By Gregory Jones-Katz
With Karl Marx in America[i], Andrew Hartman burrows and raises molehills, creating extensive networks of historical and political ideas for our intellectual nourishment. Throughout its hefty 500 pages and nine chapters, Hartman adroitly historicizes a wide range of American readers’ uses of Marx since the mid-nineteenth century.
by Peter Beilharz
Claus Offe was a fine scholar, a sharp thinker, and a good person. An extraordinary colleague, and a fascinating example of the marginal Frankfurt thinker.
Zygmunt Bauman was born in Poznan 19 November 1925. We celebrate the centenary of his birth by sharing an interview with Peter Beilharz by Southern People’s Weekly. Enthusiasm for Bauman’s ideas remains high in China, as elsewhere. We remember him fondly, as an ongoing friend and inspiration for Thesis Eleven. Happy Birthday, Zygmunt Bauman!
by Alonso Casanueva Baptista
Awareness of the shifting landscape began on the second day of the conference. During the afternoon presentations, I heard the quick flight of fighter jets. Immediately, I got curious, but people around me seemed set on paying full mind to the research of their fellows. Outside the Faculty of Philosophy—the headquarters for the student protest movement—people walked languid, placidly up and down the streets of the city centre.
Interview with Matthew Sharpe, translator Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, Philosopher of Reaction: Towards a Political Biography, Brill, 2025.
By James Dorahy
by Lloyd Cox
The 2025 Australian federal election will be remembered for both the scale of Labor’s victory and the implosion of the Liberal and National Party Coalition whose leader, Peter Dutton, lost his own seat. Together, they almost guarantee Labor at least another six years in power, while raising serious doubt about the long-term viability of an aging Liberal Party now at war with itself.
Annihilation Aesthetics: On the Disappearances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This special issue of Thesis Eleven will be published in August 2025. Below includes a introduction to the volume accompanied by an artist’s statement by Chantal Meza whose artworks works will be featured in the issue.
by Siniša Malešević
War is not an exception that suddenly interrupts normal social life. Nearly every aspect of social life including the governance structures, social hierarchies, gender and sexual relations, religious identities, class dynamics, ethno-racial stratification, educational practices, heath systems or the administrativeand administrative apparatuses have all been molded by legacies of specific wars. Whether we like it or not, warfare has historically been and remains a norm that constantly shapes our social order.
by Eric Ferris
Previously honoring Agnes Heller and George Markus, the conference was part of an ongoing, larger Chinese federal research project on aesthetics which, in part, is a canopy for critical theory and has to date resulted in serious scholarship on Eastern European Marxist thinkers by Chinese intellectuals. Co-sponsored by Thesis Eleven, The Research Center for Marxist Theory of Literature in the College of Literature and Journalism at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, and the Marxist Aesthetics Committee of the Chinese Association of Aesthetics, the conference not only reflected Bauman’s global influence, it was also an example of how his influence continues to grow.
by Howard Prosser
This interview with Martin Jay took place in January 2025. The conversation focuses on the conceptual elements of his book Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph (2025). The discussion traces the place of nominalism within philosophy and in connection to Critical Theory, history, and art.
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