John Brenkman
Biographic Data
| ID | 256374 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Brenkman |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Brenkman |
| SIGNATURE | BRENKMAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of New York |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Critical Response I A Response to Jonathan Kramnick, “Criticism and Truth”
Varieties of Nothing
Maurice Blanchot stands at the nexus of modern reflections on nihilism and of nihilism as modernity. Eschewing the simple opposition of Descartes and Pascal, he recognizes that philosophical modernity emerges in the agonistic bond between them. So, too, Nietzsche is at once Pascal's most vocal antagonist and his unacknowledged heir. Blanchot's insights stem from his precept that literature "in truth has meaning and value only as a passion lived b…
A utopia concreta da poesia: "Uma árvore de veneno" de Blake
O ensaio examina algumas perspectivas amplas sobre a arte que vêm da tradição do “marxismo crítico”, por meio da análise de um poema de Canções da experiência, de William Blake. A leitura deve tanto à hermenêutica e ao pós-estruturalismo quanto aos escritos estéticos da Escola de Frankfurt
Wrestling with (my God!) My God”
Research Article| December 01 2013 " . . . Wrestling with (my God!) My God": Modernism, Nihilism, and Belief John Brenkman John Brenkman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2013) 21 (2): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.21.2.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation John Brenkman; " . . . Wrestling with (my God!) My God": Modernism, Nihilism, and Belief. Qui Parle 1 Decem…
Nihilism and Belief in Contemporary European Thought
Just as Jürgen Habermas's dialogue with Cardinal Ratzinger shifted critical theory's stance toward religion, the dialogue between Gianni Vattimo and René Girard reveals tensions within philosophy's critical appropriations of Christianity. Vattimo draws on Heidegger and hermeneutics to claim that the dissolution of any transcendent source of value and authority in the modern world—the advent of nihilism in that sense—is a liberating opening initia…
Prospectus
This essay revisits the “Prospectus” written by the author, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson for Social Text's first issue and evaluates it with thirty years' hindsight. It focuses on the journal's position regarding Marxism and the then Soviet Union, and its—for the author—problematic veering away from liberalism. It praises the plurality of thinkers and theories that the journal engaged with
The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11
The cultural contradictions of democracy: Political thought since September 11
The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy picks apart the intellectual design and messianic ambitions of the neoconservative American foreign policy articulated by figures such as Robert Kagan and Paul Berman; it casts the same critical eye on a wide range of liberal and leftist thinkers, including Noam Chomsky and Jurgen Habermas, and probes the severe crisis that afflicts progressive political thought. Brenkman draws on the contrary visions of H…
Queer Post-Politics
When I originally heard Lee Edelman give his lecture "The Future is Kid Stuff," I found it so compelling in its passion and coherence and so disturbing in its conclusions that I had to look back at its argument and ask whether perhaps what was wrong with the argument was its very coherence-its seamless synthesis of political theory and cultural criticism through a psychoanalytic conception of the "subject" and the signifier, jouissance and the de…
Reply to Drucilla Cornell
Extreme Criticism
Politics and Form in Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison ecrit son roman, le Chant de Salomon, en 1977 a un moment ou l'incertitude est grande pour les noirs americains. L'issue des mouvements politiques noirs, du mouvement non-violent pour les droits civils jusqu'au Black Power, est douteuse. Le Chant de Salomon ne se refere pas a une realite abstraite, mais a une realite sociale qui n'est pas politiquement articulee. Il tente de rendre compte des aspects de la realite sociale qui n'ont …
Family, Community, Polis: The Freudian Structure of Feeling
discovering in the forms of personal suffering ciphers of a more general condition. When decked out metaphysically, these ciphers have become, variously, visions of the human condition or mythologies of violence and the sacred, or even allegories of language. I am a partisan of another alternative, where exemplary forms of personal suffering become ciphers of the social relationships in which we wittingly and unwittingly participate. I therefore …
Culture and Domination
In Culture and Domination John Brenkman delineates the link between cultural interpretation and social theory through a forceful, critical reassessment of hermeneutics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. He challenges the claim of traditional hermeneutics that culture is a realm of meaning and value set apart from social relations of domination and power. The alternative hermeneutics he advocates builds on Marxism and psychoanalysis but also disputes s…
Resetting the Agenda
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act
be obvious that no work in the area of narrative analysis can afford to ignore the fundamental contributions of Northrop Frye, the codifica tion by A. J. Greimas of the whole Formalist and semiotic traditions, the heritage of a certain Christian hermeneutics, and above all, the indispensable explorations by Freud of the logic of dreams, and by Claude Levi-Strauss of the logic of "primitive" storytelling and pensee sauvage, not to speak of the fla…
