Columbia University Press

Steve Coll’s “Gusher,” published in The Best Business Writing 2013 offers a behind-the-scenes look at the tremendous influence ExxonMobil has in Washington and in shaping environmental and climate policy. In this excerpt, Steve Coll documents some of the early battles between ExxonMobil and the Obama administration and how the company and its CEO, Rex Tillerson, helped to kill the cap-and trade bill:

ExxonMobil’s initial efforts to reach out to the Obama adminis­tration gave way, during 2009 and 2010, to a succession of legis­lative and policy battles in which the corporation and the new president found themselves on opposite sides. Tillerson sought meetings with Treasury and White House officials to explain ExxonMobil’s views on energy markets, domestic drilling, cli­mate legislation, and the recession. On one occasion, Tillerson joined a group of chief executives at dinner with Obama. In general, however, wary administration officials saw no reason to favor ExxonMobil with access. There was little basis for trust on either side. ExxonMobil lobbying sessions with Obama’s team at the Treasury Department or the Department of Energy could be stiff, with Fariello and other lobbyists enunciating ExxonMo­bil’s advocacy positions, sometimes just by reading from notes and prepared materials. During the first three years of Obama’s presidency, the corporation spent more than fifty-two million dollars on lobbying in Washington, about 50 percent more per year than during the Bush presidency.

The most important challenge that ExxonMobil faced was the climate bill, known as “cap-and-trade,” which Obama and congressional Democrats introduced early in 2009. The House of Representatives passed a version of the law in June and moved it to the Senate, where the most difficult negotia­tions were expected. The proposed law would have established a new regulatory system under which polluting corporations could buy and sell permits to emit greenhouse gases, under an overall “cap” that would seek to reduce the rate of global warming.

ExxonMobil denounced the cap-and-trade system as un­wieldy and bureaucratic. It did, however, announce that it would support a straight “carbon tax,” which would create incentives for reductions in coal and oil use.

The proposal was a major policy shift for the corporation, which had come to it aft er years of isolated, deliberative policy analysis. But there was little support for the idea among Demo­crats. They knew that Republicans—many of whom had signed pledges never to raise taxes—wouldn’t go for it. And they had determined that cap-and-trade was the climate-change policy they would try to pass. Exxon’s support for a carbon tax would have been welcome in, say, the early nineties, when Al Gore was pushing the idea. But the debate had moved on.

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The following is an interview with Stephanie Hepburn, coauthor (with Rita Simon) of Human Trafficking Around the World: Hidden in Plain Sight (For more on the book, you can also watch a video of Stephanie Hepburn discussing the book.):

Question: What made you interested in writing about the topic of human trafficking?

Stephanie Hepburn: I moved to New Orleans in February 2006, not long after Hurricane Katrina. Just like any place in any country that experiences a natural disaster, the infrastructure was disrupted, the population was in flux and law enforcement personnel were overextended. In order to rebuild the city there was a sudden demand for low-wage labor, which created an ideal scenario for labor exploitation and human trafficking. Further compounding the scenario is that the United States government temporarily suspended numerous protections for workers that affected wages, safety and health. Also, the government temporarily suspended immigration-enforcement requirements. These temporary suspensions compounded the situation and allowed illicit contractors to move in, and bring in and exploit workers unnoticed.

This is actually where the latter part of the book title (Hidden in Plain Sight) came from: the workers were exploited out in the open, but they were hidden in plain sight because no one was paying attention to the exploitation. I first began to research the human trafficking cases in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region and after seeing the common patterns I added the entire U.S. and 23 other nations.

Q: What do you want to accomplish with this book?

SH: I wrote the book to attract a broad audience and be accessible to anyone – whether an academic, expert in the field or a layperson who happens to be curious about the topic. I wanted to bring about improved awareness and understanding of all forms of human trafficking. When most people think of human trafficking they think of sex trafficking. They aren’t incorrect but that certainly isn’t the entire picture. In fact, the International Labour Organization estimates that 68 percent of the 20.9 million victims of human trafficking are forced labor victim, while 22 percent are victims of forced sexual exploitation. The remaining victims are in state-imposed forms of forced labor. To me, all of these victims are forced labor victims and it doesn’t serve any positive purpose to differentiate — it simply results in disparate laws and treatment.

