Dear Platypi,

Please join us on the weekend of March 19th at the 2010 Left Forum. Platypus members from Toronto, Chicago, Boston along with New York City members will be there both presenting and chairing these panels.  Below are a list of Platypus organized panels along with their respective line-ups and time slots.

Chicago                                                   New York City

A moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A on the legacy and effects of the Islamic Revolution for the Left, both in Iran and internationally,  addressing the still-vexing questions of the relationship of anti-imperialism, democracy, and religious fundamentalism for potential responses to this year's election crisis and protests

New York City:  Brecht Forum, September 13th 6pm

Panelist include:

Ervand Abrahamian, author of Iran Between Two Revolutions, The Iranian Mojahedin, Khomeinism, Tortured Confessions, and Inventing the Axis of Evil

Hamid Dabashi, author of  Theology of discontent: the ideological foundation of the Islamic Revolution, in Iran, Authority in Islam: from rise of Muhammad to the establishment of the Umayyads, and Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire

Siyaves Azeri, Head of the Committee of International Relations of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran

Chicago: University of Chicago, November 5th 2009

Panelist include:

Maziar Behrooz, author of Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran

Chris Cutrone, PhD candidate in the Committee on the History of Culture and Lecturer in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago; Adjunct Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory and Criticism and Visual and Critical Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  

Kaveh Ehsani is a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report

Danny Postel, author of Reading "Legitimation Crisis" in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism

Platypus Marxist reading group

June 28 - August 16

Sundays 1-4PM at:

School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 S. Michigan Ave.
room 707

Radical bourgeois philosophy: Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche

We will address the greater context for Marx and Marxism through the issue of bourgeois radicalism in philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Discussion will emerge by working through the development from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche, but also by reference to the Rousseauian aftermath, and the emergence of the modern society of capital, as registered by liberals such as Adam Smith and Benjamin Constant.

"The principle of freedom and its corollary, 'perfectibility,' . . . suggest that the possibilities for being human are both multiple and, literally, endless. . . . Contemporaries like Kant well understood the novelty and radical implications of Rousseau's new principle of freedom [and] appreciated his unusual stress on history as the site where the true nature of our species is simultaneously realized and perverted, revealed and distorted. A new way of thinking about the human condition had appeared. . . . As Hegel put it, 'The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite.' "
-- James Miller (author of The Passion of Michel Foucault, 2000), Introduction to Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Hackett, 1992)

Marx and Engels at work together

Weekly reading schedule:

6/28/09

1.) Robert Pippin, "On Critical Theory" [HTML Critical Inquiry 2003]; and Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

7/5/09

2.) Rousseau, selection from The Social Contract

7/12/09

3.) Adam Smith, selections from The Wealth of Nations
Volume I
Introduction and Plan of the Work
Book I: Of the Causes of Improvement...
I.1. Of the Division of Labor
I.2. Of the Principle which gives Occasion to the Division of Labour
I.3. That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market
I.4. Of the Origin and Use of Money
I.6. Of the Component Parts of the Price of Commodities
I.7. Of the Natural and Market Price of Commodities
I.8. Of the Wages of Labour
I.9. Of the Profits of Stock
Book III: Of the different Progress of Opulence in different Nations
III.1. Of the Natural Progress of Opulence
III.2. Of the Discouragement of Agriculture in the Ancient State of Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire
III.3. Of the Rise and Progress of Cities and Towns, after the Fall of the Roman Empire
III.4. How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country
Volume II
IV.7. Of Colonies
Book V: Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth
V.1. Of the Expences of the Sovereign or Commonwealth

7/19/09

4.) Benjamin Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns;" and Kant, "What is Enlightenment? ," and "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View"

7/26/09

5.) Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and "On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory, But it is of No Use in Practice" [HTML part 2]

8/2/09

6.) Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History [HTML] [PDF pp. 14-128]

8/9/09

7.) Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History for Life [translator's introduction by Peter Preuss], and selection from On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

8/16/09

8.) Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals