R D'Amico
Biographic Data
| ID | 6089611 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R D'Amico |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | D'Amico |
| SIGNATURE | AMICO R D |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Heideggerian in Spite of Himself
As far as I know, this is the first book-length study of Ernst Tugendhat in English. That is a bit of a surprise since Tugendhat is the last of Heidegger's students who went on to develop a significantly distinct philosophical approach, and it was one closer to the practice of philosophy in the United States and England than in Germany. The fact that this book is the author's expanded translation from the Italian probably indicates that this lack…
Reply to the Introduction to Telos 108
Before commenting on the “Introduction” to Telos 108 by Piccone, Berman and Ulmen, I want to cite two distinctions relevant to my discussion of it. First, federalism and populism are separate concepts, whatever it turns out is the proper meaning of populism and whether or not the intent of the Introduction was to argue for both. Federalism concerns a type of social organization held to be preferable for relatively complex commercial societies; th…
What was Telos All About
Telos once published articles about revolution, dialectic, commodity fetishism, liberation, alienation, and monopoly capitalism. It now publishes articles on federalism, populism, Carl Schmitt, and the nuances within conservatism. What is living and what is dead in Telos' Marxist past after 100 issues? To understand the journal's relation to Marxism and philosophy, it is necessary to recount some intellectual history. The term “Western Marxism” w…
Cold Fusion
Consider the following example of unintended consequences. In the past 20 years colleges and universities reacted to criticism that their students lacked essential skills after graduation by making minimum credits in math and composition mandatory. Whether or not these mandatory hours succeeded in improving student performance in these areas, these requirements did produce an unintended transformation of university faculty. Since the composition …
Problems with Traditions
In a famous anthropological study, Robin Horton argues that a characteristic of traditional societies is what he calls the “closed predicament.” The latter characterizes a society or tradition (in Horton's article he is discussing intellectual or religious traditions such as magic and mythology that involve explanations of natural phenomena and disease) in which alternative conceptual schemes are not known, certain beliefs are treated as sacred o…
Myth of the Totally Administered Society
An often cited but unquestioned claim of contemporary political theory is that the “totalitarian state” is a unique and sui generis social formation in the 20th century. Both the Left and Right have embraced this concept as the common core of political theory and policy after WWII. The locus classicus of these ideas is probably Karl Popper's claim that “civilization has not fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tri…
What Theory? Whose Community
Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves Modernity, Justice and Community (Milan: Franco Angeli Libri, 1990), 240 pp
Packaging Fog
Douglas Kellner Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 246 pp
Karl Popper and the Frankfurt School
The infamous “methodology dispute” in German sociology that occurred primarily between Popper and Adorno, with further details taken care of by such surrogates as Hans Albert and the young Habermas, is best described as a misfire. Popper admitted he did not know the work of the Frankfurt School at the time, and even claims he was unaware they were committed to Hegelian-Marxism until well after the debate or he would simply have repeated the argum…
Intellectual Eclipse
In “The Intellectuals and the Powers” Shils defines intellectuals as members of society “with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred.” These minorities reflect on natural laws and social rules. Further, they are “desirous of being in frequent communion with symbols which are more general than the immediate concrete situations of everyday life.” Thus, “It is practically given by the nature of the intellectual's orientation that there should be some …
The Hidden Telos
A retrospective concerning any journal is problematic. Some of the issues that motivated the formation of the journal, its continuation and its editorial decisions are often not directly reflected in the published articles or in the collective interpretation of its readers. Also, editorial boards change, are rarely if ever homogeneous, and one person's viewpoint on a debate hardly conveys its full interest or complexity. The following reflections…
Philosophy for Art
Arthur C. Danto The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, Columbia University Press, 1986), 216 pp
Going Relativist
Post-modernism has achieved both academic and public notoriety. Foucault, perhaps due to the accessible nature of some of his work, his homosexuality or his early death, was summarized in the pages of Vogue magazine by Edmund White and had his last USC conference covered by Time. The New York Times Magazine recendy covered the Yale Deconstructors (only shordy before most of them left the Yale department). As the current “bad boys” of die academy,…
Introduction to Squaring the Hexagon: Special Issue on French Politics and Culture