I also wanted to tell the stories of victims and strike a balance between humanizing the experience and giving essential statistical data. Many of the books that I have read on human trafficking tend to go in one direction or the other. I aimed to achieve both. To me, the statistics are necessary for giving as close to an accurate image as possible of the extent of human trafficking, while the stories are the glue and heart of the book. They prohibit reader detachment and give a clear image of what victims experience from beginning to end.

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We were sad to learn of the death of Kenneth Waltz, who passed away last week at the age of 88. Waltz was a longtime professor at Columbia University, among other places, and was the author of Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis , which was his published dissertation but went on to reshape the field of International Relations. The book first published in 1959 continues to be one of our best-selling titles and is widely used in courses.

In an article in Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt, a former student of Waltz’s, wrote about how Waltz made IR theory vital for illuminating crucial policy decisions rather than it being relegated to academic irrelevancy. Walt provided an addendum focusing on the continuing importance of Waltz and his work:

I would add … the reminder of Waltz’s deep aversion to foolish military excesses. He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and was a realist rather than a pacifist. But like Hans Morgenthau, he was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and deeply skeptical of the paranoid threat-inflation that has informed so much of U.S. foreign and defense policy. Like many other realists, he also opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The field of international relations would be better off with more people like Ken, and the world would be better off if more great powers — especially the United States — paid more attention to his insights.

This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win FREE copies of The Incident at Antioch by Alain Badiou, Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdijk, and Hermeneutic Communism by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Also check out Insurrections on Pinterest!

Today, the final day of our feature on the Insurrections series, and the final day to enter our Book Giveaway (link above), we have a post highlighting books in the series for which we’ve made the introductions available online.

Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, and died almost eighty years later, on March 18, 1980. In celebration of Fromm’s life, we have a two-part Q&A with Lawrence J. Friedman, author of The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, looking back at Fromm’s many intellectual contributions and accomplishments.

In part two of the interview, Friedman discusses how Fromm’s ideas can be applied to modern political problems.

Question: Fromm led efforts to revitalize American democracy. What did he feel was wrong with our system?

Lawrence Friedman: Fromm was the principal funder and platform architect for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s bid to win the White House in 1968. McCarthy ran as a peace candidate determined to extract America from the Vietnam War. This fit with Fromm’s antimilitarism. On a deeper level, he felt that pointless wars like Vietnam might be avoided if American democracy were restored. Invoking the old New England town meeting as his point of departure, Fromm tried to promote a small, community-based government structure with all officials directly and personally responsible to the local citizenry. Fromm continued to promote this view of democracy throughout his life even as, in his opinion, a Big Brother–like national-security state thrived under less democratic presidencies such as Nixon’s.

Fromm would have seen the possibility of democracy restored in the 2008 Obama campaign, with Obama’s appeal to racial minorities, women, and students and his ability to spark excitement about the political process. But he would have been less enthusiastic for the Obama of 2012 because the president sent additional troops to Afghanistan and essentially ordered the assassination of Bin Laden. But he would have voted for Obama a second time because he was somewhat more democratic and less elitist than Romney. Fromm had strong ideals and democracy was one of them. But he was also a pragmatist, willing to take half a loaf as a first installment on any basic goal. He would have supported Obama with this perspective.

Q: While Fromm was a strong advocate for democracy around the globe, he was also critical of how bureaucratic state socialism (such as obtained in the Soviet Union) and corporate capitalism (such as in the United States) both alienated modern man. He envisioned a “Third Way”: a humanist society that valued the happiness of the individual in a democratic polity. Can this type of government ever truly exist and function?

LF: Fromm saw both the alienating capitalism and consumer culture of the West (especially the United States) and the bureaucratic socialist societies of the Eastern bloc as anathema to the human condition. Western societies for the most part offered only the façade of democracy while covering selfhood in a plethora of estranged consumerism. The Russians were more dictatorial, Fromm argued, and the Russian leadership promoted inhumane and inefficient bureaucracy.

Fromm cooperated with intellectuals and activists in “Third Way” countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland that were trying to break from the Soviet sphere of influence while distancing themselves from Western “democracies.” They were relatively small countries and the citizenry passionately sought small community-based democratic socialism free of both Soviet bureaucracy and Western alienation. In our contemporary world where there is no longer a Soviet Union and the United States can no longer impose its will abroad. Fromm would see continuing potential for a “Third Way,” especially in small countries like Finland, Denmark, and even Tunisia.

