Jason Barker | |
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Born | 1971 (age 52–53) London, England |
Occupation | Professor |
Academic background | |
Education |
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Academic work | |
Institutions | Kyung Hee University |
Main interests | Karl Marx,Alain Badiou,Jacques Lacan |
Notable works |
Jason Barker (born 1971) is a British theorist of contemporary French philosophy,novelist,film director,screenwriter,and producer. He is a professor of cultural studies at Kyung Hee University in the Graduate School of British and American Language and Culture, [1] and visiting professor at the European Graduate School, [2] where he teaches in the Faculty of Media and Communication alongside Alain Badiou,Judith Butler,Jacques Rancière,Avital Ronell,Slavoj Žižek,and others. [3]
Most notable for his translation and introductions to the philosophy of Alain Badiou,Barker draws on an eclectic range of influences including neoplatonism,Lacanian psychoanalysis,and Marxism. [4] Writing in both the English and French languages,Barker has also contributed to debates in post-Marxism. [5]
Barker was born in London,England. [6] He studied at the Surrey Institute of Art &Design,University College,and graduated with a degree in media studies in 1995. [6] He then studied philosophy at Cardiff University,obtaining a PhD in 2003. [6]
In an article published in The Guardian in February 2012,Barker criticised the selective interpretation of Karl Marx's writings by economists such as Nouriel Roubini (who declared:"Karl Marx was right") when responding to the global recession. According to Barker,such interpretations water down the revolutionary aspects of Marx's ideas and focus unduly on their reformist tendencies. [7]
Writing in The New York Times on the occasion of the Marx bicentennial anniversary,Barker argued:"The key factor in Marx’s intellectual legacy in our present-day society is not 'philosophy' but 'critique,' or what he described in 1843 as 'the ruthless criticism of all that exists:ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be'". [8]
Barker is the author of the novel Marx Returns . The story focuses on the life of Karl Marx and his struggle to write his major work on political economy, Capital . Philosopher Ray Brassier described it as "[c]urious,funny,perplexing,and irreverent". [9] According to Nina Power,reviewing the work in the Los Angeles Review of Books ,Marx Returns is "an imaginative,uplifting,and sometimes disturbing alternative history". [10]
Barker is the writer,director and producer of the 2011 partly animated documentary film Marx Reloaded , [11] which considers the relevance of Marx's ideas in the aftermath of the global economic and financial crisis of 2008—2009. [12] The film includes interviews with several distinguished philosophers including Michael Hardt,Antonio Negri,John N. Gray,Alberto Toscano,Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek.
The London Evening Standard cited the film alongside the 2012 re-edition of The Communist Manifesto and Owen Jones' best-selling book Chavs:The Demonization of the Working Class as evidence of a resurgence of left-wing ideas. [13]
British philosopher Simon Critchley has described Marx Reloaded as "a great introduction to Marx for a new generation" [14] while German political scientist Herfried Münkler has called it "the type of film that Marx himself would have approved of". [2]
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his intellectual endeavours. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The text is the first and most systematic attempt by Marx and Engels to codify for wide consumption the historical materialist idea that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", in which social classes are defined by the relationship of people to the means of production. Published amid the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents.
An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones". Formerly applied primarily to economic, political, or religious theories and policies, in a tradition going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, more recent use treats the term as mainly condemnatory.
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou's work is heavily informed by philosophical applications of mathematics, in particular set theory and category theory. Badiou's "Being and Event" project considers the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject defined by a rejection of linguistic relativism seen as typical of postwar French thought. Unlike his peers, Badiou openly believes in the idea of universalism and truth. His work is notable for his widespread applications of various conceptions of indifference. Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations, and regularly comments on political events. Badiou argues for a return of communism as a political force.
Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation for philosophical perspectives informed by both the Marxist philosophy of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. Its history within continental philosophy began in the 1920s and '30s and running since through critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism.
Warren Montag is a professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He is known primarily for his work on twentieth-century French theory, especially Althusser and his circle, as well as his studies of the philosophers Spinoza, Locke, and Hobbes.
Costanzo Preve was an Italian philosopher and a political theoretician.
20th-century French philosophy is a strand of contemporary philosophy generally associated with post-World War II French thinkers, although it is directly influenced by previous philosophical movements.
Justin Clemens is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. He is also a published poet.
Marx Reloaded is a 2011 German documentary film written and directed by the British writer and theorist Jason Barker. Featuring interviews with several well-known philosophers, the film aims to examine the relevance of Karl Marx's ideas in relation to the Great Recession. The film's title is a wordplay on The Matrix Reloaded, the sequel to The Matrix, which is parodied in the documentary.
Karl Marx and his ideas have been represented in film in genres ranging from documentary to fictional drama, art house and comedy.
According to the political theorist Alan Johnson, there has been a revival of serious interest in communism in the 21st century led by Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, Post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968. In a broader sense, post-Marxism can refer to Marxists or Marxian-adjacent theories which break with the old worker's movements and socialist states entirely, in a similar sense to post-Leftism, and accept that the era of mass revolution premised on the Fordist worker is potentially over.
Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University and a visiting professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of what Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
The Parallax View (2006) is a book by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Like many of Žižek's books, it covers a wide range of topics, including philosophy, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, politics, literature, and film. Some of the authors discussed in detail include Jacques Lacan, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Daniel Dennett, Antonio Damasio, Franz Kafka, and Henry James.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Marxism:
Bruce Fink is an American Lacanian psychoanalyst and a major translator of Jacques Lacan. He is the author of numerous books on Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis, prominent among which are Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (1995), Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan's Seminar VIII and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique.
Marx Returns is the debut novel by the British writer and filmmaker Jason Barker. It tells the story of the German philosopher Karl Marx and his struggle to complete his magnum opus Capital.