Theses on Cultural Marxism
The theory and interpretation of culture is today embroiled in the institutional crisis afflicting the humanities. No single political or intellectual response is adequate, for the causes of this situation are multiple and develop unevenly. These causes include the national and international economy, the ideological and political tendencies now predominant in American society, and the transformations of the cultural sphere itself which have compl…
Introduction to Bataille
Georges Bataille's Psychological Structure of Fascism is of historical interest in more than the degraded sense usually given to that term. An obvious question must, however, be addressed. What draws our attention to a long neglected essay, written in 1933-34, attempting to present the rudiments of a theory of fascism? Fascism, however much impelled by a silent drive to self-destruction, was in fact defeated from the outside. We still live the co…
Mass Media: From Collective Experience to the Culture of Privatization
The project of developing a theory of mass culture and politically effective interpretations of the symbolic forms that organize social life has emerged from the transformations within capitalist society itself. Mass culture confronts us as a primary element of this society. By the same token, mass culture cannot itself be understood or analyzed except in the context of its role in producing and reproducing the social relations of capitalism. It …
The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, the Symposium
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act
be obvious that no work in the area of narrative analysis can afford to ignore the fundamental contributions of Northrop Frye, the codifica tion by A. J. Greimas of the whole Formalist and semiotic traditions, the heritage of a certain Christian hermeneutics, and above all, the indispensable explorations by Freud of the logic of dreams, and by Claude Levi-Strauss of the logic of "primitive" storytelling and pensee sauvage, not to speak of the fla…
Queer Post-Politics
When I originally heard Lee Edelman give his lecture "The Future is Kid Stuff," I found it so compelling in its passion and coherence and so disturbing in its conclusions that I had to look back at its argument and ask whether perhaps what was wrong with the argument was its very coherence-its seamless synthesis of political theory and cultural criticism through a psychoanalytic conception of the "subject" and the signifier, jouissance and the de…
Extreme Criticism
Mass Media: From Collective Experience to the Culture of Privatization
The project of developing a theory of mass culture and politically effective interpretations of the symbolic forms that organize social life has emerged from the transformations within capitalist society itself. Mass culture confronts us as a primary element of this society. By the same token, mass culture cannot itself be understood or analyzed except in the context of its role in producing and reproducing the social relations of capitalism. It …
Family, Community, Polis: The Freudian Structure of Feeling
discovering in the forms of personal suffering ciphers of a more general condition. When decked out metaphysically, these ciphers have become, variously, visions of the human condition or mythologies of violence and the sacred, or even allegories of language. I am a partisan of another alternative, where exemplary forms of personal suffering become ciphers of the social relationships in which we wittingly and unwittingly participate. I therefore …
Theses on Cultural Marxism
The theory and interpretation of culture is today embroiled in the institutional crisis afflicting the humanities. No single political or intellectual response is adequate, for the causes of this situation are multiple and develop unevenly. These causes include the national and international economy, the ideological and political tendencies now predominant in American society, and the transformations of the cultural sphere itself which have compl…
The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, the Symposium
The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, the Symposium
Introduction to Bataille
Georges Bataille's Psychological Structure of Fascism is of historical interest in more than the degraded sense usually given to that term. An obvious question must, however, be addressed. What draws our attention to a long neglected essay, written in 1933-34, attempting to present the rudiments of a theory of fascism? Fascism, however much impelled by a silent drive to self-destruction, was in fact defeated from the outside. We still live the co…
Mass Media: From Collective Experience to the Culture of Privatization
The project of developing a theory of mass culture and politically effective interpretations of the symbolic forms that organize social life has emerged from the transformations within capitalist society itself. Mass culture confronts us as a primary element of this society. By the same token, mass culture cannot itself be understood or analyzed except in the context of its role in producing and reproducing the social relations of capitalism. It …
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act
be obvious that no work in the area of narrative analysis can afford to ignore the fundamental contributions of Northrop Frye, the codifica tion by A. J. Greimas of the whole Formalist and semiotic traditions, the heritage of a certain Christian hermeneutics, and above all, the indispensable explorations by Freud of the logic of dreams, and by Claude Levi-Strauss of the logic of "primitive" storytelling and pensee sauvage, not to speak of the fla…