Q: Fromm challenged the dominant Freudian model of psychoanalysis and paid a professional price for doing so. His approach encourages “central relatedness,” where confidentiality breaches may sometimes occur and the clinician is personally involved with the patient rather than distanced by therapeutic neutrality. What is his legacy in the psychiatric world and has his approach been embraced or rejected by modern psychoanalysis?

LF: Orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis involved a seemingly neutral and distant analyst. The patient projected his repressed concerns on the analyst so these concerns could be studied. Fromm’s “central relatedness” was markedly different. The analyst was not neutral but opened himself to his deepest personal issues and encouraged the patient to similarly open his “center” to the analyst.

Traditional Freudian analysis is essentially gone. Given Fromm’s and other clinicians’ affairs and other professional breaches with their patients, rooted in the temptations of “central relatedness”, it, too, has a problematic legacy. But Fromm, like his friend Harry Stack Sullivan, emphasized the clinical relationship as an interpersonal one– the connectedness between people as the way to understand what troubled patients. Because the interpersonal is perhaps the dominant clinical approach today within psychoanalytically informed therapy, Fromm and Sullivan have reemerged as significant figures. From a therapeutic perspective, Fromm has finally come of age.

Q: You write that mental health and illness are heavily social constructs. If Fromm were living today, current clinicians might have labeled him as bipolar. Yet there were “stabilizers” in his life that pushed away bipolarity and let Fromm be very productive. What can we learn from Fromm’s approach to dealing with the effects of mental illness?

LF: Contemporary psychiatrists and other mental health experts are too quick to label their patients “bipolar” and “schizophrenic.” Both tend to be seen as genetically rooted organic maladies; psychotropic drugs are the remedies or alleviants of choice. Coming from the social misery of a deeply depressed mother and a manic father and trying somehow to keep the family together, Fromm adapted. By his own admission, he would have been called manic depressive or bipolar. However, considering the way he led his life, “manic depressive” is diagnostically far off the mark even if he was genetically or temperamentally disposed.

Fromm developed an array of daily habits that “stabilized“ or fine-tuned his existence. He wrote regularly, meditated, conversed with a small circle of convivial friends, cultivated a love for political activism, and corresponded regularly and caringly with those close to him. Succinctly, Fromm’s life and the social emphasis behind his therapeutic approach suggest that our daily social arrangements may keep us healthy and happy without recourse to drugs. At least these arrangements should precede drug trials that may be unnecessary. Fromm thought so and always emphasized social circumstances in caring for his patients even as he never dismissed the possibility of drugs as periodic supplements down the line.

Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, and died almost eighty years later, on March 18, 1980. In celebration of Fromm’s life, we have a two-part Q&A with Lawrence J. Friedman, author of The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, looking back at Fromm’s many intellectual contributions and accomplishments.

In part one of the interview, Friedman discusses Fromm’s views on love and politics, and how his works still have political impact today.

Question: Fromm was a believer in love or, as you call him, “love’s prophet.” How did his relationships with women influence his philosophy about the role of love in the world?

Lawrence Friedman: The Art of Loving (1956) sold over 25,000,000 copies and still sells well globally. The theme is easy to fathom. At a very deep level, one must simultaneously love oneself, the cherished other, and all of humankind. Love starts as a specific relationship and then becomes a global transformation of humankind into a peaceful and caring society.

Succinctly, a self in love with another is transformative. This was a perspective on love that connected to Fromm’s view of humanism and spirituality. The theme of love had an overwhelming dose of authenticity. It was rooted in Fromm’s own life. Fromm’s unhappy first marriage led to a divorce; in the second, his wife committed suicide; the third, with Annis Freeman, was love from the start. Sometimes Fromm would write six or seven love letters to Freeman every day, and she would reciprocate. The expressions of love through letters bound their lives together and energized Fromm’s spiritual crusade to humanize the world.

Q: Fromm was a founder and major funder of Amnesty International. How has Amnesty transformed our understanding of social justice and human rights?

LF: Fromm was a founder of Amnesty International in the early 1960s and was its principal funder for the next twenty years. He did much to make Amnesty perhaps the most vibrant and effective global agency for human rights and against government brutalities. To free incarcerated victims of harsh regimes, Fromm could play the part of global diplomat, shuttling among Washington, New York, London, and Moscow with remarkable skill and effectiveness. His money and his strategies to free people from governmental barbarities did much to make Amnesty International the most important human rights organization in the world today.