When, in Telos #55, we sought to evaluate the meaning and impact of French socialism in power, the verdict turned out to be peculiarly disappointing. The rhetorical question in the Introduction: “Beyond Reform or Revolution?” had already been effectively answered. As early as 1982 French socialism had revealed itself to be a “Gaullism with a Human Face” which did not have much to do either widi reform or revolution, and could provide nothing more…
Essays in Memory of Mitchell Franklin
From 1969 through the 70's Mitchell Franklin was Emeritus Professor of Law and Philosophy at SUNY Buffalo. Over this period his teaching gradually shifted to philosophy where he gave a series of lectures on Hegel, Marx and Neo-Hegelianism, which attracted and influenced a new group of students. These philosophy students were rediscovering the Continental tradition and turning to phenomenology, Western Marxism and German Idealism against die posit…
Deconstructing D'Amico, or Why Joel Whitebook is so Upset
My review of Cornelius Castoriadis' book Crossroads in the Labyrinth ended with the apt reference, I now see, to the emperor being naked. In Joel Whitebook's second review, largely irrelevant to my criticisms of Castoriadis, he fears, though he doesn't know me personally, that only the lack of psychological counseling can explain my uncontrolled anger against Castoriadis. Let me dignify his long distance psychoanalysis by passing over it in silen…
Lenin and the End of Politics
A.J. Polan. Lenin and the End of Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. 229 pages; $9.95 paper
Crossroads in the Labyrinth
Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, Translation from the French by Kate Soper and Martin Ryle (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1984) 339 pages, $27.50
Leftism: An Adult Disorder
The depth of the crisis of the Left can be measured by the level of resistance to discussing it. Mere mention of the topic elicits groans of terminal dejà vu. All sides seem to agree that there is nothing “left” to discuss. Orthodox Marxism, which is still alive and well, points to the empirical evidence that all is going according to its most dire predictions. Who can deny that industrial society is now showing classical symptoms of disequilibri…
Desire and the Commodity Form
There is no doubt that the arena of political action can no longer be held within the limits of the direct activity of labor. It is also obvious that no matter how many nuances there are in Marx's conception of a mode of production, his analysis is, in the final moment, centered around the assumption that an effective political struggle emerges only at the point of production. It would be the height of scholasticism to take this point of Marx's a…
The Prison House of Language
Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. 229 pages. $10.50 cloth; $4.75 paper
Introduction to the Foucault-Deleuze Discussion
The following discussion can be situated both in a specific response to the May events, as well as an assessment of their resolution, and the publication of a very controversial work by Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. First, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze are now the two major figures of a new tendency in French thought, a post-structuralist theory, for want of a better name, working about in that shattered domain of…
The Contours and Coupures of Structuralist Theory
Foucault has spoken recently of the profound disruption in the domain of knowledge at every level of contemporary theory. “From the beginning of this century psychoanalytic, linguistic and ethnographic research has ousted the subject from the laws of his desires, from the forms of his speech, from the rules of his actions and from the systems of his mythical discourses.” It has become increasingly more important to deal with the thrust of these d…
The Domination of Nature
The historical dynamic that has aligned science with the continuum of domination has its origins in the expansion of the natural sciences and the formation of a concept of Nature which constituted, most readily, the necessary objective structures for a practice of “mastery.” Leiss, in The Domination of Nature, takes as a specific problem the sources, deep in this complex history, of an identification between knowledge and power, between Nature as…
Epistemologie des Sciences de l'Homme
This publication brings together three sections of Piaget's enormous study published by UNESCO, Tendances Principales de la Recherche dans les Sciences Sociales et Humaines. In this two volume work Piaget attempts to develop, in rejecting the hierarchical treatment of the sciences, the specificity of each level of research and its reciprocity with other levels without a reduction of all levels to one (psychology to bio-chemistry, for example). Pi…
The Contours and Coupures of Structuralist Theory
Foucault has spoken recently of the profound disruption in the domain of knowledge at every level of contemporary theory. “From the beginning of this century psychoanalytic, linguistic and ethnographic research has ousted the subject from the laws of his desires, from the forms of his speech, from the rules of his actions and from the systems of his mythical discourses.” It has become increasingly more important to deal with the thrust of these d…
Going Relativist
