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Marxist Aesthetics
Marxist aesthetics is a theory of aesthetics based on, or derived from, the theories of Karl Marx. It involves a dialectical and materialist, or dialectical materialist, approach to the application of Marxism to the cultural sphere, specifically areas related to taste such as art, beauty, and so forth. Marxists believe that economic and social conditions, and especially the class relations that derive from them, affect every aspect of an individual's life, from religious beliefs to legal systems to cultural frameworks. From one classic Marxist point of view, the role of art is not only to represent such conditions truthfully, but also to seek to improve them (social/socialist realism); however, this is a contentious interpretation of the limited but significant writing by Marx and Engels on art and especially on aesthetics. For instance, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who greatly influenced the art of the early Soviet Union, followed the secular humanism of Ludwig Feuerbach more than he fo ...
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Aesthetics
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed through judgments of taste. Aesthetics covers both natural and artificial sources of experiences and how we form a judgment about those sources. It considers what happens in our minds when we engage with objects or environments such as viewing visual art, listening to music, reading poetry, experiencing a play, watching a fashion show, movie, sports or even exploring various aspects of nature. The philosophy of art specifically studies how artists imagine, create, and perform works of art, as well as how people use, enjoy, and criticize art. Aesthetics considers why people like some works of art and not others, as well as how art can affect moods or even our beliefs. Both aesthetics and the philosophy of art try to find answers for what exact ...
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Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Francesco Gramsci ( , , ; 22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926 where he remained until his death in 1937. Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. His ''Prison Notebooks'' are considered a highly original contribution to 20th-century political theory. Gramsci drew insights from varying sources – not only other Marxists but also thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel, and Benedetto Croce. The notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including Italian history and nationalism, the French Revolution, fascism, Taylorism and Fordism, civil society, folklore, religion and ...
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Constructivism (art)
Constructivism is an early twentieth-century art movement founded in 1915 by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Abstract and austere, constructivist art aimed to reflect modern industrial society and urban space. The movement rejected decorative stylization in favor of the industrial assemblage of materials. Constructivists were in favour of art for propaganda and social purposes, and were associated with Soviet socialism, the Bolsheviks and the Russian avant-garde. Constructivist architecture and art had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such as the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. Its influence was widespread, with major effects upon architecture, sculpture, graphic design, industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and, to some extent, music. Beginnings Constructivism was a post-World War I development of Russian Futurism, and particularly of the 'counter reliefs' of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited ...
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Economic And Philosophical Manuscripts Of 1844
The ''Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844'' (german: Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844), also referred to as the ''Paris Manuscripts'' (') or as the ''1844 Manuscripts'', are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx, published posthumously in 1932. The notebooks were compiled in their original German in the Soviet Union by researchers at Moscow's Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, decades after Marx's death. They were first released in Berlin in 1932, and in 1933, there followed a republication of this work in the Soviet Union (Moscow-Leningrad), also in German. Their publication greatly altered the reception of Marx by situating his work within a theoretical framework that had until then been unavailable to his followers. Context The ''Manuscripts'' were composed during the summer of 1844, when Marx was 25 or 26 years old. Marx was at this time resident in Paris, then seen as the center of socialist thought. Several memb ...
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The German Ideology
''The German Ideology'' (German: ''Die deutsche Ideologie'', sometimes written as ''A Critique of the German Ideology'') is a set of manuscripts originally written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels did not find a publisher, but the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by David Riazanov through the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. The first part of the book is an exposition of Marx's "materialist conception of history", though recent research for the new ''Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe'' (MEGA) indicates that much of the 'system' in this part was created afterwards by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in the 1930s, from the set of manuscripts written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Much of the rest of the book consists of many satirical polemics against Bruno Bauer, other Young Hegelians, and Max Stirner's ''The Ego and Its Own'' (1844). Text The text itself was written by Marx and Engels in Brussels i ...
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Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism. Barthes is perhaps best known for his 1957 essay collection ''Mythologies'', which contained reflections on popular culture, and 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which critiqued traditional approaches in literary criticism. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Collège de France. Biography Early life Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. His father, naval officer Louis Barthes, was killed in a battle during ...
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Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books were sold in UK editions alone, and there are many translations available. His work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism. Life Early life Born in Pandy, just north of Llanfihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny, Wales, Williams was the son of a railway worker in a village where all of the railwaymen voted Labour, while the local small farmers mostly voted Liberal. It was not a Welsh-speaking area: he described it as "Anglicised in the 1840s". There was, nevertheless, a strong Welsh identity. "There is the joke that someone says his family came over with the Normans and we reply: 'Are you liking it here?'" William ...
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of ''Les Temps modernes'', the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in the human experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with th ...
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Pierre Macherey
Pierre Macherey (; born 17 February 1938, Belfort) is a French Marxist philosopher and literary critic at the University of Lille Nord de France. A former student of Louis Althusser and collaborator on the influential volume ''Reading Capital'', Macherey is a central figure in the development of French post-structuralism and Marxism. His work is influential in literary theory and Continental philosophy in Europe (including Britain) though it is generally little read in the United States. Scholarly work Macherey is known for his contribution to ''Reading Capital'', his influential work in Marxist literary criticism, and intensive philosophical engagement with both Spinoza and Hegel. His work on these figures (from his early ''Hegel or Spinoza'' through his ''Hegel et la société'' and his five volume study of Spinoza's ''Ethics'') complicates a relationship that is often otherwise taken to be a simple opposition between the competing paradigms of 'immanance' and 'dialect ...
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Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez
Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (September 17, 1915 – July 8, 2011) was a Spanish-born Mexican philosopher, writer and professor born in Algeciras, Andalucia. Biography After studying philosophy at the University of Madrid, Vázquez emigrated to Mexico in 1939 with thousands of other intellectuals, scientists and artists following the defeat of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, in which he participated as editor of the central publication of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (JSU) “Ahora”. Sánchez was appointed a full-time professor of philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1959, becoming a professor emeritus of the university in 1985.Galván Chávez, Ana. "Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez y el marxismo" ("Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and Marxism") Retrieved 22 Mar. 2009. Sánchez also held honorary doctoral degrees from the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and the University of Cádiz (Spain).Galván Chávez, Ana. "Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez y el marxismo" ...
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Jacques Rancière
Jacques Rancière (; born 10 June 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis. After co-authoring ''Reading Capital'' (1965) with the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and others, and after witnessing the 1968 political uprisings his work turned against Althusserian Marxism, he later came to develop an original body of work focused on aesthetics. Life and work Rancière contributed to the influential volume ''Reading Capital'' before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris; Rancière felt Althusser's theoretical stance did not leave enough room for spontaneous popular uprising.Ben DavisRancière, For Dummies.The Politics of Aesthetics. Book Review. Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the con ...
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Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser (, ; ; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. Althusser was a long-time member and sometimes a strong critic of the French Communist Party (''Parti communiste français'', PCF). His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the cult of personality and of ideology. Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism. Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense men ...
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