From "Rational Utopia" to "Will-to-Utopia". On the "Post-modern" Turn in the Recent Work of Agnes Heller

Agnes Heller recently described her position as 'postmodernist', suggesting a move from a political radical to a politically liberal or 'neoconservative' position. The aim of this paper is to assess the degree to which Heller can still be regarded as a radical political thinker through an evaluation of her work on autonomy, democracy and contingency all of which remain key concepts in her thinking about the political. We find in each case that whilst many of the motifs of her critical Marxist period recur in her recent work, they are losing their oppositional or 'negative' character in the sense that making these motifs operational would require changes to the structure or functioning of liberal-capitalism. Whils remaining in some sense a radical thinker Heller has moved from the advocacy of a 'rational utopia' to a form of theorising which I describe as 'will-to-utopia': radical at the surface yet conservative at the core.

A question of a voice: with what voice will I cry my sad fado?

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‘You, my body, and my mind, one of these will go’: Madness as Disguise in Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Endgame

ithin the wide topic of disguise in literature, we could signal a subcurrent which can be found in a number of literary texts: the idea of madness as a disguise, i.e. the creation or invention of a ‘false self’ as a mask which is presented to the world and which conceals the real self. In The Divided Self (1960), R. D. Laing deals with the “personality, false self, mask, front or persona that (...) [schizophrenic] wear” (73). Using as a basis Laing’s theories on schizophrenia and the creation of a false-self system, we will analyze two works by Samuel Beckett: Murphy and Endgame, where we find the uses of madness as disguise in a series of ways: through the usage of ‘disguised’ language (what we could refer to as schizophrenese) which acts as a mask for real meaning; through odd ‘schizophrenic’ behaviour on the part of the characters (which screens real intentions), and, mainly, through the creation of a ‘false self’ which acts as a disguise and barrier between the inner self and the real world. These two works by Samuel Beckett, where real intentions and meanings are continuously concealed and disguised in a desperate attempt to preserve the inner self, lend themselves to an analysis of madness as disguise, precisely the one we attempt to carry out in our paper.

Improvements in acid soil tolerance of Brazilian barley will require new allelic combinations.

2016