Theses on Cultural Marxism
The theory and interpretation of culture is today embroiled in the institutional crisis afflicting the humanities. No single political or intellectual response is adequate, for the causes of this situation are multiple and develop unevenly. These causes include the national and international economy, the ideological and political tendencies now predominant in American society, and the transformations of the cultural sphere itself which have compl…
Culture and Domination
In Culture and Domination John Brenkman delineates the link between cultural interpretation and social theory through a forceful, critical reassessment of hermeneutics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. He challenges the claim of traditional hermeneutics that culture is a realm of meaning and value set apart from social relations of domination and power. The alternative hermeneutics he advocates builds on Marxism and psychoanalysis but also disputes s…
Resetting the Agenda
Family, Community, Polis: The Freudian Structure of Feeling
discovering in the forms of personal suffering ciphers of a more general condition. When decked out metaphysically, these ciphers have become, variously, visions of the human condition or mythologies of violence and the sacred, or even allegories of language. I am a partisan of another alternative, where exemplary forms of personal suffering become ciphers of the social relationships in which we wittingly and unwittingly participate. I therefore …
Politics and Form in Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison ecrit son roman, le Chant de Salomon, en 1977 a un moment ou l'incertitude est grande pour les noirs americains. L'issue des mouvements politiques noirs, du mouvement non-violent pour les droits civils jusqu'au Black Power, est douteuse. Le Chant de Salomon ne se refere pas a une realite abstraite, mais a une realite sociale qui n'est pas politiquement articulee. Il tente de rendre compte des aspects de la realite sociale qui n'ont …
Reply to Drucilla Cornell
Extreme Criticism
Queer Post-Politics
When I originally heard Lee Edelman give his lecture "The Future is Kid Stuff," I found it so compelling in its passion and coherence and so disturbing in its conclusions that I had to look back at its argument and ask whether perhaps what was wrong with the argument was its very coherence-its seamless synthesis of political theory and cultural criticism through a psychoanalytic conception of the "subject" and the signifier, jouissance and the de…
The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11
The cultural contradictions of democracy: Political thought since September 11
The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy picks apart the intellectual design and messianic ambitions of the neoconservative American foreign policy articulated by figures such as Robert Kagan and Paul Berman; it casts the same critical eye on a wide range of liberal and leftist thinkers, including Noam Chomsky and Jurgen Habermas, and probes the severe crisis that afflicts progressive political thought. Brenkman draws on the contrary visions of H…
Prospectus
This essay revisits the “Prospectus” written by the author, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson for Social Text's first issue and evaluates it with thirty years' hindsight. It focuses on the journal's position regarding Marxism and the then Soviet Union, and its—for the author—problematic veering away from liberalism. It praises the plurality of thinkers and theories that the journal engaged with
A utopia concreta da poesia: "Uma árvore de veneno" de Blake
O ensaio examina algumas perspectivas amplas sobre a arte que vêm da tradição do “marxismo crítico”, por meio da análise de um poema de Canções da experiência, de William Blake. A leitura deve tanto à hermenêutica e ao pós-estruturalismo quanto aos escritos estéticos da Escola de Frankfurt
Wrestling with (my God!) My God”
Research Article| December 01 2013 " . . . Wrestling with (my God!) My God": Modernism, Nihilism, and Belief John Brenkman John Brenkman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2013) 21 (2): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.21.2.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation John Brenkman; " . . . Wrestling with (my God!) My God": Modernism, Nihilism, and Belief. Qui Parle 1 Decem…
Nihilism and Belief in Contemporary European Thought
Just as Jürgen Habermas's dialogue with Cardinal Ratzinger shifted critical theory's stance toward religion, the dialogue between Gianni Vattimo and René Girard reveals tensions within philosophy's critical appropriations of Christianity. Vattimo draws on Heidegger and hermeneutics to claim that the dissolution of any transcendent source of value and authority in the modern world—the advent of nihilism in that sense—is a liberating opening initia…
Critical Response I A Response to Jonathan Kramnick, “Criticism and Truth”
Varieties of Nothing
Maurice Blanchot stands at the nexus of modern reflections on nihilism and of nihilism as modernity. Eschewing the simple opposition of Descartes and Pascal, he recognizes that philosophical modernity emerges in the agonistic bond between them. So, too, Nietzsche is at once Pascal's most vocal antagonist and his unacknowledged heir. Blanchot's insights stem from his precept that literature "in truth has meaning and value only as a passion lived b…
Philosophy (11 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (4 works)