In this article, I look at Eastern European history in an attempt to specify the logic of colonia... more In this article, I look at Eastern European history in an attempt to specify the logic of coloniality and distinguish it from the logic of imperiality, with which it is often entangled, but should not be confused. At stake are differing modes of resistance provoked when one logic or the other is recognized. Because coloniality appears as to the colonized as an alien force, anti-colonialism tends to focus on removing the alien element. But imperiality, because it is never pure, compels anti-imperial movements to ask themselves who they are.
There is a rich tradition of interaction between anthropology and philosophy. This article reflec... more There is a rich tradition of interaction between anthropology and philosophy. This article reflects on the character of this interaction, arguing that it is not a case of two separate, parallel traditions that mutually influence one another, but rather of two interconnected disciplines that have become necessary to one another’s development. Both disciplines aim at a universalistic understanding of the human being, but each does so by different means. Philosophy allows the autonomous work of reason to criticize established categories of thought, positing new concepts of the human; but it risks becoming too autonomous – too self-sufficient and self-referential – thus allowing its categories to become resistant to criticism, established as marks of “civilization” that distinguish philosophical ideas from ideas that are non-philosophical, irrational, and barbarous. Anthropology, for its part, reveals the limitations of premature universalism, pointing to forms of reason excluded from dominant systems of thought. Philosophy can turn to anthropology in order to expand and bring in new concepts. Anthropology can turn to philosophy in order to recall its original impulse toward conceptualizing the universal, in an expansive form that I call “barbarous universalism.”
Folklore and Ethnography in the Soviet Western Borderlands: Socialist in Form, National in Content, ed. Toms Ķencis, Simon J. Bronner, and Elo-Hanna Seljamaa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023
The historical existence of socialist folkloristics surprises no one. Yet communist folkloristics... more The historical existence of socialist folkloristics surprises no one. Yet communist folkloristics remains an enigma. If lower-cased “socialism” is typically understood generically as a political practice, then there is no difficulty comprehending specific ways that ruling regimes in the Soviet Western Borderlands, following official Soviet policy, made use of folkloric material and supported its academic study for a variety of propagandistic purposes on behalf of the Soviet form of Communism (with a capital C). If the generic form of lower-cased “communism,” on the other hand, is an ideology, that is to say, a set of broadly interlacing ideas, then its relationship to folklore appears more complicated. Indeed, few researchers operating outside the framework of Communist Party hegemony have devoted much attention to the role of philosophically communist ideas in the folkloristics of Communist-led Europe. More often, researchers have emphasized the nationalist and romantic-agrarian ideologies that accompanied folkloristics in the region long before the field became the object of official Communist policy. As a result, the phenomenon of communist folkloristics tends to be discussed as if it were a historical peculiarity, a meeting of two incongruous worldviews, which only political expedience or happenstance could have brought together. Yet popular, amateur artistic activity, with folklore as its paradigmatic form, was a central aspect of cultural policy during most of the period of Communist Party ascendancy in the region, and probably no other coordinated public intervention in support of folklore has ever been undertaken on so grand a scale. Could it really be that the long cohabitation of Communism and folklore was only a marriage of convenience?
Letní škola historie XXXIV, ed. Barbora Holubová and Jana Kohnová. Prague: Vydavatelství Pedagogické fakulty UK, 2022
An article, in Czech, on Czech dissident notions of "antipolitics," on the power of these notions... more An article, in Czech, on Czech dissident notions of "antipolitics," on the power of these notions in the dissident movement and on the unfortunate consequences of maintaining the same notions in the changed conditions of post-Communism. The English title would be "Contradictions of dissident antipolitics."
Václav Havel píše ve známém výroku z roku 1984, "Jsem příznivcem ,antipolitické politiky' ." Co mohl mít na mysli, když tak zjevně politicky aktivní člověk se hlásil k postoji "antipolitickému"? V odpovědi na tuto otázku spočívá klíč k pochopení specifika politického myšlení českého disentu v jeho nejvlivnější podobě - tj. v podobě, která nechává stopy v české politice podnes.
Drawing on Hegel’s interpretation of narrative and Lyotard’s rejection of “grand” dialectical nar... more Drawing on Hegel’s interpretation of narrative and Lyotard’s rejection of “grand” dialectical narratives, this paper addresses the relationship between emancipatory dialectics and narrative form. It begins by establishing the intimate connection between dialectical thought and narration. On this basis, the paper argues that varying conceptions of dialectics can be associated with varying structures of narrating history. Finally, the paper makes the case for identifying a specific narrative form adequate to the radical re-readings of Hegel that have replaced the perspective of the master (the subject privileged by a given system of historicity) with the perspective of the slave (who, while excluded from historicity, struggles against this exclusion). This narrative form corresponds to none of the classical Greek genres; it is best described as a trickster tale.
In the following essay-manifesto, Contradictions editor Joseph Grim Feinberg lays out his view of... more In the following essay-manifesto, Contradictions editor Joseph Grim Feinberg lays out his view of the journal as a platform for confronting the central contradictions of post-communism, working through the problems of Central and Eastern Europe in global context, and seeking the continued contemporary relevance of the history of emancipatory and critical thought. Contradictions, he writes, should enable philosophy and its neighboring fields to engage with this region, at this moment, while telling world history something that no other time or place has told it before.
Idea socializmu? Ku knihe Axela Honnetha, ed. Peter Daubner (Bratislava: Filozofický ústav SAV), 2022
A critique, in Slovak, of Axel Honneth's idea of socialism. In English, the title would be "On th... more A critique, in Slovak, of Axel Honneth's idea of socialism. In English, the title would be "On the idea of socialism, or Why socialists don’t respect the autonomy of the private and political spheres." An English translation may be coming soon.
Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, 2022
The Czech Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík was a humanist. He was also a humanist who problematise... more The Czech Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík was a humanist. He was also a humanist who problematised the meaning of the human. The central tensions of humanism run through Kosík’s work. Kosík held up the human being as a transcendent ideal in contrast with an alienating reality, even while he pointed toward the historical contingency of this transcendent ideal. Kosík never fully resolved this tension, but he pointed to one possibility for resolution. In his notion of ‘democracy’, especially ‘radical democracy’, a term emerges that mediates between the absolute, abstract human ideal and the relative, concretely alienated person. This term, ‘the people’, points to an alternative conception of humanity, grounded in social form and emancipatory struggle. If the people’s activity is ‘radical’, it reaches for humanity’s roots.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “And the ‘Thing Itself’ Is Man: Radical Democracy and the Roots of Humanity.” In Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, ed. Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, and Jan Mervart, Leiden: Brill, 2022, pp. 187–204.
The Political Economy of Eastern Europe 30 Years into the ‘Transition’: New Left Perspectives from the Region, 2022
The chapter focuses on how the legacy of dissident antipolitics operates in the context of post-C... more The chapter focuses on how the legacy of dissident antipolitics operates in the context of post-Communist Slovakia, and in particular in the context of the long predominance of the centrist nationalism of Vladimir Mečiar and the social nationalism of Robert Fico. While in Poland and Hungary the anti-communist legacy was used by conservatives in order to fight culture wars against liberals, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia this legacy served to create an alliance of conservatives and liberals in the struggle against “populism” and the “legacy of communism,” supporting a depoliticized struggle for “decent politics,” diverting attention from socio-economic issues. Thus, post-dissident framings can be used also for discourse policing to conceal a race to the bottom in social policy. This discourse is characterized by an accent on the image of a “decent” and “cultivated” civil society struggling against the state, which further strengthens the apolitical character of post-dissident opposition. At the same time, the chapter also shows how opposition to this post-dissident narrative can lead the left into the same political corner as national conservatives. In the conclusion, the author proposes a dialectical reaction to post-dissident rhetoric—to formulate a new dissident position adequate for the situation of real capitalism.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim, “Post-Dissent and the New Right: Problems and Potential of Post-Communist Dissent in Slovakia and Beyond.” In The Political Economy of Eastern Europe 30 Years into the ‘Transition’: New Left Perspectives from the Region, ed. Ágnes Gagyi and Ondřej Slačálek, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp. 151–67.
Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, 2021
After years of prophecy that electronic and digital media are irresistibly replacing other modes ... more After years of prophecy that electronic and digital media are irresistibly replacing other modes of social interaction, the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that human beings are still not ready to live our lives entirely online. But life under lockdown has given us a heightened awareness of just how much of our daily lives is still not ‘mediated’ at all in the typical sense we have given to the notion of mediation. ‘Media,’ in common parlance, has become synonymous with the so-called ‘new,’ electronic media. Perhaps we are due for reflection on the role of face-to-face orality in the modern world, the role of old media as full players in the contemporary configuration of communication. This theoretical turn would entail understanding face-to-face oral communication as a medium – not an absence of mediation, but a structure of mediation that shapes meaning and experience in specific ways, enabling certain forms of social organization and certain kinds of emancipatory vision related to these organizational forms.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim, “Emancipation and Old Media: The Mediation of Immediacy between Oral and Networked Society.” Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, Band. 7 (2021), pp. 179–97.
This paper engages with radical democratic theory in light of the so-called "return of the people... more This paper engages with radical democratic theory in light of the so-called "return of the people" taking place in contemporary political discourse. I argue that the return of the people should not be seen only as a return of politics strictly speaking, but also as a process by which elements of the social that had previously been excluded from politics enter the political sphere. Framing the problem in this way calls for a view to how politics is circumscribed, distinguished from the social but also, at various moments, broken open. At the same time, I call for paying increased attention to how the notion of the people takes shape beyond the political sphere, off the metaphorical political stage. By examining how the people is constructed in cultural and social movements, off the political stage, we can better understand the form taken by the people when it appears in politics.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “De-staging the People: On the Role of the Social and Populism beyond Politics.” Thesis Eleven vol. 164, no. 1 (2021), pp. 104–19.
Revolutions for the Future: May ’68 and the Prague Spring, ed. Jana Ndiaye Beránková, Michael Hauser, and Nick Nesbitt, Lyon: Suture., 2020
A postscript to the volume Revolutions for the Future, about 1968 in Paris and Prague. Here I loo... more A postscript to the volume Revolutions for the Future, about 1968 in Paris and Prague. Here I look at the next big revolution in Czechoslovakia, in 1989, and I compare the critical role played by philosophers during and after earlier revolutions with the affirmative, uncritical position taken by many former dissidents after 1989.
This is a just a sample from the article. The press's webpage is here: https://suturepress.com/ and it deserves your support.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “1989: The Triumph of Truth and the Burial of Philosophy.” In Revolutions for the Future: May ’68 and the Prague Spring, ed. Jana Ndiaye Beránková, Michael Hauser, and Nick Nesbitt, Lyon: Suture, 2020, pp. 300–17.
Confronting Reification. Revitalizing Georg Lukács’s Thought in Late Capitalism, 2020
In this paper I take up an idea that was central to Lukács’s best-known work, “Reification and th... more In this paper I take up an idea that was central to Lukács’s best-known work, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” but which has become the object of extensive criticism: that the antinomies of bourgeois thought can be overcome when approached from “the standpoint of the proletariat.” Lukács’s diagnosis of the problem of reification in modern consciousness is still widely discussed, but his proposed response to this situation has been much less readily accepted: that there exists a privileged subject-object of history that can transgress the limits placed on thought by reification, and that this subject-object is the proletariat. As I reinterpret certain of the key conceptual moves made by Lukács in developing this idea, I draw attention to the ways in which Lukács de-emphasizes the empirical understanding of the proletariat as a set of people defined positively by the fact that they earn wages or identify as workers, in favor of a negative understanding of the proletariat as an entity that is included in capitalism but excluded from bourgeois society and, for this reason, is capable of viewing this society from outside, grasping the social totality. Although this conception is implicit in Lukács’s essay, it is not explicitly laid out. By developing what Lukács left unspecified, I offer a potential solution to several of the problems that Lukács’s argument has been forced to confront, such as his alleged privileging of the working class over other oppressed groups and his reliance on the party to achieve the consciousness that the working class seems unable to achieve on its own. In my interpretation, the standpoint of the proletariat does not indicate a privileged position available only to one social group. Rather, it is a point at which multiple forms of domination intersect, due to the specific form of inclusive exclusion that lies at the heart of bourgeois society. The organizational form taken by the movement toward proletarian consciousness, thus understood, would not be a party that leads and exclusively represents the proletariat, but an international of the excluded. It would be the organizational form of a movement of all those who stand outside the society that they have helped build, and who from this point outside are able to see and change the world.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “György Lukács’s Archimedean Socialism.” In Confronting Reification: Revitalizing Georg Lukács’s Thought in Late Capitalism, ed. Gregory R. Szmulewicz-Zucker, Leiden: Brill, 2020, pp. 186–202.
Performance theorists have long been drawn to the potential of performance to subvert established... more Performance theorists have long been drawn to the potential of performance to subvert established institutions. The results of performance are never fully determined in advance; performances subject established images to reinterpretation; they take place before an audience that can criticize and intervene. But performative principles also play a role in maintaining established institutions and ways of being. Performance demands that participants take on roles and perform them more or less effectively. Performance also establishes a separation between the relatively active people who have the authority to perform publicly important roles and relatively passive audiences who observe those institutionalized performances. In this paper I argue for a balanced view of the subversive potential of performance, taking seriously the tradition of anti-theatricality, in order to determine the role of performance both in undermining and in upholding established institutions, and I call attention to the potentially subversive (but often contradictory) role of what I call anti-performance, the attempt (which is just as contradictory as performance itself) to move beyond the performativity that is imposed by established institutions, in order to achieve new forms of being that are experienced not only as “played” but as “real.”
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Understanding Anti-Performance: The Performative Division of Experience and the Standpoint of the Non-Performer.” Performance Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 2 (2020), pp. 332–48.
Imaginace a forma. Mezi estetickým formalizmem a filosofií emancipace. Studie Josefu Zumrovi, 2018
An essay on the meaning of folklore in Eastern European Communist thought.
Full citation: Fein... more An essay on the meaning of folklore in Eastern European Communist thought.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Lid jako filosof. Folklór a masový intelektualismus v socialistickém hnutí.” In Ivan Landa, Jan Mervert et al., Imaginace a forma. Mezi estetickým formalizmem a filosofií emancipace. Studie Josefu Zumrovi. Prague: Filosofia, 2018, pp. 231–38.
This study attempts to reconstruct key elements in the thought of literary critic and folklorist ... more This study attempts to reconstruct key elements in the thought of literary critic and folklorist Bedřich Václavek. Václavek is generally recognized as a prominent figure in interwar literary development and as a researcher who examined genres of popular tradition that had previously eluded scholarly attention. Yet his thought is not well known as a synthetic whole. The reception of his work is divided into two separate fields, and interpreters have paid little attention to the importance of his folkloristic work on his understanding of literature, and to the importance of his literary theory on his understanding of folklore. Václavek’s work as a whole remains little known. Nevertheless, Václavek dealt with parallel issues in his two main fields, elaborating complementary conceptual frameworks, each of which contributed to the originality of the other. If we view Václavek only as a literary critic, we may see him as a figure who voiced and confronted crucial challenges of his times, but who does not particularly stand out from among the many other critics of his day who made similar attempts to bridge the experimental literary ambitions of the avant-garde and the social objectives of those political movements that the avant-garde most frequently embraced. And if we view Václavek only as a folklorist, we may see him as a careful scholar who contributed to the development of his discipline, but who did not go beyond its boundaries to lay out the more general social importance of this work. It is only when we look at Václavek’s work in its entirety that we perceive the conceptual innovation he brought to literary criticism from folklore studies, as well as the social importance acquired by folklore studies when it is connected to the overall aesthetic expression of the people in society. What emerges from a synthetic reconstruction of Václavek’s thought is his systematic attempt to explain the concept of “people” and its role in aesthetic development, both in the literary sphere and in the sphere of oral tradition — and (perhaps even more importantly for Václavek) in the space between the written and the spoken word, where literature and folklore meet and general “culture” emerges from this fusion.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Básník a lid. Bedřich Václavek mezi literaturou a folklorem” [The poet and the people: Bedřich Václavek between literature and folklore]. Česká literatura, vol. 65, no. 6 (2017), pp. 823–45.
This article examines the relationship between the political theories of Central European disside... more This article examines the relationship between the political theories of Central European dissidents and the social practice of “tramping,” a back-to-nature movement that was associated with oppositional politics and “anti-politics” in Czechoslovakia from the end of World War I until 1989. The article reflects on the potential political significance of the tramping movement’s ideal uncivilized society as an alternative to the dissidents’ concept of “civil society,” which began as a call for “antipolitical” transformation, and yet after 1989 became an ideological justification for explicitly elitist modes of liberal-conservative governance. The concept of “uncivilized society,” which can be drawn from the discourse of tramping, has parallels in contemporary autonomist calls for tactical from oppressive modernity. The article concludes that the tramping movement’s emphasis on internal organization best distinguishes the movement both from East-Central European dissent before 1989 and from autonomism today.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “The Uncivilized Society of Czechoslovak Tramps: An Exploration in Proletarian Fantasy.” Studia Ethnologica Pragensia, vol. 3, no. 2 (2017), pp. 30–50.
