I have always been fascinated by the relationship between the concept of time, history, and politics. My first publications were in the philosophy of history. I started by translating some Left Hegelians. Then I moved toward Kant and Benjamin. My research background was constituted by the attempt to liberate Marxism from any kind of teleological philosophy of history. Recently, I began digging into concrete historical cases to extract political and legal categories. I’m interested in the reactivation of past possibilities to reconfigure the present and open alternative futures. I am now fortunate to teach courses on Temporalities and History in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC.
In Marx’s Temporalities I re-read Marx's work beyond any philosophy of history, providing a critical analysis of his political and theoretical development from his early writings to the elaboration of the critique of political economy and his final anthropological studies on non-individualistic and communist forms. The book provides an adequate historiographical paradigm for globalized capitalism. It considers the plurality of temporal layers that are combined and come into conflict in the violently synchronizing temporal dimension of capitalist modernity.
I could have mentioned other books written by E.P. Thompson. Each of his books has influenced my work.
Customs and Tradition contains "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism." This brilliant and elegantly written essay shows how capitalism, to impose itself, had to modify the experience of time. This change occurred through numerous conflicts with the traditions and customs of the working classes.
E.P. Thompson teaches us to consider the political importance and emancipatory potential of these struggles and not to leave "tradition" and its energy to the right.
E.P. Thompson taught me to look at these conflicts not just as forms of resistance, but as tensions between mutually incompatible legal systems. A useful corrective to Foucault.
Customs in Common is the remarkable sequel to E.P. Thompson's influential, landmark volume of social history, The Making of the English Working Class. The product of years of research and debate, Customs in Common describes the complex culture from which working class institutions emerged in England a panoply of traditions and customs that the new working class fought to preserve well into Victorian times.
In a text marked by both empathy and erudition, Thompson investigates the gradual disappearance of a range of cultural customs against the backdrop of the great upheavals of the eighteenth century. As villagers were subjected to…
This book is one of the texts that gave rise to Italian “operaismo.”
For me, as for many other Marx scholars, it is a fundamental text that teaches how to look at capitalist relations from the perspective of class struggle. This shift in perspective means looking at capital as a response to a conflict that forces it into constant restructuring, innovation, and reconfiguration.
The conflict also innervates workers' institutions, so that sometimes a refusal to participate in a strike can also be read and acted upon as a refusal to participate in the union's reformist and compromising politics. It is a way of reading social relations to free their political potential.
Workers and Capital is universally recognised as the most important work produced by operaismo, a current of political thought emerging in the 1960s that revolutionised the institutional and extra-parliamentary Left in Italy and beyond. In the decade after its first publication in 1966, the debates over Workers and Capital produced new methods of analysis and a new vocabulary for thousands of militants, helping to inform the new forms of workplace, youth and community struggles. Concepts like 'neocapitalism', 'class composition', 'mass-worker', 'the plan of capital', 'workers' inquiry' and 'co-research' became an established part of the Italian Left's political lexicon. Over five…
This text, along with Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History, introduces the notions of historical mutiversum and temporal strata.
Bloch develops these concepts to rethink the Marxist theory of history in relation to anticolonial struggles. He questions the idea of progress without abandoning it. Instead, he revisits progress from the perspective of complementary differentiations. This a crucial text for thinking about the plurality of times without falling into cultural relativism.
It is always better to take your reader straight to the point and spare him a long preamble. This is particularly advisable when the book itself is offered as an introduction. If it takes a long time to get to the matter, the mind tends to refuse what is really needful. This work consists largely of material first delivered as lec tures. If the spoken word can still be heard (where it should be heard), well and good. It helps if you tell someone the way as well as point it out; yet…
There are numerous reasons why this text should be read. Personally, Benjamin's reflections on progress and history are crucial to a critique of capitalist modernity.
From a methodological perspective, this text allows the reader to enter Benjamin's laboratory and grasp the essential aspects of his groundbreaking methodology that merged cultural analysis, historical research, and philosophical reflection. Benjamin's unique approach combined elements of sociology, anthropology, and literary critique, creating a multidisciplinary work that defied conventional boundaries.
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them…
The style of this book is clear, direct, and energetic.
Bensaid's book addresses the ideas of Karl Marx, demonstrating their continuing relevance in the contemporary world. It explores how Marx's theories can be applied to analyze and understand the complex dynamics of capitalist societies, making it a valuable resource for those seeking insights into our time's economic, social, and political issues.
The end of Soviet Socialism signalled to some observers that the ghost of Marx had finally been laid to rest. But history's refusal to grind to a halt and the global credit crisis that began in 2008 have rekindled interest in capitalism's most persistent critic. Written during the mid-nineties, a period of Western complacency and neo-liberal reaction, Marx for Our Times is a critical reading of dialectical materialism as a method of resistance. Without denying the contradictory character of Marx's thought, and with a sensitivity to the plurality of theories it has inspired, Daniel Bensaid sets out to discover what…
Susan Tate Ankeny left a career in teaching to write the story of her father’s escape from Nazi-occupied France. In 2011, after being led on his path through France by the same Resistance fighters who guided him in 1944, she felt inspired to tell the story of these brave French patriots, especially the 17-year-old- girl who risked her own life to save her father’s. Susan is a member of the 8th Air Force Historical Society, the Air Force Escape and Evasion Society, and the Association des Sauveteurs d’Aviateurs Alliés.
The first and only full-length biography of Hazel Ying Lee, an unrecognized pioneer and unsung World War II hero who fought for a country that actively discriminated against her gender, race, and ambition.
This unique hidden figure defied countless stereotypes to become the first Asian American woman in United States history to earn a pilot's license, and the first female Asian American pilot to fly for the military.
Her achievements, passionate drive, and resistance in the face of oppression as a daughter of Chinese immigrants and a female aviator changed the course of history. Now the remarkable story of a fearless underdog finally surfaces to inspire anyone to reach toward the sky.
One of WWII’s most uniquely hidden figures, Hazel Ying Lee was the first Asian American woman to earn a pilot’s license, join the WASPs, and fly for the United States military amid widespread anti-Asian sentiment and policies.
Her singular story of patriotism, barrier breaking, and fearless sacrifice is told for the first time in full for readers of The Women with Silver Wings by Katherine Sharp Landdeck, A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell, The Last Boat Out of Shanghai by Helen Zia, Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown and all Asian American, women’s and WWII history books.…
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