Mary Ann Caws: Surrealism and the Literary Imagination: A Study of Breton and Bachelard (1966)

Publisher Mouton, The Hague, 1966
Volume 12 of Studies in French Literature
85 pages

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Michel Serres: The Natural Contract (1990–) [PT, EN]

“Global environmental change, argues Michel Serres, has forced us to reconsider our relationship to nature. In this translation of his influential 1990 book Le Contrat Naturel, Serres calls for a natural contract to be negotiated between Earth and its inhabitants.

World history is often referred to as the story of human conflict. Those struggles that are seen as our history must now include the uncontrolled violence that humanity perpetrates upon the earth, and the uncontrollable menace to human life posed by the earth in reaction to this violence. Just as a social contract once brought order to human relations, Serres believes that we must now sign a “natural contract” with the earth to bring balance and reciprocity to our relations with the planet that gives us life. Our survival depends on the extent to which humans join together and act globally, on an earth now conceived as an entity.

Tracing the ancient beginnings of modernity, Serres examines the origins and possibilities of a natural contract through an extended meditation on the contractual foundations of law and science. By invoking a nonhuman, physical world, Serres asserts, science frees us from the oppressive confines of a purely social existence, but threatens to become a totalitarian order in its own right. The new legislator of the natural contract must bring science and law into balance.

Serres ends his meditation by retelling the story of the natural contract as a series of parables. He sees humanity as a spacecraft that with the help of science and technology has cast off from familiar moorings. In place of the ties that modernity and analytic reason have severed, we find a network of relations both stranger and stronger than any we once knew, binding us to one another and to the world. The philosopher’s harrowing and joyous task, Serres tells us, is that of comprehending and experiencing the bonds of violence and love that unite us in our spacewalk to the spaceship Mother Earth.”

Originally published in French as Le Contrat Naturel, Editions Francois Bourin, 1990

English edition
Translated by Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson
Publisher University of Michigan Press, 1995
Studies in Literature and Science series
ISBN 0472065491, 9780472065493
136 pages

Publisher (EN)

O contrato natural (Portuguese, trans. Serafim Ferreira, 1994, added on 2013-11-22)
The Natural Contract (English, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson, 1995)

Axel Honneth: The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (1985/1991)

Axel Honneth’s Critique of Power is a rich interpretation of the history of critical theory, which clarifies its central problems and emphasizes the “social” factors that should provide that theory with a normative and practical orientation.

Honneth focuses on the dialog between French and German social theory that was beginning at the time of Michel Foucault’s death. It traces the common roots of the work of Foucault and Jürgen Habermas to a basic text of the last generation of critical theorists – Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment – and draws from this connection the outline of a program that might unite and surpass their seemingly irreconcilable methods of critiquing power structures. In doing so, Honneth provides a constructive and nonpolemical framework for comparisons between the two theorists. And he presents a novel interpretation of Foucault’s analysis of social systems.

Honneth traces the internal contradictions in critical theory through an analysis of Horkheimer’s early programmatic writings, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Adorno’s later social-theoretical writings. He shows how Habermas and Foucault in their distinctive ways reinserted the social world into critical theory but argues that neither operation has been wholly successful. His cogent analysis redirects critical social theory in ways that can draw on the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of the two approaches.

Originally published in German under the title Kritik der Macht. Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1985
Translated by Kenneth Baynes
Publisher MIT Press, 1991
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought series
ISBN 0262581280, 9780262581288
372 pages

review (Elaine Martin)

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