Príliš ľudská tvár socialismu? Reforma zdola a okolnosti reformného procesu v Československu v roku 1968, 2016
A study in the history of the concept of "civil society" in Czechoslovakia. The article shows tha... more A study in the history of the concept of "civil society" in Czechoslovakia. The article shows that during the reform movement in the 1960s, the concept was still far from its uncritical, normative post-communist usage, and instead denoted a sphere of society that was the object of reformers critique as well as increasing fascination.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Občan alebo človek? Alebo, či v reformnom procese šlo vôbec o občiansku spoločnosť...” In Príliš ľudská tvár socialismu? Reforma zdola a okolnosti reformného procesu v Československu v roku 1968, ed. Miroslav Tížik and Norbert Kmeť, Bratislava: Institute for Sociology, 2016, pp. 64–89.
Introduction to a collection of essays by G. M. Tamás. In Czech. (For an English translation, con... more Introduction to a collection of essays by G. M. Tamás. In Czech. (For an English translation, contact the author.)
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Z trosek civilizace. Barbarská filosofie G. M. Tamáse." In G. M. Tamás, K filosofii socialismu. Ed. Pavel Siostrzonek and Joseph Grim Feinberg. Prague: Filosofia, 2016, pp. 9–30.
Based on an ethnographic study of folklore performance in contemporary Slovakia, this paper criti... more Based on an ethnographic study of folklore performance in contemporary Slovakia, this paper critically engages with “performance theory,” arguing that sometimes performance can be best understood by looking beyond moments of performance to the long, often arduous work of preparing for performance and reflecting on performances past. The author proposes studying folklore (and art more generally) not only as performance but also as “organization,” that is, as a set of enduring yet always shifting social relations. This approach enables us to see the modes of collectivity that emerge out of the social experience of art and, specifically, folklore.
In Slovak.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “‘Jeden veľký kolektív’. Folklór ako vystúpenie a organizácia.” Sociológia – Slovak Sociological Review vol. 48, no. 4 (2016), pp. 357–76.
In this article, I look at Eastern European history in an attempt to specify the logic of colonia... more In this article, I look at Eastern European history in an attempt to specify the logic of coloniality and distinguish it from the logic of imperiality, with which it is often entangled, but should not be confused. At stake are differing modes of resistance provoked when one logic or the other is recognized. Because coloniality appears as to the colonized as an alien force, anti-colonialism tends to focus on removing the alien element. But imperiality, because it is never pure, compels anti-imperial movements to ask themselves who they are.
There is a rich tradition of interaction between anthropology and philosophy. This article reflec... more There is a rich tradition of interaction between anthropology and philosophy. This article reflects on the character of this interaction, arguing that it is not a case of two separate, parallel traditions that mutually influence one another, but rather of two interconnected disciplines that have become necessary to one another’s development. Both disciplines aim at a universalistic understanding of the human being, but each does so by different means. Philosophy allows the autonomous work of reason to criticize established categories of thought, positing new concepts of the human; but it risks becoming too autonomous – too self-sufficient and self-referential – thus allowing its categories to become resistant to criticism, established as marks of “civilization” that distinguish philosophical ideas from ideas that are non-philosophical, irrational, and barbarous. Anthropology, for its part, reveals the limitations of premature universalism, pointing to forms of reason excluded from dominant systems of thought. Philosophy can turn to anthropology in order to expand and bring in new concepts. Anthropology can turn to philosophy in order to recall its original impulse toward conceptualizing the universal, in an expansive form that I call “barbarous universalism.”
Folklore and Ethnography in the Soviet Western Borderlands: Socialist in Form, National in Content, ed. Toms Ķencis, Simon J. Bronner, and Elo-Hanna Seljamaa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023
The historical existence of socialist folkloristics surprises no one. Yet communist folkloristics... more The historical existence of socialist folkloristics surprises no one. Yet communist folkloristics remains an enigma. If lower-cased “socialism” is typically understood generically as a political practice, then there is no difficulty comprehending specific ways that ruling regimes in the Soviet Western Borderlands, following official Soviet policy, made use of folkloric material and supported its academic study for a variety of propagandistic purposes on behalf of the Soviet form of Communism (with a capital C). If the generic form of lower-cased “communism,” on the other hand, is an ideology, that is to say, a set of broadly interlacing ideas, then its relationship to folklore appears more complicated. Indeed, few researchers operating outside the framework of Communist Party hegemony have devoted much attention to the role of philosophically communist ideas in the folkloristics of Communist-led Europe. More often, researchers have emphasized the nationalist and romantic-agrarian ideologies that accompanied folkloristics in the region long before the field became the object of official Communist policy. As a result, the phenomenon of communist folkloristics tends to be discussed as if it were a historical peculiarity, a meeting of two incongruous worldviews, which only political expedience or happenstance could have brought together. Yet popular, amateur artistic activity, with folklore as its paradigmatic form, was a central aspect of cultural policy during most of the period of Communist Party ascendancy in the region, and probably no other coordinated public intervention in support of folklore has ever been undertaken on so grand a scale. Could it really be that the long cohabitation of Communism and folklore was only a marriage of convenience?
Letní škola historie XXXIV, ed. Barbora Holubová and Jana Kohnová. Prague: Vydavatelství Pedagogické fakulty UK, 2022
An article, in Czech, on Czech dissident notions of "antipolitics," on the power of these notions... more An article, in Czech, on Czech dissident notions of "antipolitics," on the power of these notions in the dissident movement and on the unfortunate consequences of maintaining the same notions in the changed conditions of post-Communism. The English title would be "Contradictions of dissident antipolitics."
Václav Havel píše ve známém výroku z roku 1984, "Jsem příznivcem ,antipolitické politiky' ." Co mohl mít na mysli, když tak zjevně politicky aktivní člověk se hlásil k postoji "antipolitickému"? V odpovědi na tuto otázku spočívá klíč k pochopení specifika politického myšlení českého disentu v jeho nejvlivnější podobě - tj. v podobě, která nechává stopy v české politice podnes.
Drawing on Hegel’s interpretation of narrative and Lyotard’s rejection of “grand” dialectical nar... more Drawing on Hegel’s interpretation of narrative and Lyotard’s rejection of “grand” dialectical narratives, this paper addresses the relationship between emancipatory dialectics and narrative form. It begins by establishing the intimate connection between dialectical thought and narration. On this basis, the paper argues that varying conceptions of dialectics can be associated with varying structures of narrating history. Finally, the paper makes the case for identifying a specific narrative form adequate to the radical re-readings of Hegel that have replaced the perspective of the master (the subject privileged by a given system of historicity) with the perspective of the slave (who, while excluded from historicity, struggles against this exclusion). This narrative form corresponds to none of the classical Greek genres; it is best described as a trickster tale.
In the following essay-manifesto, Contradictions editor Joseph Grim Feinberg lays out his view of... more In the following essay-manifesto, Contradictions editor Joseph Grim Feinberg lays out his view of the journal as a platform for confronting the central contradictions of post-communism, working through the problems of Central and Eastern Europe in global context, and seeking the continued contemporary relevance of the history of emancipatory and critical thought. Contradictions, he writes, should enable philosophy and its neighboring fields to engage with this region, at this moment, while telling world history something that no other time or place has told it before.
Idea socializmu? Ku knihe Axela Honnetha, ed. Peter Daubner (Bratislava: Filozofický ústav SAV), 2022
A critique, in Slovak, of Axel Honneth's idea of socialism. In English, the title would be "On th... more A critique, in Slovak, of Axel Honneth's idea of socialism. In English, the title would be "On the idea of socialism, or Why socialists don’t respect the autonomy of the private and political spheres." An English translation may be coming soon.
Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, 2022
The Czech Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík was a humanist. He was also a humanist who problematise... more The Czech Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík was a humanist. He was also a humanist who problematised the meaning of the human. The central tensions of humanism run through Kosík’s work. Kosík held up the human being as a transcendent ideal in contrast with an alienating reality, even while he pointed toward the historical contingency of this transcendent ideal. Kosík never fully resolved this tension, but he pointed to one possibility for resolution. In his notion of ‘democracy’, especially ‘radical democracy’, a term emerges that mediates between the absolute, abstract human ideal and the relative, concretely alienated person. This term, ‘the people’, points to an alternative conception of humanity, grounded in social form and emancipatory struggle. If the people’s activity is ‘radical’, it reaches for humanity’s roots.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “And the ‘Thing Itself’ Is Man: Radical Democracy and the Roots of Humanity.” In Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, ed. Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, and Jan Mervart, Leiden: Brill, 2022, pp. 187–204.
