Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T03:04:51.717Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reflections on a Teach-In Walk-Out

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2015

Susan Marks
Get access

Extract

Karl Marx wrote that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways’, whereas ‘the point is to change it’. Are international legal scholars exposed to the same charge? Have they too placed theory before the demands of real-world emancipatory practice? The author explores these questions, and shows how Marx’s concerns about the philosophers indeed have resonance in the field of international law. At the same time, however, she observes that the problem is not with theory per se, if by theory is simply meant academic enquiry. Rather, it is with theory of a particular kind. Against this background, she discusses some of the ways in which academic enquiry can be itself a form of emancipatory practice, some of the features of what she refers to as transformative scholarship. In developing her account, she highlights the point that those who seek social transformation need not only to transcend the limitations for which Marx criticised certain kinds of philosophy (‘idealism’). They also need to avoid the antithetical pitfalls for which, much later, Frankfurt School theorist Adorno criticised certain modes of politics (‘actionism’).

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , July 2002 , pp. 175 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. D. Kennedy, “When Renewal Repeats: Thinking Against the Box” (2000) 32 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 335 at 462.

2. Marx, , Early Political Writings, ed. by O’Malley, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid, at 125.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid, at 137.

7. Ibid, at 122

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid, at 119.

10. Ibid, at 118. Marx, , Early Political Writings, ed. by O’Malley, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 118.

11. Wiggershaus, R., The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994)Google Scholar at 632 (quoting a student leaflet).

12. Adorno, T.W., Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Pickford, H.W. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 259.Google Scholar See also “Resignation” ibid., 289, from which some of the passages discussed below are drawn.

13. Ibid, at 263.

14. Ibid. at 289.

15. Ibid, at 290.

16. Adorno, T.W., Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, E.B. (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1973)Google Scholar at 17.

17. Ibid. at 150.

18. Supra note 12 at 264. T. Adorno, supra note 12 at 259, 264.

19. Ibid, at 290.

20. Ibid. at 266.

21. Ibid, at 265.

22. Ibid, at 265 (Adorno’s emphasis). For further reflections by Adorno on Marx’s “eleventh thesis”, see the opening passage of Negative Dialectics, supra note 16 at 3.

23. Ibid, at 151.

24. Supra note 12 at 277. Ibid, at 277.

25. Jameson, F., Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990)Google Scholar at 46.

26. Eagleton, T., Marx and Freedom (London: Phoenix, 1997)Google Scholar at 3.

27. Horkheimer, M., Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. O’Connell, M.J. et al. (New York: Continuum, 1995)Google Scholar at 188.

28. Horkheimer, M., “On the Problem of Truth”, reprinted in Arato, A. & Gebhardt, E., eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1998) 407.Google Scholar

29. Ibid, at 427.

30. “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze” in Foucault, M., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews ed. by Bouchard, D.F. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar 205 at 208.

31. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, B. (London: Athlone Press, 1987)Google Scholar at xv.

32. Ibid.

33. Supra note 31 at 377. Deleuze & Guattari, supra note 31 at 377.

34. Supra note 30 at 206. “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze”, supra note 30 at 205, 206.

35. A similar point is made in connection with another of Marx’s works in Marx, , Selected Writings, 2nd ed. by McLellan, D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 71.Google Scholar

36. Supra note 2 at 123. Marx, supra note 2 at 123.