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This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Also check out Insurrections on Pinterest!

Today, we have a Q & A with Professor Jeffrey Robbins, in which he discusses some of the essential components of the Insurrections series and their importance today.

Question: Clayton Crockett wrote that insurrectionist theology is not politically neutral and is critical of corporate capitalism. Can you elaborate on the insurrectionist critique of contemporary corporatism?
 
Jeffrey Robbins: Perhaps it is important to distinguish between insurrectionist theology as named and employed by Crockett (together with myself, Creston Davis, and Ward Blanton), and the Insurrections series.  An insurrectionist theology, as we conceive it, is a materialist political theology that takes seriously the emancipatory potential of religion.  Instead of relying on the concept of transcendence or the notion of a transcendent God, it accepts Wittgenstein’s maxim that “the world is all that is the case,” and thus expresses itself in the form of an immanent critique. 
 
Beginning from this point, we can say of the insurrectionist critique that contemporary corporatism is today’s undeniable hegemon.  Consider the story from today’s New York Times:  After protests erupted in Cyprus over the European Union’s planned austerity measures that would seize funds from individual Cypriot savings accounts, Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth, offered its own private bailout to rescue the Cyprus economy.  As the story puts it, “The fate of this proposal is uncertain. . . But it illustrates how a sprawling, wealthy company so deeply entwined with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that it is often called a state within a state is willing to seize an opportunity and exploit weaknesses and divisions within Europe to cement its position and power.”
 
While certain corporations operate as a state within a state (consider here, as well, an entity such as the company formerly known as Blackwater whose CEO admitted it worked as a “virtual extension of the CIA”), marshaling the mechanisms of the state for its own private gain, there are others operating as transnational corporations without respect to national boundaries.  At a minimum, this suggests a new, alternative form of political sovereignty.  Further, when the flow of capital is not only global, but instantaneous, this demands new forms of political organization and new means of political resistance.  And finally, contemporary corporatism’s reign can be considered complete when it becomes the logic—or better, the rubric—by which we determine even educational and philanthropic success.

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This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win FREE copies of The Incident at Antioch by Alain Badiou, Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdijk, and Hermeneutic Communism by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Also check out Insurrections on Pinterest!

Today, we have a guest post from Professor Santiago Zabala, in which he discusses the unique nature and success of the Insurrections series, and its significance in critical studies today.

In order for any scholarly series to work there are three indispensable components: a distinguished academic press, a long-term philosophical project, and, most of all, passionate editors. CUP’s Insurrections series not only has all of these, but also has become a model for series from other presses. A few weeks ago I was at a conference in New Delhi called On World Religions: Diversity, Not Dissension (which took place at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and was organized by the distinguished Indian philosopher Anindita Balslev and attended by intellectuals from all over the world, including the His Holiness the Dalai Lama). I was asked by a group of students whether I knew what would be the next titles in Insurrections. I must confess I was not completely surprised to be asked because these researchers, in keeping with the intellectual environment of the event, were already interested in the intersection of religion, politics, and culture. However, the series is known not only within the intellectual circle of political theology as I have discovered elsewhere in Asia and South America over the past years. I’m not interested in writing a report on the series’ editorial success, even though it’s clear the editors (Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, and Jeffrey W. Robbins) have managed to create a true editorial insurrection, but rather in pointing out the ontological nature of the series. In order to do this, it is first important to understand who these editors are.

The four editors of Insurrections are truly postmetaphysical philosophers, that is, concerned with what Michel Foucault called the “ontology of actuality,” where existence is not given beforehand but rather disclosed through its own historical disruptions. This is evident not only in the work of Slavoj Žižek but also in that of the other three editors, who merit as much attention as the Slovenian philosopher. While Creston Davis, a long-time disciple and collaborator of Žižek, has been articulating a refreshing materialist-immanent theology for years now, Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins have contributed in a unique way to political theology’s democratic effort to overcome conservative theological articulations (unfortunately expressed by the newly elected Pope Francis in Rome). What unites these editors and what they bring to the intersection between politics and theology is the vision that the truth of political theology in the twenty-first century can no longer be imagined through liberal reforms or anarchic events but only by reconsidering democracy as a form of religious practice and political thought. This new democracy is not simply unconstrained by modern liberal capitalism but actually its greatest enemy, that is, a true insurrection. The fact these editors have so much in common is perhaps the reason why the series, only seven years after its inception, is so successful. Certainly, the books in the series have sold, which is important, but much more significant are its consequences, that is, the issues it has given form to.