The Political Economy of Eastern Europe 30 Years into the ‘Transition’: New Left Perspectives from the Region, 2022
The chapter focuses on how the legacy of dissident antipolitics operates in the context of post-C... more The chapter focuses on how the legacy of dissident antipolitics operates in the context of post-Communist Slovakia, and in particular in the context of the long predominance of the centrist nationalism of Vladimir Mečiar and the social nationalism of Robert Fico. While in Poland and Hungary the anti-communist legacy was used by conservatives in order to fight culture wars against liberals, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia this legacy served to create an alliance of conservatives and liberals in the struggle against “populism” and the “legacy of communism,” supporting a depoliticized struggle for “decent politics,” diverting attention from socio-economic issues. Thus, post-dissident framings can be used also for discourse policing to conceal a race to the bottom in social policy. This discourse is characterized by an accent on the image of a “decent” and “cultivated” civil society struggling against the state, which further strengthens the apolitical character of post-dissident opposition. At the same time, the chapter also shows how opposition to this post-dissident narrative can lead the left into the same political corner as national conservatives. In the conclusion, the author proposes a dialectical reaction to post-dissident rhetoric—to formulate a new dissident position adequate for the situation of real capitalism.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim, “Post-Dissent and the New Right: Problems and Potential of Post-Communist Dissent in Slovakia and Beyond.” In The Political Economy of Eastern Europe 30 Years into the ‘Transition’: New Left Perspectives from the Region, ed. Ágnes Gagyi and Ondřej Slačálek, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp. 151–67.
Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, 2021
After years of prophecy that electronic and digital media are irresistibly replacing other modes ... more After years of prophecy that electronic and digital media are irresistibly replacing other modes of social interaction, the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that human beings are still not ready to live our lives entirely online. But life under lockdown has given us a heightened awareness of just how much of our daily lives is still not ‘mediated’ at all in the typical sense we have given to the notion of mediation. ‘Media,’ in common parlance, has become synonymous with the so-called ‘new,’ electronic media. Perhaps we are due for reflection on the role of face-to-face orality in the modern world, the role of old media as full players in the contemporary configuration of communication. This theoretical turn would entail understanding face-to-face oral communication as a medium – not an absence of mediation, but a structure of mediation that shapes meaning and experience in specific ways, enabling certain forms of social organization and certain kinds of emancipatory vision related to these organizational forms.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim, “Emancipation and Old Media: The Mediation of Immediacy between Oral and Networked Society.” Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, Band. 7 (2021), pp. 179–97.
This paper engages with radical democratic theory in light of the so-called "return of the people... more This paper engages with radical democratic theory in light of the so-called "return of the people" taking place in contemporary political discourse. I argue that the return of the people should not be seen only as a return of politics strictly speaking, but also as a process by which elements of the social that had previously been excluded from politics enter the political sphere. Framing the problem in this way calls for a view to how politics is circumscribed, distinguished from the social but also, at various moments, broken open. At the same time, I call for paying increased attention to how the notion of the people takes shape beyond the political sphere, off the metaphorical political stage. By examining how the people is constructed in cultural and social movements, off the political stage, we can better understand the form taken by the people when it appears in politics.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “De-staging the People: On the Role of the Social and Populism beyond Politics.” Thesis Eleven vol. 164, no. 1 (2021), pp. 104–19.
Revolutions for the Future: May ’68 and the Prague Spring, ed. Jana Ndiaye Beránková, Michael Hauser, and Nick Nesbitt, Lyon: Suture., 2020
A postscript to the volume Revolutions for the Future, about 1968 in Paris and Prague. Here I loo... more A postscript to the volume Revolutions for the Future, about 1968 in Paris and Prague. Here I look at the next big revolution in Czechoslovakia, in 1989, and I compare the critical role played by philosophers during and after earlier revolutions with the affirmative, uncritical position taken by many former dissidents after 1989.
This is a just a sample from the article. The press's webpage is here: https://suturepress.com/ and it deserves your support.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “1989: The Triumph of Truth and the Burial of Philosophy.” In Revolutions for the Future: May ’68 and the Prague Spring, ed. Jana Ndiaye Beránková, Michael Hauser, and Nick Nesbitt, Lyon: Suture, 2020, pp. 300–17.
Confronting Reification. Revitalizing Georg Lukács’s Thought in Late Capitalism, 2020
In this paper I take up an idea that was central to Lukács’s best-known work, “Reification and th... more In this paper I take up an idea that was central to Lukács’s best-known work, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” but which has become the object of extensive criticism: that the antinomies of bourgeois thought can be overcome when approached from “the standpoint of the proletariat.” Lukács’s diagnosis of the problem of reification in modern consciousness is still widely discussed, but his proposed response to this situation has been much less readily accepted: that there exists a privileged subject-object of history that can transgress the limits placed on thought by reification, and that this subject-object is the proletariat. As I reinterpret certain of the key conceptual moves made by Lukács in developing this idea, I draw attention to the ways in which Lukács de-emphasizes the empirical understanding of the proletariat as a set of people defined positively by the fact that they earn wages or identify as workers, in favor of a negative understanding of the proletariat as an entity that is included in capitalism but excluded from bourgeois society and, for this reason, is capable of viewing this society from outside, grasping the social totality. Although this conception is implicit in Lukács’s essay, it is not explicitly laid out. By developing what Lukács left unspecified, I offer a potential solution to several of the problems that Lukács’s argument has been forced to confront, such as his alleged privileging of the working class over other oppressed groups and his reliance on the party to achieve the consciousness that the working class seems unable to achieve on its own. In my interpretation, the standpoint of the proletariat does not indicate a privileged position available only to one social group. Rather, it is a point at which multiple forms of domination intersect, due to the specific form of inclusive exclusion that lies at the heart of bourgeois society. The organizational form taken by the movement toward proletarian consciousness, thus understood, would not be a party that leads and exclusively represents the proletariat, but an international of the excluded. It would be the organizational form of a movement of all those who stand outside the society that they have helped build, and who from this point outside are able to see and change the world.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “György Lukács’s Archimedean Socialism.” In Confronting Reification: Revitalizing Georg Lukács’s Thought in Late Capitalism, ed. Gregory R. Szmulewicz-Zucker, Leiden: Brill, 2020, pp. 186–202.
Performance theorists have long been drawn to the potential of performance to subvert established... more Performance theorists have long been drawn to the potential of performance to subvert established institutions. The results of performance are never fully determined in advance; performances subject established images to reinterpretation; they take place before an audience that can criticize and intervene. But performative principles also play a role in maintaining established institutions and ways of being. Performance demands that participants take on roles and perform them more or less effectively. Performance also establishes a separation between the relatively active people who have the authority to perform publicly important roles and relatively passive audiences who observe those institutionalized performances. In this paper I argue for a balanced view of the subversive potential of performance, taking seriously the tradition of anti-theatricality, in order to determine the role of performance both in undermining and in upholding established institutions, and I call attention to the potentially subversive (but often contradictory) role of what I call anti-performance, the attempt (which is just as contradictory as performance itself) to move beyond the performativity that is imposed by established institutions, in order to achieve new forms of being that are experienced not only as “played” but as “real.”
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Understanding Anti-Performance: The Performative Division of Experience and the Standpoint of the Non-Performer.” Performance Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 2 (2020), pp. 332–48.
Imaginace a forma. Mezi estetickým formalizmem a filosofií emancipace. Studie Josefu Zumrovi, 2018
An essay on the meaning of folklore in Eastern European Communist thought.
Full citation: Fein... more An essay on the meaning of folklore in Eastern European Communist thought.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Lid jako filosof. Folklór a masový intelektualismus v socialistickém hnutí.” In Ivan Landa, Jan Mervert et al., Imaginace a forma. Mezi estetickým formalizmem a filosofií emancipace. Studie Josefu Zumrovi. Prague: Filosofia, 2018, pp. 231–38.
This study attempts to reconstruct key elements in the thought of literary critic and folklorist ... more This study attempts to reconstruct key elements in the thought of literary critic and folklorist Bedřich Václavek. Václavek is generally recognized as a prominent figure in interwar literary development and as a researcher who examined genres of popular tradition that had previously eluded scholarly attention. Yet his thought is not well known as a synthetic whole. The reception of his work is divided into two separate fields, and interpreters have paid little attention to the importance of his folkloristic work on his understanding of literature, and to the importance of his literary theory on his understanding of folklore. Václavek’s work as a whole remains little known. Nevertheless, Václavek dealt with parallel issues in his two main fields, elaborating complementary conceptual frameworks, each of which contributed to the originality of the other. If we view Václavek only as a literary critic, we may see him as a figure who voiced and confronted crucial challenges of his times, but who does not particularly stand out from among the many other critics of his day who made similar attempts to bridge the experimental literary ambitions of the avant-garde and the social objectives of those political movements that the avant-garde most frequently embraced. And if we view Václavek only as a folklorist, we may see him as a careful scholar who contributed to the development of his discipline, but who did not go beyond its boundaries to lay out the more general social importance of this work. It is only when we look at Václavek’s work in its entirety that we perceive the conceptual innovation he brought to literary criticism from folklore studies, as well as the social importance acquired by folklore studies when it is connected to the overall aesthetic expression of the people in society. What emerges from a synthetic reconstruction of Václavek’s thought is his systematic attempt to explain the concept of “people” and its role in aesthetic development, both in the literary sphere and in the sphere of oral tradition — and (perhaps even more importantly for Václavek) in the space between the written and the spoken word, where literature and folklore meet and general “culture” emerges from this fusion.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Básník a lid. Bedřich Václavek mezi literaturou a folklorem” [The poet and the people: Bedřich Václavek between literature and folklore]. Česká literatura, vol. 65, no. 6 (2017), pp. 823–45.
This article examines the relationship between the political theories of Central European disside... more This article examines the relationship between the political theories of Central European dissidents and the social practice of “tramping,” a back-to-nature movement that was associated with oppositional politics and “anti-politics” in Czechoslovakia from the end of World War I until 1989. The article reflects on the potential political significance of the tramping movement’s ideal uncivilized society as an alternative to the dissidents’ concept of “civil society,” which began as a call for “antipolitical” transformation, and yet after 1989 became an ideological justification for explicitly elitist modes of liberal-conservative governance. The concept of “uncivilized society,” which can be drawn from the discourse of tramping, has parallels in contemporary autonomist calls for tactical from oppressive modernity. The article concludes that the tramping movement’s emphasis on internal organization best distinguishes the movement both from East-Central European dissent before 1989 and from autonomism today.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “The Uncivilized Society of Czechoslovak Tramps: An Exploration in Proletarian Fantasy.” Studia Ethnologica Pragensia, vol. 3, no. 2 (2017), pp. 30–50.
Príliš ľudská tvár socialismu? Reforma zdola a okolnosti reformného procesu v Československu v roku 1968, 2016
A study in the history of the concept of "civil society" in Czechoslovakia. The article shows tha... more A study in the history of the concept of "civil society" in Czechoslovakia. The article shows that during the reform movement in the 1960s, the concept was still far from its uncritical, normative post-communist usage, and instead denoted a sphere of society that was the object of reformers critique as well as increasing fascination.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Občan alebo človek? Alebo, či v reformnom procese šlo vôbec o občiansku spoločnosť...” In Príliš ľudská tvár socialismu? Reforma zdola a okolnosti reformného procesu v Československu v roku 1968, ed. Miroslav Tížik and Norbert Kmeť, Bratislava: Institute for Sociology, 2016, pp. 64–89.
Introduction to a collection of essays by G. M. Tamás. In Czech. (For an English translation, con... more Introduction to a collection of essays by G. M. Tamás. In Czech. (For an English translation, contact the author.)
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Z trosek civilizace. Barbarská filosofie G. M. Tamáse." In G. M. Tamás, K filosofii socialismu. Ed. Pavel Siostrzonek and Joseph Grim Feinberg. Prague: Filosofia, 2016, pp. 9–30.
Based on an ethnographic study of folklore performance in contemporary Slovakia, this paper criti... more Based on an ethnographic study of folklore performance in contemporary Slovakia, this paper critically engages with “performance theory,” arguing that sometimes performance can be best understood by looking beyond moments of performance to the long, often arduous work of preparing for performance and reflecting on performances past. The author proposes studying folklore (and art more generally) not only as performance but also as “organization,” that is, as a set of enduring yet always shifting social relations. This approach enables us to see the modes of collectivity that emerge out of the social experience of art and, specifically, folklore.
In Slovak.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “‘Jeden veľký kolektív’. Folklór ako vystúpenie a organizácia.” Sociológia – Slovak Sociological Review vol. 48, no. 4 (2016), pp. 357–76.
Karel Teige, The Marketplace of Art, trans. Greg Evans, ed. Sezgin Boynik and Joseph Grim Feinberg, Helsinki and Prague: Rab-Rab and Contradictions, 2022
This is an English translation of Karel Teige's Marketplace of Art. Trans. Greg Evans. Helsinki a... more This is an English translation of Karel Teige's Marketplace of Art. Trans. Greg Evans. Helsinki and Prague: Rab-Rab and Contradictions, 2022.
Kontradikce / Contradictions is a journal devoted to original research and theoretical reflection... more Kontradikce / Contradictions is a journal devoted to original research and theoretical reflection on the history and present of critical social thought in Central and Eastern Europe, and on the "post-communist" situation throughout world. The English-language issue of the journal's third volume, edited by Joseph Grim Feinberg, includes texts by Russell Rockwell on H. Marcuse and K. Kosík, Monika Woźniak on M. Siemek and E. Ilyenkov, Jiří Holba on Buddhism and Egon Bondy, Nikolay Karkov on autonomist Marxism in Eastern Europe, Noam Chomsky on the meaning of dissent, Jan Svoboda on T. G. Masaryk, Lubomír Sochor on "actually existing socialism," and more. A special thematic section presents critical approaches to civil society and citizenship by Jeremy Walton, Veronika Stoyanova, and Nishat Awan.
Kontradikce / Contradictions is a journal devoted to original research and theoretical reflection... more Kontradikce / Contradictions is a journal devoted to original research and theoretical reflection on the history and present of critical social thought in Central and Eastern Europe, and on the "post-communist" situation throughout world. The Czech-language issue of the journal's third volume, edited by Joseph Grim Feinberg, includes texts by Jan Svoboda on T. G. Masaryk, James Mark Shields on Buddhism and Marxism, Lubomír Sochor on "actually existing socialism," Jacques Rancière on fiction, and more. A special thematic section presents critical approaches to civil society and citizenship by Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ondřej Holub, Engin F. Isin, Zdeněk Mlynář, and Miroslav Kusý.
The English-language issue of Contradictions, vol. 2, includes texts by Dan Swain on Marxism and ... more The English-language issue of Contradictions, vol. 2, includes texts by Dan Swain on Marxism and theories of justice, Nicole Pepperell on Lukács, Peter Steiner on Václav Havel, Robert Kalivoda on Marx and Freud, Alain Badiou on communism, and others. For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/en/archive
The Czech-language issue of Kontradikce/Contradictions, vol. 2, includes texts by Vít Bartoš on t... more The Czech-language issue of Kontradikce/Contradictions, vol. 2, includes texts by Vít Bartoš on the dialectics of nature, Ivana Komanická on croletarian culture in revolutionary Košice, Nick Nesbitt on Deleuze and music, Matěj Metelec on Charta 77 and the left today, Vratislav Effenberger on poetry, Herbert Marcuse on aesthetics.
Contradictions: A Journal for Critical Thought is a bilingual (Czech and English) publication tha... more Contradictions: A Journal for Critical Thought is a bilingual (Czech and English) publication that assesses and creatively revives radical intellectual traditions of Central and Eastern Europe, bringing them to bear on the historical present and bringing them into international discussions of emancipatory social change.
This is the English-language issue of Contradictions, vol. 1. For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/en/archive.
Kontradikce. Časopis pro kritické myšlení / Contradictions: A Journal for Critical Thought is a b... more Kontradikce. Časopis pro kritické myšlení / Contradictions: A Journal for Critical Thought is a bilingual (Czech and English) publication that assesses and creatively revives radical intellectual traditions of Central and Eastern Europe, bringing them to bear on the historical present and bringing them into international discussions of emancipatory social change.
This is the Czech-language issue of Kontradikce / Contradictions, vol. 1. For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/archiv
Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, 2021
Karel Kosík (1926–2003) was one of the most remarkable Czech Marxist philosophers of the twentiet... more Karel Kosík (1926–2003) was one of the most remarkable Czech Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. His reputation as a creative thinker is owed largely to his philosophical ‘blockbuster’ Dialectics of the Concrete, first published in Czechoslovakia in 1963. In reintroducing Kosík’s philosophy to English-speaking readers, we show that Kosík’s work is important not only as a leading intellectual document of the Prague Spring, but also as an original theoretical contribution with international impact that sheds light on the meaning of labour and praxis, cognition and economic structure, and revolution and the crises of modernity.
Contributors include: Ian Angus, Siyaves Azeri, Vít Bartoš, Jan Černý, Joseph Grim Feinberg, Diana Fuentes, Gabriella Fusi, Tomáš Hermann, Tomáš Hříbek, Xiaohan Huang, Peter Hudis, Petr Kužel, Ivan Landa, Michael Löwy, Jan Mervart, Anselm K. Min, Tom Rockmore, Francesco Tava, and Xinruo Zhang.
The Political Economy of Eastern Europe 30 years into the ‘Transition’ - New Left Perspectives from the Region, 2021
By the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in most parts of Eastern Europe, high exp... more By the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in most parts of Eastern Europe, high expectations associated with postsocialist transition have been substituted by disillusionment. After 1990, Eastern Europe has been internationally treated with a low-interest acknowledgement of what was understood as a slow and erratic, but unquestionable process of integration in a Western-dominated world order. In the context of today’s geopolitical reorganization, East European examples of authoritarian politics once again become discussed as significant reference points for Western and global politics. This book represents a contribution to this debate from a distinctive East European perspective: that of new left scholars and activists from the region, whose lifetime largely corresponds to the transformations of the postsocialist period, and who came to develop an understanding of their environment in terms of its relations to global capitalist processes. A both theoretical and empirical contribution, the book provides essential insights on topics conventionally associated with East European transition from privatization to the politicized slogans of corruption or civil society, and analyzes their connection to the newest reconfigurations of postsocialist capitalist regimes. As a contribution to contemporary debates on the present global socio-political transformation, this collection does not only seek to debate analytical statements, but also to change the field where analytical aims are set, by adding perspectives that think Eastern Europe’s global relations from within the regional context and its political stakes.
