. Boston, Beacon, 1988. 338 pp.

We recognize in the “confounding of language” and the “scattering abroad” of the people of the earth that take place in the story of Babel (Gen. 1l:l-9) conditions of chaos and confusion that pertain to our own situation, not only in language but also in the moral life. The story may make us nostalgic for a time when “the whole earth had one language and few words,” moral pluralism, too, frightens us. It’s not that we don’t appreciate variety in human life (though some of us seem able to tolerate it only in small doses). But coming into contact with significantly different moral beliefs, norms, and ways of interpreting, speaking, and acting-distinct “moral languages,” to use the shor thand4an make us worry whether any morality can be relied upon as true. Does the diversity of moral languages condemn us to a relativism that leads inexorably to nihilism? Is morality undermined by its own multiplici-

27.50

The distinctive feature of Afro-American life in the 60s was the rise on the historical stage of a small yet determined petite bourgeoisie promoting liberal reforms, and the revolt of the masses, whose aspirations exceeded those of liberalism but whose containment was secured by political appeasement, cultural control and state repression. Afro-America encountered the modern American capitalist order (in its expansionist phase)-as urban dwellers, industrial workers and franchised citizens-on a broad scale for the first time. This essay will highlight the emergence of the black parvenu petite bourgeoisie -the new, relatively privileged, middle class-and its complex relations to the black working poor and underclass. I will try to show how the political strategies, ideological struggles and cultural anxieties of this predominantly white-collar stratum of the black working class both propelled the freedom movement in an unprecedented manner and circumscribed its vision, analysis and praxis within liberal capitalist perimeters. For interpretive purposes, the 60s is not a chronological category which encompasses a decade, but rather a historical construct or heuristic rubric which renders noteworthy historical processes and events intelligible. The major historical processes that set the context for the first stage of the black freedom movement in the 60s were the modernization of