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This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win FREE copies of The Incident at Antioch by Alain Badiou, Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdijk, and Hermeneutic Communism by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala.Throughout this week, we will be hosting a number of posts and interviews from the editors and authors of the Insurrections series, and we will also feature the series on Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

The Insurrection Series is on Pinterest! Take a minute to browse through the titles and covers, and maybe even our page devoted to the life and works of Alain Badiou, a prominent author in the series.

One of our most exciting and active book series is Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture, edited by Slavoj Zizek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, and Jeffrey W. Robbins. Books in the series offer a close look at the intersection of religion, politics, and culture in the modern world by bringing the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn.

Throughout this week, we will be hosting a number of posts and interviews from the editors and authors of the Insurrections series, and we will also feature the series on Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of THREE of the exciting books in the Insurrections series to the winner of our Book Giveaway: The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident D’Antioch, by Alain Badiou; Hermeneutic Communism, by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala; and Rage and Time, by Peter Sloterdijk.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday, March 29, at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word! The book giveaway is now closed. Thanks to all who participated, and congratulations to the winner!

This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. To round things off this week, we have created a Pinterest board running through Badiou’s history as an intellectual. Thanks for following our posts on Badiou this week, and remember to enter our giveaway by 1 PM today!

This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. Today, the final day of our giveway, we have an excerpt from Badiou’s hypertranslation, Plato’s Republic. In this chapter, Socrates and two interlocutors discuss what, exactly, makes a philosopher.

Plato's Republic, by Alain Badiou by

This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, both translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. In today’s post, Ward Blanton discusses the importance of The Incident at Antioch in “rethinking … those old, old questions about ‘Jerusalem and Athens’ which seem to lodge so naturally around the figure of Paul.”

Professor Blanton is a Reader in Biblical Cultures & European Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent. Among other books and collections, he spearheaded Columbia’s translation of Stanislas Breton’s A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul. His next book, A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life, is in press with Columbia’s series Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture.

Paula Versus the New Philosophers, or, Incident in Beijing

Ward Blanton, University of Kent

I’m not sure whether others have been struck by some of the public interactions of Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley, interactions which invariably start to circulate around the question of whether or how political creation relates to political disappointment. The more the matter is tabled the more memory of older conflicts—for and against Kant, for and against Levinas, or for and against a Lutheran inflection of newness and identity within the Pauline legacy—begin to churn toward the surface. I confess I like such moments as we continue to struggle with how we imagine or conceptualize the political—as we speculate on our own political chances. As if to stir gently what has always for me been a pleasing pot, I could begin by naming a disappointment I have undergone in relation to that remarkable play, The Incident at Antioch. Above all, I was sorry when I realized we couldn’t include portions of it in our Paul and the Philosophers (Fordham, 2013). True enough, it didn’t make any sense to publish a short selection of Susan Spitzer’s beautiful translation at the very moment that the entire play would become available… but for my disappointment logistics are generally beside the point entirely! In truth, I was disappointed that I would no longer have a great excuse to say there what I really wanted to say about Badiou’s play, namely, that I think The Incident at Antioch is one of the most important contemporary spurs for a rethinking of those old, old questions about ‘Jerusalem and Athens’ which seem to lodge so naturally around the figure of Paul.
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This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. In this post, Susan Spitzer discusses the experience of translating two very different works by Badiou.

Translating Alain Badiou’s The Incident at Antioch and Plato’s Republic
Susan Spitzer

Although the translator’s initial encounter with the foreign-language text, to which so much time will be devoted, is not often discussed, I doubt I’ll ever forget the heart-sinking feeling I had on first opening Alain Badiou’s L’Incident d’Antioche. The play was utterly different from anything I’d read before, and translating it, I knew immediately, would be a daunting task. As I later remarked in my Preface to the translation, “The Incident at Antioch is characterized by a rich linguistic mélange, a virtual kaleidoscope of styles and genres: poetic or highly elevated literary language, language borrowed directly from the Bible or with religious overtones, pompous rhetoric, made-up proverbs, everyday French that often tends towards the colloquial, if not at times the vulgar, all overlain with the remnants of a certain Marxist vocabulary or with terminology bearing the stamp of Badiou’s own philosophical œuvre, and studded with allusions to, or quotations from, Marx and Engels, Goethe, Shakespeare, Racine, La Fontaine, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Greek mythology, along with myriad references to the contemporary world.”

