Socionatures,Space, and Decolonisation: Amílcar Cabral's Praxis of Dialectics

The agronomic writings of influential theorist and independence leader Amílcar Cabral contain a hitherto underappreciated dialectical approach that is environmental, nonreductive, spatialised, nonteleological, and anticolonial, with significance for geographies that are simultaneously critical, physical, Southern, Black, African, and decolonial. Cabral's interests in socionatures—and especially colonialism and the state—emerged from childhood in colonial Cabo Verde. His undergraduate thesis examines dialectics of soil erosion and agrarian structures in Portugal, amidst his politicisation and anti-colonial networking. He developed his dialectical approach spatially as he conducted Guinea-Bissau's agricultural census and advanced beyond methodological nationalism and evolutionary stagism by emphasising colonial connections (colonial state mechanisation and export crops in African agrarian systems). These insights and concerns shaped and were shaped by his work on warehouses, Angolan plantations, and broader post-1960 liberation struggles to suggest that a rural guerrilla strategy was possible and necessary in Guinea through dialectical engagements with diverse peasantries and international support.     

论荀悦的历史认识论

荀悦在前人的基础上 ,对历史认识的目的、方法、思维方式、检验标准等提出了许多有价值的见解。他阐明以史为鉴的必要性 ,将历史认识与取鉴资治有机结合起来 ;强调认识历史要透过现象看本质 ,通过区分类例 ,由此及彼 ,知微察著 ,去伪存真 ,获得对历史的理性认识 ;指出应以发展变易的观点审视历史 ,不能墨守成规 ,应当因时立制 ,分析事物时应看到其内部相互对立而又相互联系的不同方面 ;要求以儒家思想作为考察历史的理论原则 ,将主观认识与客观事实相参验 ,以真实作为检验历史认识的标准。荀悦的历史认识论值得认真加以总结     

光明城与广亩城的哲学观对照

本文采用诠释学文本解读的方法,通过对20世纪两位现代主义建筑大师-赖特和柯布各自提出理想城的语境与文本进行分析,解释了光明城与广亩城的城市形态结构与建筑师各自的世界观与思维方式的内在关系。光明城反映了柯布的二元辩证思维观。广亩城反映了赖特的有机整体观。文章最后对二者的乌托邦式规划理论进行了哲学批判,分析了其中的矛盾性主要在于对城市、市民及二者关系的认识论缺陷。     

THE DIALECTICS OF JAMESON'S DIALECTICS

This review essay attempts to understand the book under review against the background of Jameson's previous writings. Failing to do so would invite misunderstanding since there are few contemporary theorists whose writing forms so much of a unity. Jameson's book can be divided into three parts. The first and most important part deals with dialectics, the second with politics, and the third with philosophy of history. In the first part Jameson argues that dialectics best captures our relationship to the sociocultural and historical world we are living in. The second part makes clear that Jameson is not prepared to water down his own Marxist politics in order to spare the liberal sensibilities of his political opponents. In the third part Jameson develops his own philosophy of history, mainly in a dialogue with Ricoeur. Dialectics is his main weapon in his discussion with Ricoeur, and it becomes clear that the Spinozism of dialectics allows for a better understanding of history and of historical writing than does Ricoeur's phenomenological approach. The book is an impressive testimony to the powers of dialectical thought and to its indispensability for a proper grasp of historical writing.     

评“分析马克思主义”及其《新论》

分析马克思主义是马克思主义在当代西方资本主义社会的一种新的发展形式,是西方分析哲学、经验主义的社会科学以及新古典经济学的方法运用于马克思主义理论研究的产物。与传统西方马克思主义相比,这种新的现象有着自身的特点;《分析马克思主义新论》是分析马克思主义者的最新力作,既体现了对马克思主义的一种发展,同时也存在着某些问题和不足。对于这种新现象及《分析马克思主义新论》一书中存在的理论问题的剖析,有利于我们把握当代马克思主义发展的正确方向,坚定马克思主义的科学立场。     