V současném světě dochází ke změně pohledu na liberální demokracii. Přestává platit obecná politi... more V současném světě dochází ke změně pohledu na liberální demokracii. Přestává platit obecná politická a kulturní shoda na tom, že liberální demokracie představuje završení dějin, že společenská individualizace je tím nejlepším a nezrušitelným principem, kdežto kolektivní identity jsou věcí minulosti. Liberální společnost, dosud oslavující postmoderní mnohost a jinakost, se proměňuje ve společnost roztříštěnou do uzavřených komunit, v níž se vytrácí jednotící ideál občanství a lidských práv. Kniha nabízí analýzu vznikajících nových forem politického a myšlenkového sjednocování, tak jak se projevují v současných teoriích lidu, v myšlení teologického hnutí „radikální ortodoxie“ a v populistických hnutích.
Who determines what is "real"?
Observing the activities of urban folk dance enthusiasts in Slo... more Who determines what is "real"?
Observing the activities of urban folk dance enthusiasts in Slovakia, Joseph Grim Feinberg sets out to scrutinize the processes by which "authentic folklore" is identified, talked about, represented, reconstructed, reenacted, and revived.
In Slovakia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe after World War II, Communist governments promoted folklore revivals and staged performances of song and dance as representations of "the people." When the Communists fell from power in Slovakia in 1989, folklore was also discredited in the eyes of many. By the early twenty-first century, however, a new generation launched a movement to revive folklore's reputation and reintroduce it to a broad public.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. Revised Slovak translation published as: Vrátiť folklór ľuďom. Dialektika autentickosti na súčasnom Slovensku, trans. Renáta Tížiková Nemcová, Bratislava: AKAmedia and Sociologický ústav SAV, 2018.
An anthology of writing by Czech Marxist humanist philosopher and occasional poet Ivan Sviták, ed... more An anthology of writing by Czech Marxist humanist philosopher and occasional poet Ivan Sviták, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Joseph Grim Feinberg.
Full citation: Sviták, Ivan. The Windmills of Humanity: On Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World. Ed. and trans. Joseph Grim Feinberg. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2014.
The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, 2019
An entry in The International Encyclopedia of Surrealismon the College of Sociology (Collège de S... more An entry in The International Encyclopedia of Surrealismon the College of Sociology (Collège de Sociologie).
The text here is not final. The final version is available in The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, ed. Michael Richardson, et al., vol. 1. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 498–501.
This is an entry in The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx on the reception of Marx in the Soviet Union... more This is an entry in The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx on the reception of Marx in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
There is probably no part of the world where Marx's thought has enjoyed such prestige and currently finds itself in such disrepute as Eastern Europe and the former territory of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the region itself is typically defined by its history of rule by "Marxist" regimes whose actions have done as much to discredit Marxism as they ever succeeded in promoting it. The history of Marxism in the region, however, reveals a continual series of intellectual debates whose emancipatory insight was never exhausted in service to state or party policy. It was, at the same time, marked by the need to repeatedly rethink itself in the face of limiting conditions-and of its own role in the genesis of those conditions. Eastern European Marxism developed in close contact with Marxism in those parts of Germany and Austria that would later be considered "Western" Europe. Nevertheless, Marxism developed in new directions as it responded to the problems raised by the new social conditions in which it found itself, and under the influence of the intellectual and social movements that proceeded it and competed with it, most notably the romantic revolutionary movements that defended the peasantry and the common people, as well as the region's movements for Westernizing modernization and national liberation. After the October Revolution of 1917, the establishment of the Soviet Union spurred the region's Marxists to distinguish themselves still further from their comrades and rivals elsewhere, reflecting on the emerging problems of building a socialist society and, eventually, on how those constructive efforts may have gone wrong.
Monde diplomatique's Atlas der Globalisierung, 2019
An analysis of the "new" xenophobic right. Published in German under the title "Europas neue Rech... more An analysis of the "new" xenophobic right. Published in German under the title "Europas neue Recht. Die fremdenfeindlichen Bewegung und Parteien erklären Freiheit und Wohlstanzu knappen Güttern," in the Monde diplomatique's Atlas der Globalisierung. Welt in Bewegung. Berlin: Le Monde diplomatique.
The uploaded file is the original English text of the article.
A review essay on Lea Ypi's memoir Free, about growing up in Albania before and after the "transi... more A review essay on Lea Ypi's memoir Free, about growing up in Albania before and after the "transition." Online: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/against-concepts
Citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. "Against Concepts." NLR Sidecar 27 January 2022.
Review of Danaher, David S. Reading Václav Havel. In Slavic and East European Journal vol. 61, no... more Review of Danaher, David S. Reading Václav Havel. In Slavic and East European Journal vol. 61, no. 1 (2017), pp. 146–47.
Some of the most interesting writing on folklore, it seems, is not really about folklore at all. ... more Some of the most interesting writing on folklore, it seems, is not really about folklore at all. Perhaps this is because it has always been one of folklore studies' central tasks to ask what folklore is, and what folklore becomes at the seemingly eternal moment when it disappears.
Review of Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe by Marisa Galvez. Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, March 18, 2015
Review of Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and... more Review of Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
The uploaded file is a draft; final version published in Dějiny - Teorie - Kritika, 2013, no. 1, pp. 177–81 (in Czech).
Review of The Big Red Songbook, ed. Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvator... more Review of The Big Red Songbook, ed. Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno, afterword by Utah Phillips (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2007).
Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, Apr 13, 2009
Review of:
From Folklore to World Music / Od folkloru k world music. Edited by Irena Přibylová... more Review of:
From Folklore to World Music / Od folkloru k world music. Edited by Irena Přibylová and Lucie Uhlíková. Náměšť nad Oslavou, Czech Republic: Městské kulturní středisko, 2003.
From the East to the West and from the West to the East / Od východu na západ a od západu na východ. Edited by Martina Pavlicová and Irena Přibylová. Náměšť nad Oslavou, Městské kulturní středisko, 2005.
The Magic of World Music: From Rituals to Web Pages / Kouzla ve world music: Od rituálů k webovým stránkám. Edited by Martina Pavlicová and Irena Přibylová. Náměšť nad Oslavou, Městské kulturní středisko, 2006.
My Heart’s in the Highlands / Mé srdce je na Vysočině. Eds. Martina Pavlicová and Irena Přibylová. Náměšť nad Oslavou, Městské kulturní středisko, 2007.
Ethnocultural Traditions in Contemporary Society / Etnokulturní tradice v současné společnosti. Ed. Marta Troncová. Brno, Czech Republic: Institute of Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2007.
An essay on neoliberalism, the so-called refugee crisis, and the rise of the new extreme right
... more An essay on neoliberalism, the so-called refugee crisis, and the rise of the new extreme right
The uploaded file is a draft. The final version is available online here: http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/an-austere-place-of-refuge/; and in abridged form here: http://politicalcritique.org/cee/2016/austere-place-of-refuge/. Published in German translation as “Die Verteidiger Europas. Warum die neue radikale Rechte in Ost und West so erfolgreich ist,” Le monde diplomatique, Deutsche Ausgabe, April 2016, pp. 6–7. In Czech as “Strohé útočiště. Prolamování hradeb pevnosti Evropa”, A2 8/2016, pp. 18–19. in Greek as “Ένα καταφύγιο λιτότητας για τους πρόσφυγες,” Elaliberta.gr, March 18, 2016.)
An essay on Europe and the crisis of Greece and the Eurozone.
Citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim... more An essay on Europe and the crisis of Greece and the Eurozone.
Citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Europe and Its Ends.” Heathwood, Oct. 19, 2015. (Originally published online at www.heathwoodpress.com, a site no longer active.)
An essay on anti-populism and what I call "neo-aristocratism" in bourgeois, and especially post-c... more An essay on anti-populism and what I call "neo-aristocratism" in bourgeois, and especially post-communist, society.
Abridged English published in Chronos, no. 7, (Nov. 2013). Originally published on www.chronosmag.eu. Longer Czech version in Analogon no. 69, 2013, pp. 18 – 23.
Twelve social-theoretical theses on the destructive nature of automobile.
Full citation: Feinb... more Twelve social-theoretical theses on the destructive nature of automobile.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Cars Can Never Run Cleanly: The Automobile as an (Anti–)Social Form.” Carbusters.org, Nov. 8, 2010. (Originally published online; no longer accessible.) Also published in Slovak in Nové slovo, No. 9, 2010.