Post-modernism has achieved both academic and public notoriety. Foucault, perhaps due to the accessible nature of some of his work, his homosexuality or his early death, was summarized in the pages of Vogue magazine by Edmund White and had his last USC conference covered by Time. The New York Times Magazine recendy covered the Yale Deconstructors (only shordy before most of them left the Yale department). As the current “bad boys” of die academy,…
Introduction to Squaring the Hexagon: Special Issue on French Politics and Culture
When, in Telos #55, we sought to evaluate the meaning and impact of French socialism in power, the verdict turned out to be peculiarly disappointing. The rhetorical question in the Introduction: “Beyond Reform or Revolution?” had already been effectively answered. As early as 1982 French socialism had revealed itself to be a “Gaullism with a Human Face” which did not have much to do either widi reform or revolution, and could provide nothing more…
Marx Contre Marx
The limitations of this book are all the more obvious in view of the pertinent and serious issues Paillet tries to handle. However, at no point does Paillet show more than well-schooled vocabulary parroting grand themes for the most simple-minded political ends and motivations. Paillet's lengthy and incredibly repetitious study is based on the contention that the phenomenon of “bureaucracy” must be treated as a new form of class struggle. Paillet…
Epistemologie des Sciences de l'Homme
This publication brings together three sections of Piaget's enormous study published by UNESCO, Tendances Principales de la Recherche dans les Sciences Sociales et Humaines. In this two volume work Piaget attempts to develop, in rejecting the hierarchical treatment of the sciences, the specificity of each level of research and its reciprocity with other levels without a reduction of all levels to one (psychology to bio-chemistry, for example). Pi…
Introduction to the Foucault-Deleuze Discussion
The following discussion can be situated both in a specific response to the May events, as well as an assessment of their resolution, and the publication of a very controversial work by Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. First, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze are now the two major figures of a new tendency in French thought, a post-structuralist theory, for want of a better name, working about in that shattered domain of…
The Contours and Coupures of Structuralist Theory
Foucault has spoken recently of the profound disruption in the domain of knowledge at every level of contemporary theory. “From the beginning of this century psychoanalytic, linguistic and ethnographic research has ousted the subject from the laws of his desires, from the forms of his speech, from the rules of his actions and from the systems of his mythical discourses.” It has become increasingly more important to deal with the thrust of these d…
The Domination of Nature
The historical dynamic that has aligned science with the continuum of domination has its origins in the expansion of the natural sciences and the formation of a concept of Nature which constituted, most readily, the necessary objective structures for a practice of “mastery.” Leiss, in The Domination of Nature, takes as a specific problem the sources, deep in this complex history, of an identification between knowledge and power, between Nature as…
The Prison House of Language
Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. 229 pages. $10.50 cloth; $4.75 paper
Desire and the Commodity Form
There is no doubt that the arena of political action can no longer be held within the limits of the direct activity of labor. It is also obvious that no matter how many nuances there are in Marx's conception of a mode of production, his analysis is, in the final moment, centered around the assumption that an effective political struggle emerges only at the point of production. It would be the height of scholasticism to take this point of Marx's a…
Leftism: An Adult Disorder
The depth of the crisis of the Left can be measured by the level of resistance to discussing it. Mere mention of the topic elicits groans of terminal dejà vu. All sides seem to agree that there is nothing “left” to discuss. Orthodox Marxism, which is still alive and well, points to the empirical evidence that all is going according to its most dire predictions. Who can deny that industrial society is now showing classical symptoms of disequilibri…
Crossroads in the Labyrinth
Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, Translation from the French by Kate Soper and Martin Ryle (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1984) 339 pages, $27.50
Deconstructing D'Amico, or Why Joel Whitebook is so Upset
My review of Cornelius Castoriadis' book Crossroads in the Labyrinth ended with the apt reference, I now see, to the emperor being naked. In Joel Whitebook's second review, largely irrelevant to my criticisms of Castoriadis, he fears, though he doesn't know me personally, that only the lack of psychological counseling can explain my uncontrolled anger against Castoriadis. Let me dignify his long distance psychoanalysis by passing over it in silen…
Lenin and the End of Politics
A.J. Polan. Lenin and the End of Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. 229 pages; $9.95 paper
Going Relativist
Post-modernism has achieved both academic and public notoriety. Foucault, perhaps due to the accessible nature of some of his work, his homosexuality or his early death, was summarized in the pages of Vogue magazine by Edmund White and had his last USC conference covered by Time. The New York Times Magazine recendy covered the Yale Deconstructors (only shordy before most of them left the Yale department). As the current “bad boys” of die academy,…
