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Call for Papers
"Rethinking 1968"
PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory
and Culture
Special Issue
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The events of 1968 shook the world. On the 40th anniversary
of the protests in France, Germany and the United States,
the EPTC organized a series of panels to investigate these
industrial and student actions, and whether they can serve
as a basis for critiquing our current political climate. We
want to ask if the philosophical underpinnings of these
revolutionary acts have continued relevance today.
For example, in France, the French phenomenologist and
existentialist, turned Marxist, Jean-Paul Sartre was held up
as one of the intellectuals who could provide an
intellectual basis for the revolution. Alongside
structuralists like Althusser, Sartre was viewed as an
intellectual god-father of the movement, not only because of
his writings critical of capitalism and the bourgeois
system, be they his early writings on existentialism, or his
later reformulation of Marxism in the Critique of
Dialectical Reason, nor because he linked left-wing activism
in the first world with support for the oppressed elsewhere,
but because he was willing to lend his name and support to
the Maoists against the Gaullist government.
Similarly, in Germany, two philosophers, the
phenomenologically-inspired and Marxist Herbert Marcuse and
the neo-Marxist and member of the Frankfurt School Jürgen
Habermas were central figures for the student
revolutionaries. As a member of the Frankfurt School's
second generation, Habermas was viewed by the students as
safely removed from the alleged post-World War II
conservatism of Adorno and Horkheimer. For the first several
years following its publication, Habermas's habilitation
thesis, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
was a text central to the student struggle in Germany.
Similarly, Marcuse's texts, Reason and Revolution, Eros and
Civilization, and One-Dimensional Man, as well as his
occasional writings, were used as rallying cries by the left
both in Europe and in the United States.
The question we propose for this volume is, what relevance
do these philosophers's works have today, in light of the
continued expansion of the capitalist system, and the fact
that student leaders like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Bernard
Kouchner, and Joschka Fischer have renounced extra-political
activities and joined the political mainstream. We are
interested in papers that explore the relevance of the
philosophical critiques that inspired the movements of 1968
for present day radical politics, including papers that use
the philosophical inspirations behind 1968:
(1) To critique global capitalism while providing a positive
way forward,
(2) To examine American hegemony,
(3) To examine possibilities for overturning existing
political structures in either the developed or
developing world,
(4) To examine issues surrounding the environment or
environmental justice,
(5) Or any other topic, provided that the paper deals
extensively with the philosophical ideas of 1968 and
their relevance for today's changed political landscape.
Interested authors should submit a copy of their paper in
RTF or WORD format to PhaenEx's website:
http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex
Queries should be sent to Kevin W. Gray at:
[email protected]
The submission deadline is July 1, 2009.
Contact:
Kevin W. Gray
Faculté de Philosophie
Université Laval
Québec, QC G1K 7P4
Canada
Phone: +1 845 228.8548
Skype: kevinwgray
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex
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