A Czech translation of the long version was published as: “Proti grantům.” In Nová vědecká éra? Od byrokratické komerce ke kreativitě ve veřejném zájmu. Prague: Epocha, 2021, pp. 39–59.
An essay on labor song, the university, and the proletarian public sphere.
The uploaded file ... more An essay on labor song, the university, and the proletarian public sphere.
An essay on the peculiar post-communist desire to deny the existence of anything before capitalis... more An essay on the peculiar post-communist desire to deny the existence of anything before capitalism.
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Papers by Joe Grim Feinberg
The text uploaded is not final and typeset. For that, see https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666906530/Folklore-and-Ethnology-in-the-Soviet-Western-Borderlands-Socialist-in-Form-National-in-Content, or contact me.
Václav Havel píše ve známém výroku z roku 1984, "Jsem příznivcem ,antipolitické politiky' ." Co mohl mít na mysli, když tak zjevně politicky aktivní člověk se hlásil k postoji "antipolitickému"? V odpovědi na tuto otázku spočívá klíč k pochopení specifika politického myšlení českého disentu v jeho nejvlivnější podobě - tj. v podobě, která nechává stopy v české politice podnes.
The file uploaded here is a draft before typesetting. The final version is available here: https://brill.com/view/book/9789004503243/BP000010.xml (or contact the author).
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “And the ‘Thing Itself’ Is Man: Radical Democracy and the Roots of Humanity.” In Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, ed. Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, and Jan Mervart, Leiden: Brill, 2022, pp. 187–204.
This is a draft, before typesetting. Final text available here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-78915-2_9 (or contact the author)
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim, “Post-Dissent and the New Right: Problems and Potential of Post-Communist Dissent in Slovakia and Beyond.” In The Political Economy of Eastern Europe 30 Years into the ‘Transition’: New Left Perspectives from the Region, ed. Ágnes Gagyi and Ondřej Slačálek, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp. 151–67.
The uploaded document is a draft before typesetting. Final version available here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jbmp-2021-0010/html (or contact the author)
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim, “Emancipation and Old Media: The Mediation of Immediacy between Oral and Networked Society.” Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, Band. 7 (2021), pp. 179–97.
The uploaded file is a draft before copy editing. Final version available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/07255136211025772?journalCode=thea (or contact the author)
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “De-staging the People: On the Role of the Social and Populism beyond Politics.” Thesis Eleven vol. 164, no. 1 (2021), pp. 104–19.
This is a just a sample from the article. The press's webpage is here: https://suturepress.com/ and it deserves your support.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “1989: The Triumph of Truth and the Burial of Philosophy.” In Revolutions for the Future: May ’68 and the Prague Spring, ed. Jana Ndiaye Beránková, Michael Hauser, and Nick Nesbitt, Lyon: Suture, 2020, pp. 300–17.
The uploaded file is a draft prepared before typesetting. The final version is available in print, or here: https://brill.com/view/book/9789004430082/BP000013.xml (or contact the author).
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “György Lukács’s Archimedean Socialism.” In Confronting Reification: Revitalizing Georg Lukács’s Thought in Late Capitalism, ed. Gregory R. Szmulewicz-Zucker, Leiden: Brill, 2020, pp. 186–202.
Available through open access here: https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/279
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Understanding Anti-Performance: The Performative Division of Experience and the Standpoint of the Non-Performer.” Performance Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 2 (2020), pp. 332–48.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Lid jako filosof. Folklór a masový intelektualismus v socialistickém hnutí.” In Ivan Landa, Jan Mervert et al., Imaginace a forma. Mezi estetickým formalizmem a filosofií emancipace. Studie Josefu Zumrovi. Prague: Filosofia, 2018, pp. 231–38.
In Czech.
Openly accessible here: https://asjournals.lib.cas.cz/ceskaliteratura/article/uuid:53e2569e-2815-488c-a2ed-c227eaf9b024
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Básník a lid. Bedřich Václavek mezi literaturou a folklorem” [The poet and the people: Bedřich Václavek between literature and folklore]. Česká literatura, vol. 65, no. 6 (2017), pp. 823–45.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “The Uncivilized Society of Czechoslovak Tramps: An Exploration in Proletarian Fantasy.” Studia Ethnologica Pragensia, vol. 3, no. 2 (2017), pp. 30–50.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Občan alebo človek? Alebo, či v reformnom procese šlo vôbec o občiansku spoločnosť...” In Príliš ľudská tvár socialismu? Reforma zdola a okolnosti reformného procesu v Československu v roku 1968, ed. Miroslav Tížik and Norbert Kmeť, Bratislava: Institute for Sociology, 2016, pp. 64–89.
Text accessible online: http://filosofia.flu.cas.cz/soubory/tituly/Tamas_uvod.pdf
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Z trosek civilizace. Barbarská filosofie G. M. Tamáse." In G. M. Tamás, K filosofii socialismu. Ed. Pavel Siostrzonek and Joseph Grim Feinberg. Prague: Filosofia, 2016, pp. 9–30.
In Slovak.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “‘Jeden veľký kolektív’. Folklór ako vystúpenie a organizácia.” Sociológia – Slovak Sociological Review vol. 48, no. 4 (2016), pp. 357–76.
See also https://www.sav.sk/?lang=sk&doc=journal-list&part=article_response_page&journal_article_no=12369
The text uploaded is not final and typeset. For that, see https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666906530/Folklore-and-Ethnology-in-the-Soviet-Western-Borderlands-Socialist-in-Form-National-in-Content, or contact me.
Václav Havel píše ve známém výroku z roku 1984, "Jsem příznivcem ,antipolitické politiky' ." Co mohl mít na mysli, když tak zjevně politicky aktivní člověk se hlásil k postoji "antipolitickému"? V odpovědi na tuto otázku spočívá klíč k pochopení specifika politického myšlení českého disentu v jeho nejvlivnější podobě - tj. v podobě, která nechává stopy v české politice podnes.
The file uploaded here is a draft before typesetting. The final version is available here: https://brill.com/view/book/9789004503243/BP000010.xml (or contact the author).
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “And the ‘Thing Itself’ Is Man: Radical Democracy and the Roots of Humanity.” In Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, ed. Joseph Grim Feinberg, Ivan Landa, and Jan Mervart, Leiden: Brill, 2022, pp. 187–204.
This is a draft, before typesetting. Final text available here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-78915-2_9 (or contact the author)
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim, “Post-Dissent and the New Right: Problems and Potential of Post-Communist Dissent in Slovakia and Beyond.” In The Political Economy of Eastern Europe 30 Years into the ‘Transition’: New Left Perspectives from the Region, ed. Ágnes Gagyi and Ondřej Slačálek, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp. 151–67.
The uploaded document is a draft before typesetting. Final version available here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jbmp-2021-0010/html (or contact the author)
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim, “Emancipation and Old Media: The Mediation of Immediacy between Oral and Networked Society.” Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, Band. 7 (2021), pp. 179–97.
The uploaded file is a draft before copy editing. Final version available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/07255136211025772?journalCode=thea (or contact the author)
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “De-staging the People: On the Role of the Social and Populism beyond Politics.” Thesis Eleven vol. 164, no. 1 (2021), pp. 104–19.
This is a just a sample from the article. The press's webpage is here: https://suturepress.com/ and it deserves your support.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “1989: The Triumph of Truth and the Burial of Philosophy.” In Revolutions for the Future: May ’68 and the Prague Spring, ed. Jana Ndiaye Beránková, Michael Hauser, and Nick Nesbitt, Lyon: Suture, 2020, pp. 300–17.
The uploaded file is a draft prepared before typesetting. The final version is available in print, or here: https://brill.com/view/book/9789004430082/BP000013.xml (or contact the author).
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “György Lukács’s Archimedean Socialism.” In Confronting Reification: Revitalizing Georg Lukács’s Thought in Late Capitalism, ed. Gregory R. Szmulewicz-Zucker, Leiden: Brill, 2020, pp. 186–202.
Available through open access here: https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/279
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Understanding Anti-Performance: The Performative Division of Experience and the Standpoint of the Non-Performer.” Performance Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 2 (2020), pp. 332–48.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Lid jako filosof. Folklór a masový intelektualismus v socialistickém hnutí.” In Ivan Landa, Jan Mervert et al., Imaginace a forma. Mezi estetickým formalizmem a filosofií emancipace. Studie Josefu Zumrovi. Prague: Filosofia, 2018, pp. 231–38.
In Czech.