Fortunately for me, Badiou was (and still is) a regular visitor to Los Angeles, so I was able to corral him into assisting me with the translation issues that confronted me at every turn. Most of the time, thanks to his generosity and patience, I would come away from these sessions relieved to have finally (or so I hoped) understood what was meant. But on one occasion he was of no help at all. Expecting a simple answer to my query about the source of certain lines in Act I that he had enclosed in quotation marks, I was surprised to hear him say, “No, no, it’s not a citation; it’s just the characters reciting their lines in a sort of chorus.” My intuition told me otherwise, but what is a translator to do when the author explicitly tells her she is over-reaching? The answer, it now seems obvious, was: Google! I entered one French phrase after another into the search engine, only to come up empty-handed. I then played around with the lines a bit, in case Badiou hadn’t followed the exact order of words in what I was still convinced was a citation. No luck. Next I tried numerous versions of my own tentative translation of the phrases or lines. Finally, when I was almost ready to concede defeat, I hit the jackpot: the lines, somewhat altered, were from The German Ideology! No one was more surprised, or pleased, I hasten to add, than Badiou himself when I apprised him of this. He had simply forgotten, having written the play some twenty-odd years before, about his own idiosyncratic use of Marx and Engels in this one particular scene.

Translating his Plato’s Republic was a different experience altogether. No dread on first perusing the text; on the contrary, irrepressible laughter. I knew from the outset that the book, a sparkling theatrical dialogue interspersed with novel-like narrative passages, would be a real romp for a literary translator. Not that there weren’t thorny passages – when Badiou’s mathematics met Plato’s, for example, or when the umpteenth appearance of “ce qui de l’Être s’expose à la pensée” (“that which of Being is exposed to thought”? “that aspect of Being which is exposed to thought”? “that of Being which is exposed to thought”?) made me tear my hair out – but overall it was a sheer delight to be part of the process of what was then a still-unfolding work. Badiou would send me each chapter when he finished it, and I would eagerly await the next installment to see what remarkable changes he had wrought on Plato’s immortal work. After receiving his blessing for the American-English slant I was determined to give the translation, I felt free to sprinkle the text with slang, where I deemed appropriate, and even the odd Yiddishism (“these vacationing culture-vultures, these mid-summer mavens of the minor arts”). Socrates, or at least this thoroughly contemporary version of him, was, needless to say, very philosophical about it all. I’m now looking forward excitedly to meeting up with him again sometime soon in the screenplay Badiou is currently writing about the life of Plato.

Copyright 2013 by Susan Spitzer

This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. In this post, we have our second introduction of the day: Reinhard’s introduction to Plato’s Republic. In this essay, Reinhard discusses Badiou’s “Platonism of the multiple” and his “hypertranslation” of Plato’s famous Republic.

Plato's Republic, by Alain Badiou by

This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. Today, we have an excerpt from the introduction to The Incident at Antioch, in which Reinhard discusses Badiou’s under-appreciated literary side and puts The Incident at Antioch in context in the development of Badiou’s political and philosophical ideas.

The Incident at Antioch, by Alain Badiou by Columbia University Press

Today is Valentine’s Day! In honor of the occasion, we have a post from Lawrence J. Friedman, author of The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, in which Friedman discusses Erich Fromm’s views on love, as articulated in his book The Art of Loving.

Erich Fromm had many “lives”. He was a political activist, a psychoanalyst, a theologian, a personality theorist, a social psychologist, a philosopher, and a clinician. Fromm wrote a great many books. Only one sold less than 1,000,000 copies. Through these volumes, Fromm conveyed the most complex thoughts of Einstein, Goethe, Darwin, Freud, Marx, and other intellectual giants in a way that readers everywhere could understand. In a very real sense, he was an “educator to the world.”

Fromm is primarily known for two of his books. Escape from Freedom (1941) addressed murderous dictators like Hitler who were running rampant over Europe and threatening to extinguish millions. For Fromm, hatred and sado-masochism were basic to their mass appeal. The Art of Loving (1956), on the other hand, was very different. It concerned hope and joyfulness – the upside of human experience. Whereas Escape from Freedom sold roughly 5,000,000 copies, The Art of Loving marketed 25,000,000 copies globally and continues to sell well.

