![]() Piccone’s early essay on phenomenological Marxism complemented other reading I was doing in Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and the Frankfurt School. As I grew up and read more widely, I realize that this is the core of Marxism and critical theory. The gist of phenomenological Marxism, as I understand it, is that conceptual categories arise from everyday life, from people’s struggles and experiences. That was an invaluable lesson from early Telos, the French left existentialists and Marcuse. I learned that the intellectual life must be lived rigorously, but also that, for all of us who were foot soldiers in the New Left and readers and writers for early Telos, we must put our money where our mouths were: we needed to live lives prefiguratively, treating our comrades well and refusing to postpone liberation to a distant future time. Paul, Russell and many others were wonderful mentors and, for all of their reputation as irascible and ‘difficult,’ they would come through in the clutch, much as my own graduate-school mentor John O’Neill would. But this toughness was set against the extraordinary bonds of friendship and nurturance that many people experienced in their contact with Telos. Telos toughened me up, much as Paul and Russell were tough, no-bullshit guys. Sometimes, like Piccone and Jacoby, I was unlucky, losing jobs, friendly colleagues, institutional support. ![]() It also helped me distrust organizations, including academic ones.Īnd so my Telos helped me situate myself and my own writing around everyday life and it helped me feel comfortable as an academic outsider-somehow who lucked into a job, tenure, publishing opportunities. Telos made me mistrust disciplines and their usual narrow scope and methods. I learned from the examples of Piccone, Jacoby and others that there is a real gulf between professional academics and intellectuals, and I knew I wanted to be an intellectual who ranges widely across diverse literatures. And Telos showed me by its example that distance and disaffiliation afford clarity of insight. I never forget the lessons of existential phenomenology, even as I blended these with the work of the Frankfurt School and French theory. In reflecting on Telos’ impact on me, I remember two things: Telos helped me understand why theory needed to be grounded in everyday life, the lifeworld. It was, in effect, my bibliography in graduate school that saw me through much of the rest of my academic career. ![]() I read it, and I pursued its many sources. My intellectual formation depended on early Telos as I developed an un-American sensibility and opened myself to Europe. As I discuss below, Piccone’s article, “Phenomenological Marxism,” is an important part of my auto-bibliography-the stuff I cite and on which I build. I still have those issues and occasionally I dust them off and re-read them. ![]() This was the Telos of Paul Piccone’s phenomenological Marxism, Enzo Paci, Karil Kosik, the early Russell Jacoby. My Telos was the very first few issues, when I was a graduate student and becoming a theorist. Social Amnesia contains a forceful argument for "thinking against the grain - an endeavor that remains as urgent as ever." It is an important work for sociologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts.There are many Teloses, as many as there are readers. He discusses how in the years since Social Amnesia was first published society has oscillated from extreme subjectivism to extreme objectivism, which feed off each other and constitute two forms of social amnesia: a forgetting of the past and a pseudo-historical consciousness. Jacoby's new self-evaluation has the same sharp edge as the book itself, offering special insights into the evolution of psychological theory during the past two decades.In his probing, self-critical new introduction, Jacoby maintains that any serious appraisal of psychology or sociology, or any discipline, must seek to separate the political from the theoretical. It is simultaneously a critique of present practices and theories in psychology. Social Amnesia is an effort to remember what is perpetually lost under the pressure of society. ![]() In this book, Jacoby excavates the critical and historical concepts that have fallen prey to the dynamic of a society that strips them both of their historical and critical content. Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as society's repression of remembrance - society's own past. ![]()
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