Introduction to Squaring the Hexagon: Special Issue on French Politics and Culture
When, in Telos #55, we sought to evaluate the meaning and impact of French socialism in power, the verdict turned out to be peculiarly disappointing. The rhetorical question in the Introduction: “Beyond Reform or Revolution?” had already been effectively answered. As early as 1982 French socialism had revealed itself to be a “Gaullism with a Human Face” which did not have much to do either widi reform or revolution, and could provide nothing more…
Essays in Memory of Mitchell Franklin
From 1969 through the 70's Mitchell Franklin was Emeritus Professor of Law and Philosophy at SUNY Buffalo. Over this period his teaching gradually shifted to philosophy where he gave a series of lectures on Hegel, Marx and Neo-Hegelianism, which attracted and influenced a new group of students. These philosophy students were rediscovering the Continental tradition and turning to phenomenology, Western Marxism and German Idealism against die posit…
Philosophy for Art
Arthur C. Danto The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, Columbia University Press, 1986), 216 pp
The Hidden Telos
A retrospective concerning any journal is problematic. Some of the issues that motivated the formation of the journal, its continuation and its editorial decisions are often not directly reflected in the published articles or in the collective interpretation of its readers. Also, editorial boards change, are rarely if ever homogeneous, and one person's viewpoint on a debate hardly conveys its full interest or complexity. The following reflections…
What Theory? Whose Community
Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves Modernity, Justice and Community (Milan: Franco Angeli Libri, 1990), 240 pp
Packaging Fog
Douglas Kellner Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 246 pp
Karl Popper and the Frankfurt School
The infamous “methodology dispute” in German sociology that occurred primarily between Popper and Adorno, with further details taken care of by such surrogates as Hans Albert and the young Habermas, is best described as a misfire. Popper admitted he did not know the work of the Frankfurt School at the time, and even claims he was unaware they were committed to Hegelian-Marxism until well after the debate or he would simply have repeated the argum…
Intellectual Eclipse
In “The Intellectuals and the Powers” Shils defines intellectuals as members of society “with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred.” These minorities reflect on natural laws and social rules. Further, they are “desirous of being in frequent communion with symbols which are more general than the immediate concrete situations of everyday life.” Thus, “It is practically given by the nature of the intellectual's orientation that there should be some …
Myth of the Totally Administered Society
An often cited but unquestioned claim of contemporary political theory is that the “totalitarian state” is a unique and sui generis social formation in the 20th century. Both the Left and Right have embraced this concept as the common core of political theory and policy after WWII. The locus classicus of these ideas is probably Karl Popper's claim that “civilization has not fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tri…
Problems with Traditions
In a famous anthropological study, Robin Horton argues that a characteristic of traditional societies is what he calls the “closed predicament.” The latter characterizes a society or tradition (in Horton's article he is discussing intellectual or religious traditions such as magic and mythology that involve explanations of natural phenomena and disease) in which alternative conceptual schemes are not known, certain beliefs are treated as sacred o…
Cold Fusion
Consider the following example of unintended consequences. In the past 20 years colleges and universities reacted to criticism that their students lacked essential skills after graduation by making minimum credits in math and composition mandatory. Whether or not these mandatory hours succeeded in improving student performance in these areas, these requirements did produce an unintended transformation of university faculty. Since the composition …
What was Telos All About
Telos once published articles about revolution, dialectic, commodity fetishism, liberation, alienation, and monopoly capitalism. It now publishes articles on federalism, populism, Carl Schmitt, and the nuances within conservatism. What is living and what is dead in Telos' Marxist past after 100 issues? To understand the journal's relation to Marxism and philosophy, it is necessary to recount some intellectual history. The term “Western Marxism” w…
Reply to the Introduction to Telos 108
Before commenting on the “Introduction” to Telos 108 by Piccone, Berman and Ulmen, I want to cite two distinctions relevant to my discussion of it. First, federalism and populism are separate concepts, whatever it turns out is the proper meaning of populism and whether or not the intent of the Introduction was to argue for both. Federalism concerns a type of social organization held to be preferable for relatively complex commercial societies; th…
Philosophy (25 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Psychoanalysis (7 works)