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When, towards the end of her life, VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941), pioneer of literary modernism, met Sigmund Freud, pioneer of psychic spelunking, the latter presented her with a narcissus. It is not clear what Freud meant […]
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The Trinidadian Marxist and cricket expert C. L. R. JAMES (1901-89) pioneered what is now known as post-colonial thought, but did so by being thoroughly colonial. After attending school in the West Indies, James pursued […]
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GUY DEBORD (1931-94) was a founder and key intellectual figure in the Situationist International, an avant-garde Marxist collective influential in postwar France, especially during the 1968 uprising in Paris. Debord’s book The Society of the […]
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American philosopher SIDNEY HOOK (1902-89) enacted the key dilemmas of twentieth-century politics. Born in Brooklyn to Austrian Jewish parents, he attended City College of New York, the same “Harvard of the Proletariat” that would educate […]
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ARTHUR ADOLPH “HARPO” MARX (1888-1964) was a philosopher of silence. Though it started as a way to distinguish him from his voluble brothers, especially front man Groucho, his assumed muteness became a career-long existential conundrum […]
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Like Camus and Derrida, LOUIS ALTHUSSER (1918-90) came from Algeria. Unlike them, he murdered his wife — taking his philosophy of anti-humanism a little too far, as the clunky grad-seminar joke has it. (In court […]
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