“辨证”视域中和谐社会的价值取向

中国共产党构建社会主义和谐社会的实践,是唯物辩证法思想在社会生活层面的体现和运用。本文立足于“辨证”的认识视野,审视和解构了和谐社会的价值取向。文章认为,我们构建的和谐社会,是“同一性”和“差异性”的辨证统一;“主体性”和“社会性”的辨证统一;“相对性”和“绝对性”的辨证统一;“理想性”和“现实性”的辨证统一;“多元性”和“主导性”的辨证统一。     

Fanon's Mobilities: Race,Space, Recognition

This article engages with Frantz Fanon's writing on both geographical and dialectical movement. It suggests that in particular historical-geographical contexts—such as those described by Fanon himself—geographical patterns of mobility and confinement operate as the presupposition and result of “race”; while also functionally enabling capitalism's necessary and enduring dialectic of appropriation and capitalisation, and reproducing the Fanonian “zone of nonbeing”. More simply, this article suggests that in certain conjunctures the tight articulation of race, mobility, and capital accumulation inhibits the reciprocal recognition of equals. In those contexts, a spatialised “counter-ontological” politics is the only means of establishing intersubjective symmetry and the preconditions for Fanon's “new humanism”. This article concretises these arguments in relation to historical work on antebellum “carceral landscapes”. It concludes by drawing explicitly on Stuart Hall's reflections on articulation and “lines of tendential force” in order to think through the relevance of Fanonian theorisation today.     

Dialectical movements with the Toba people in the Argentine Chaco

Since 1998, I have undertaken fieldwork with the Indigenous peoples of the Argentine Chaco, focusing initially on their dances and embodied practices. After this ethnographic research, I began to think more deeply about the relationships between fieldwork and reflexivity and the possibilities of redefining analytical categories in the global South. The purpose of this article is to revisit my emphasis on a ‘dialectical approach to embodiment’ as a starting point for analysing cultural transformation in Latin America. I argue that this methodological approach has been closely linked to the interweaving of conflicting embodied experiences and peripheral geopolitical locations. In this regard I analyse how the contradictory experiences identified in my fieldwork with the Toba people, and also in my intersubjective and geopolitical positions as a Latin American academic woman, led me to a critical re-examination of dialectics. Further, I describe how this methodological approach, while well received among Latin American scholars has to some degree been resisted by (North) American and British scholars, and I explore the geopolitical implications of these disparate academic positions. Through these critical movements, I hope to contribute to rethinking dialectics in postcolonial contexts, adding some embodied voices from the Latin American South.     

Hegel and Clausewitz: Convergence on Method,Divergence on Ethics

The Hegelian influence in Clausewitz has far more often been stated than it has ever been qualified, quantified, or verified. Perhaps the error was to try to ‘prove’ such a link, rather than focus on what such a convergence consists of and what it means, regardless of how it happened. Using both a historical and a linguistic argument, this essay delineates early writings that are devoid of any Hegelian similarities from those later in Clausewitz's life where a convergence of ideas becomes manifest. A counterpoise to Raymond Aron's overall dismissal of the link between the two authors, this article nonetheless reaches a limit as well: though they agreed in many ways in their methodology, the two fathers of the ‘dialectical war theory’ diverged quite dialectically on ethics. Hegel understands war as an inherently justified ‘right’ of the state, while Clausewitz sees it rather as the neutral ‘instrument’ of a moral agent, the state. The author traces this divergence to a missing link: a foundational aspect of Hegel's method regarding the nature of subjectivity and objectivity is absent from Clausewitz's work, and this appears to generate the impasse. The essay provides grey tones to arguments on either side of the debate about influences, or lack thereof, which have strayed too far into shades of black and white.     

Struggling Pasts: A Commentary

This commentary is organized into three parts. The first discusses the papers presented in this volume, notably divided into two themes: those that looked at past struggles and those that look at struggling in the present. The second part deals more critically with the unifying analytical theme of the papers: a dialectical approach to historical archaeology and how it can be implemented through the theory of internal relations. The final section of this commentary takes this idea and applies it to the archaeology of landscape and the production of social space.