Why has The Art of Loving had such an enormous attraction? Why has it competed with flowers and candy as a Valentine’s Day gift? Why does it appeal to my current Harvard undergraduates just as it appealed, half a century ago, to the undergraduates I studied with at the University of California?

We all seem to be animated by love and downcast by its absence. It is perhaps the most upbeat emotion of human existence. Fromm’s delineation of love is clear. Love requires a good deal of effort on many fronts and for the duration of one’s life. One has to love oneself, other(s), and all of humankind. For Fromm, love is Biblical command to “love thy neighbor as thyself” and then some. Love requires “central relatedness” – allowing the deepest region or essence of one’s spiritual self to enter another self and to extend that entrance into all of humankind. There is a reciprocity of feeling and commitment that begins with self understanding, extends to parental understanding, takes the form of erotic mutuality with a partner, and extends into all of humankind. Fromm’s view of love resembles the Quaker concept of the “inner light of God” that connects (on the deepest possible level) the self, the other, and all of humankind.

If Fromm’s explication of the meaning of “love” was not unprecedented, he advanced it with such animation and freshness of vision that it has appealed to millions. He offered up an inspiring sense of hopefulness in a world that he found blighted for most of his life by war, terrorism, bigotry, famine, and other dispiriting ills. But there was another quality that added a zest and conveyed a credibility to Fromm’s discussion of love. He was in love at a very deep level as he wrote his book about love.

Fromm had three wives and several affairs. The first marriage, to Frieda Fromm Reichmann, ended in divorce. Henny Gurland, his second wife, committed suicide. He started dating Annis Freeman shortly after Gurland’s suicide. Raised in Alabama, Freeman was tall, sensuous, and beautiful. Whereas Fromm Reichmann and Gurland had been Jewish, intellectual, and professional, Freeman was a Gentile and had no vocation. She practiced astrology, meditated, enjoyed tai chi, and took some interest in Eastern spiritual traditions. Despite their differences, Freeman fell quickly and deeply in love with Fromm. She considered all of his thoughts to be brilliant and was thrilled by his every mannerism. From the start, Fromm professed a lifelong commitment to Freeman. He enthusiastically indulged her with tea, pastries, flowers, and all else she might desire. When Fromm was with Freeman, there was not much else that he could desire – not even an affair a film celebrity or dancer.

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In this interview, Clayton Crockett, author of Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event and editor of the Insurrections series, discusses why he decided to defend Gilles Deleuze from Alain Badiou, and how, in the process, he came to write a radical reworking of Deleuze’s political philosophy and discovered a continuity between the French philosopher’s controversial and abstruse writings.

Q: You have written and published on theology and religion. Why a book on two French philosophers, who are both opposed to religion?

A: Yes, both Deleuze and Badiou are atheists, but they both grapple with what I call theological issues and questions, Badiou most explicitly in his book on St. Paul. And my understanding of theology is radical and non-confessional, as well as strongly influenced by poststructuralist French or Continental philosophy.

Q: How did you come to write this book?

A: I studied Deleuze in graduate school at Syracuse, and the further I went, the more I kept coming back to his thought, especially Difference and Repetition, which I didn’t fully understand but found brilliant and groundbreaking. As Badiou’s work became more prominent I read Badiou, but I really disliked his treatment of Deleuze in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Over the past three years, I ended up leading seminars on Difference and Repetition and Cinema 2, and began to develop a much better understanding of Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole. Around this time, Jeff Robbins, my series co-editor for the Insurrections Series, asked Creston Davis and I to respond to a question from one of Jeff’s students about the difference between Deleuze and Badiou. Creston liked Deleuze, but leaned towards Badiou, whereas I appreciated Badiou but preferred Deleuze. I ended up writing a much more detailed answer than I expected, which expanded into a blog post for Creston’s blog “Objet Petit A,” and then just kept writing.

Q: What is specifically your problem with Badiou’s interpretation of Deleuze?

A: Badiou charges Deleuze with being a hidden philosopher of the One, with being aristocratic, quietist, and with being obsessed with the past. He also associates him with the Presocratic naïve efforts to understand nature. I really felt that Badiou created this caricature of Deleuze that was set up as a foil for Badiou to present himself as this master-philosopher. And Daniel W. Smith explains in an essay called “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities” why this is such a terrible understanding of Deleuze.