Openly accessible here: https://asjournals.lib.cas.cz/ceskaliteratura/article/uuid:53e2569e-2815-488c-a2ed-c227eaf9b024
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Básník a lid. Bedřich Václavek mezi literaturou a folklorem” [The poet and the people: Bedřich Václavek between literature and folklore]. Česká literatura, vol. 65, no. 6 (2017), pp. 823–45.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “The Uncivilized Society of Czechoslovak Tramps: An Exploration in Proletarian Fantasy.” Studia Ethnologica Pragensia, vol. 3, no. 2 (2017), pp. 30–50.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Občan alebo človek? Alebo, či v reformnom procese šlo vôbec o občiansku spoločnosť...” In Príliš ľudská tvár socialismu? Reforma zdola a okolnosti reformného procesu v Československu v roku 1968, ed. Miroslav Tížik and Norbert Kmeť, Bratislava: Institute for Sociology, 2016, pp. 64–89.
Text accessible online: http://filosofia.flu.cas.cz/soubory/tituly/Tamas_uvod.pdf
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Z trosek civilizace. Barbarská filosofie G. M. Tamáse." In G. M. Tamás, K filosofii socialismu. Ed. Pavel Siostrzonek and Joseph Grim Feinberg. Prague: Filosofia, 2016, pp. 9–30.
In Slovak.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “‘Jeden veľký kolektív’. Folklór ako vystúpenie a organizácia.” Sociológia – Slovak Sociological Review vol. 48, no. 4 (2016), pp. 357–76.
See also https://www.sav.sk/?lang=sk&doc=journal-list&part=article_response_page&journal_article_no=12369
For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/en/archive.
For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/archiv
For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/en/archive
For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/archive
This is the English-language issue of Contradictions, vol. 1. For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/en/archive.
This is the Czech-language issue of Kontradikce / Contradictions, vol. 1. For more, see https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/archiv
Contributors include: Ian Angus, Siyaves Azeri, Vít Bartoš, Jan Černý, Joseph Grim Feinberg, Diana Fuentes, Gabriella Fusi, Tomáš Hermann, Tomáš Hříbek, Xiaohan Huang, Peter Hudis, Petr Kužel, Ivan Landa, Michael Löwy, Jan Mervart, Anselm K. Min, Tom Rockmore, Francesco Tava, and Xinruo Zhang.
Observing the activities of urban folk dance enthusiasts in Slovakia, Joseph Grim Feinberg sets out to scrutinize the processes by which "authentic folklore" is identified, talked about, represented, reconstructed, reenacted, and revived.
In Slovakia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe after World War II, Communist governments promoted folklore revivals and staged performances of song and dance as representations of "the people." When the Communists fell from power in Slovakia in 1989, folklore was also discredited in the eyes of many. By the early twenty-first century, however, a new generation launched a movement to revive folklore's reputation and reintroduce it to a broad public.
For more information, see
See: https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5691.htm
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. Revised Slovak translation published as: Vrátiť folklór ľuďom. Dialektika autentickosti na súčasnom Slovensku, trans. Renáta Tížiková Nemcová, Bratislava: AKAmedia and Sociologický ústav SAV, 2018.
Full citation: Sviták, Ivan. The Windmills of Humanity: On Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World. Ed. and trans. Joseph Grim Feinberg. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2014.
See https://www.akpress.org/windmillsofhumanity.html
The text here is not final. The final version is available in The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, ed. Michael Richardson, et al., vol. 1. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 498–501.
There is probably no part of the world where Marx's thought has enjoyed such prestige and currently finds itself in such disrepute as Eastern Europe and the former territory of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the region itself is typically defined by its history of rule by "Marxist" regimes whose actions have done as much to discredit Marxism as they ever succeeded in promoting it. The history of Marxism in the region, however, reveals a continual series of intellectual debates whose emancipatory insight was never exhausted in service to state or party policy. It was, at the same time, marked by the need to repeatedly rethink itself in the face of limiting conditions-and of its own role in the genesis of those conditions. Eastern European Marxism developed in close contact with Marxism in those parts of Germany and Austria that would later be considered "Western" Europe. Nevertheless, Marxism developed in new directions as it responded to the problems raised by the new social conditions in which it found itself, and under the influence of the intellectual and social movements that proceeded it and competed with it, most notably the romantic revolutionary movements that defended the peasantry and the common people, as well as the region's movements for Westernizing modernization and national liberation. After the October Revolution of 1917, the establishment of the Soviet Union spurred the region's Marxists to distinguish themselves still further from their comrades and rivals elsewhere, reflecting on the emerging problems of building a socialist society and, eventually, on how those constructive efforts may have gone wrong.
The uploaded text is uncorrected. For the final version, see https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbury-companion-to-marx-9781350189843/ or contact me.
The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, ed. Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis, and Imre Szeman. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 445–50.
The uploaded file is the original English text of the article.
Citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. "Against Concepts." NLR Sidecar 27 January 2022.
The uploaded text is a draft. Final version here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26633724?refreqid=excelsior%3A0ffe03427d00cc515f36dc6e21965eb5 (or contact the author).
Review of Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe by Marisa Galvez. Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, March 18, 2015
Online: https://jfr.sitehost.iu.edu/review.php?id=1584).
The uploaded file is a draft; final version published in Dějiny - Teorie - Kritika, 2013, no. 1, pp. 177–81 (in Czech).
See also http://www.dejinyteoriekritika.cz/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabIndex=1&TabId=2&Jid=15&Aid=209&Mid=12
The uploaded file is a draft. Final version published in the Journal of American Folklore 123, no. 488, spring 2010, pp. 233–35. Available online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.123.488.0233 (or contact the author).
From Folklore to World Music / Od folkloru k world music. Edited by Irena Přibylová and Lucie Uhlíková. Náměšť nad Oslavou, Czech Republic: Městské kulturní středisko, 2003.
From the East to the West and from the West to the East / Od východu na západ a od západu na východ. Edited by Martina Pavlicová and Irena Přibylová. Náměšť nad Oslavou, Městské kulturní středisko, 2005.
The Magic of World Music: From Rituals to Web Pages / Kouzla ve world music: Od rituálů k webovým stránkám. Edited by Martina Pavlicová and Irena Přibylová. Náměšť nad Oslavou, Městské kulturní středisko, 2006.
My Heart’s in the Highlands / Mé srdce je na Vysočině. Eds. Martina Pavlicová and Irena Přibylová. Náměšť nad Oslavou, Městské kulturní středisko, 2007.
Ethnocultural Traditions in Contemporary Society / Etnokulturní tradice v současné společnosti. Ed. Marta Troncová. Brno, Czech Republic: Institute of Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2007.
The uploaded file is a draft. Final version published online: https://jfr.sitehost.iu.edu/review.php?id=871
The uploaded file is a draft. The final version is available online here: http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/an-austere-place-of-refuge/; and in abridged form here: http://politicalcritique.org/cee/2016/austere-place-of-refuge/. Published in German translation as “Die Verteidiger Europas. Warum die neue radikale Rechte in Ost und West so erfolgreich ist,” Le monde diplomatique, Deutsche Ausgabe, April 2016, pp. 6–7. In Czech as “Strohé útočiště. Prolamování hradeb pevnosti Evropa”, A2 8/2016, pp. 18–19. in Greek as “Ένα καταφύγιο λιτότητας για τους πρόσφυγες,” Elaliberta.gr, March 18, 2016.)
Citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Europe and Its Ends.” Heathwood, Oct. 19, 2015. (Originally published online at www.heathwoodpress.com, a site no longer active.)
The uploaded file is a draft, before typesetting. Final version available online here: http://old.itvar.cz/prilohy/856/Tvar09-2014.pdf
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Kritérium neolyrického věku.” Tvar 2014, no. 9, pp. 10–11.
Abridged English published in Chronos, no. 7, (Nov. 2013). Originally published on www.chronosmag.eu. Longer Czech version in Analogon no. 69, 2013, pp. 18 – 23.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Cars Can Never Run Cleanly: The Automobile as an (Anti–)Social Form.” Carbusters.org, Nov. 8, 2010. (Originally published online; no longer accessible.) Also published in Slovak in Nové slovo, No. 9, 2010.
The uploaded file is the complete text. An abridged version was published as: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Academic Grants Foster Waste and Antagonism, Not Scholarship.” Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 17, 2010 (online: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Academic–Grants–Foster–Waste/124920/?sid=at).
A Czech translation of the long version was published as: “Proti grantům.” In Nová vědecká éra? Od byrokratické komerce ke kreativitě ve veřejném zájmu. Prague: Epocha, 2021, pp. 39–59.
The uploaded file is a draft. Final version available online: https://www.aaup.org/article/singing-all-way-union#.WHO7WlzkjJo
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. "Singing All the Way to the Union." Academe: Bulletin of the AAUP, vol. 96, no. 1 (Jan–Feb. 2010), pp. 18–20.
Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “The Ontology of the Post-Communist Right.” ZNet, May 30, 2003 (published online: now archived at https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-ontology-of-the-post-communist-right-by-joseph-grim-feinberg/).
Also published in Slovak on Hej rup!, June 14, 2003 and on Nové Slovo, no. 30/31, July 23, 2003. and Slovo, No. 30/31, 2003.