But I wouldn’t have written the book just to show that Badiou is wrong about Deleuze. As I worked through Difference and Repetition I realized that my own understanding of Deleuze’s philosophy was changed, and that I found a radical, revolutionary way to read Deleuze based on his work on repetition, intensity, energy and physics in chapter 5, and that this is consistent with his incredible book on the time-image, Cinema 2. Finally, I argue that Cinema 2 is a political book; as Paola Marrati says, it’s the book where Deleuze works out his political philosophy. And then I figured out how to situate Capitalism and Schizophrenia between Difference and Repetition and Cinema 2. So Badiou becomes a productive foil against which I can present my interpretation of Deleuze.

Q: Badiou aggressively attacked Deleuze in print, and even disrupted his classes, right?

A: Yes, Badiou was a radical Maoist, and he felt that Deleuze was insufficiently radical. Deleuze supported the student movements in 1968 while teaching at Lyon, even though he was ill with tuberculosis. In the 1970’s, they were both teaching at Vincennes, an experimental university designed to respond to the student protests, and Badiou and his “brigades” led interventions into Deleuze’s seminar. Furthermore, under a pseudonym, Badiou published an essay called “The Fascism of the Potato” where he attacked Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, which is the root-structure of tubers.

Q: So they were not friends.

A: No, although at the end of Deleuze’s life, they engaged in a correspondence of letters, partly because Badiou appreciated Deleuze’s dismissal of the Nouveaux Philosophers, people like Bernard Henri Levy who he felt popularized and trivialized philosophy. Anyway, Deleuze was critical of Badiou’s understanding of multiplicity, and said so in his last book (written with Guattari), What is Philosophy?. Deleuze ended up asking Badiou not to publish their correspondence, because he was becoming weaker and sicker, and he felt that they were not his best articulations of what was at stake. Badiou agreed, but then referred to these letters in his book Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, and used their occasion to write a final critical response to Deleuze after Deleuze’s death, which many readers of Deleuze felt was highly unfair, because Deleuze was unable to respond.

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“It was clear to most New Yorkers that Koch had a deep abiding love for his city. That reputation, that started when he was in public office, was solidified because he stayed in the public eye. He would exert political power, but it always seemed to be because he wanted to continue helping New York.”—Jonathan Soffer

Never is a biographer’s perspective more relevant (or sought after) than when their subject is finally laid to rest. Since the passing of larger-than-life former NYC mayor Ed Koch on Friday, Jonathan Soffer, author of Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, has been a central voice in the debate on what shape Koch’s legacy should take. In the following post, we bring you an amalgamation of Soffer’s latest commentary on Koch, one that highlights the author’s argument that the “King of New York” will be a man of many legacies.

A Legacy of Free (and Colorful) Speech

Koch was sometimes honest about his politics to a fault. I think, more than any other reason, he lost his chances for re-election to a fourth term when he said that Jews would have to be crazy to vote for Jesse Jackson. He could not be deterred from saying things that were just excruciating. But paradoxically, it gave him a reputation for honesty.

~ From Soffer’s interview with TIME Magazine, for more click here.

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“Do contemporary citizens, some of them descendants of wrongdoers, owe anything to the descendants of victims? For almost all cases, the answer given is no.”—Nahshon Perez

The following is an interview with Nahshon Perez, author of Freedom from Past Injustices: A Critical Evaluation of Claims for Inter-Generational Reparations:

Question: What is Freedom from Past Injustices about?

Nahshon Perez: In Freedom from Past Injustices I argue that past wrongs should not be corrected through legal means, and that it is important to let bygones be bygones. This is not a popular opinion among scholars and many practitioners, and the arguments carefully examined and developed in my book are not frequently voiced. They are nevertheless, I think, powerful and persuasive.

Freedom from Past Injustices focuses specifically on past wrongs: these are substantial cases of injustices in which all the wrongdoers and victims have since passed away. The issue, therefore, always includes the question: do contemporary citizens, some of them descendants of wrongdoers, owe anything to the descendants of victims? For almost all cases, the answer given is no.

Freedom from Past Injustices views persons as individuals. Consequently, the first challenge facing those who support inter-generational reparations for past wrongs would be to justify burdening non-wrongdoers with the payment of reparations to non-victims. As the arguments for and against inter-generational reparations for past wrongs are carefully examined, the importance of this individualistic point of departure becomes clearer.

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