Books by Larry Alan Busk
Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786615251
Papers by Larry Alan Busk
Radical Philosophy Review, 2024
This paper develops an understanding of climate denial as an expression of alienation in the sens... more This paper develops an understanding of climate denial as an expression of alienation in the sense described by Marx. We first argue for an expanded and differentiated conception of climate denial, theorizing four distinct types that go beyond the simple rejection of an anthropogenic warming trend: naturalist denialism, technological denialism, gradualist denialism, and politicized denialism. We then claim that these forms of climate denial illustrate and are illustrative of Marx's concept of alienation from species-being (Gattungswesen). The article is intended as a contribution to the growing literature on climate denial as a social and ideological problem rather than as an individual epistemic or moral issue.
Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2024
This article interrogates Matthew Huber's criticism of degrowth theory, specifically his claim th... more This article interrogates Matthew Huber's criticism of degrowth theory, specifically his claim that the socialist project must foreground class struggle over and against calls for degrowth. We identify two key problems with Huber's approach. First, he offers no response to the central empirical thesis of the degrowth literature, i.e. that ecological sustainability is incompatible with increasing aggregate material throughput. Second, he limits his discussion to class struggle internal to the “Global North,” obscuring the global character of production that so concerns degrowth theory. When these two points are understood, it becomes clear that degrowth should not be positioned against class struggle. In fact, the former should be understood as a prerequisite for any authentic realization of the latter (as well as vice-versa). This article therefore defends a version of ecosocialist degrowth.
Critical Review, 2024
This article responds to four critics of Democracy in Spite of the Demos and reiterates its centr... more This article responds to four critics of Democracy in Spite of the Demos and reiterates its central thesis. Christopher Holman and Théophile Pénigaud attempt to maintain the critical value of democracy by invoking different elements of the deliberative tradition, while Benjamin Schupmann answers my charges by appealing to a strong liberal constitutionalism. I argue that these attempts repeat the ambivalence described and criticized in the book: democracy is taken as an end in itself, but with asterisks that introduce conditions and qualifications. As long as democracy is only desirable given certain caveats, the critical weight is placed on these caveats and not on the figure of democracy. Andrew Norris takes a different approach, interrogating the book’s use of ideology critique and the concept of “socially necessary delusion.” This intervention presents difficulties to the concluding suggestion of the book, but I maintain that that these difficulties can be productive and generative rather than limiting or prohibitive.
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis, 2024
This article elaborates and defends a critique of capitalism which, despite its appearance in var... more This article elaborates and defends a critique of capitalism which, despite its appearance in various bodies of work, has not been named or systematically differentiated. The critique locates a contradiction between production for use-value and production for exchange-value, or a contradiction in what we call “the telos of production.” While maintaining that it has some basis in Marx’s work, we defend this model as preferable to the critique of capitalism based strictly on the exploitation of labor (which we call the “exploitation-exclusive critique”). We attempt to show this by applying the two approaches to the empirical realities of the ecological crisis and ongoing imperialist relations. It is not necessary, however, to abandon the critique of exploitation, or various other criticisms of the capitalist system: we claim that the telos of production critique is the most general diagnosis of capitalism and is capable of incorporating the other major critiques.
Historical Materialism, 2024
Attempts to unify Marxist and feminist social critique have been vexed by the fact that 'patriarc... more Attempts to unify Marxist and feminist social critique have been vexed by the fact that 'patriarchy' predates the advent of capitalism (its transhistorical status). Feminists within the Marxist, socialist, and materialist traditions have responded to this point by either granting patriarchy a certain autonomy relative to capitalism (the 'dual/triple systems' approach), or by suggesting that patriarchal relations have a foundational and necessary status in the history of capitalist development (which we term the 'origins-subsistence' approach). This paper offers an alternative account of the relationship between capitalism and the transhistorical status of 'patriarchy.' In aid of a 'unitary theory' of Marxist Feminism, we argue that the transhistorical status of patriarchy is better understood through an application of Marx's concepts of formal and real subsumption. A modified version of these concepts can illuminate not only capitalist appropriation of antecedent social and economic forms, but also its capacity to produce new forms of gendered exploitation and oppression.
Theory & Event, 2023
This essay considers the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change in relation to two possible ... more This essay considers the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change in relation to two possible critical-theoretic dispositions. The first, represented by an emblematic passage from Adorno, retains the hope for the realization of a "rational society." The second, represented by a complementary passage from Foucault, enjoins critical theory to abandon any ambition toward criticizing or transforming society at a totalizing level. We argue that the unfolding climate catastrophe demands a conception of critical theory more in line with the first disposition, and that the relevance of the skeptical disposition is likewise seriously undermined if climate change is taken into account.
Philosophy Today, 2023
This article reconsiders Hannah Arendt's account of "totalitarianism" in light of the climate cat... more This article reconsiders Hannah Arendt's account of "totalitarianism" in light of the climate catastrophe and the apparent inability of our political-economic system to respond to it adequately. In the last two chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt focuses on the "ideology" of totalitarian regimes: a pathological denial of reality, a privileging of the ideological system over empirical evidence, and a simultaneous feeling of total impotence and total omnipotence-an analysis that maps remarkably well onto the climate zeitgeist. Thus, while Arendt used the concept of "totalitarianism" to foreclose alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy, the climate impasse suggests that the totalitarian label more properly belongs to the prevailing system itself.
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis, 2022
For the first time in decades, scholars and social critics outside of the Marxist tradition are t... more For the first time in decades, scholars and social critics outside of the Marxist tradition are talking about capitalism in the third person and subjecting it to critical scrutiny-not merely inequality, or 'neoliberalism,' but capitalism. The primary catalyst for this development has been the increased awareness of anthropogenic climate change as an existential threat, aided by the appearance of a few high-profile books. The recent 1 surge of literature on climate change has been answered by a complementary surge in criminally irresponsible denialist literature-and simultaneously by a glut of antisocialist 2
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2021
In this essay, I attempt to measure various prevailing democratic theories against an argument th... more In this essay, I attempt to measure various prevailing democratic theories against an argument that Carl Schmitt advances in the first chapter of his ‘Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy’. In practice, he claims there, democratic politics is compelled to introduce a distinction between ‘the will of the people’ and the behaviour of the empirical people, thus justifying the bracketing and unlimited suspension of the latter in the name of the former, even to the point of dictatorship. I argue that no contemporary approach to democracy as a fundamental value is able to mount a compelling response to this critique and that we should therefore reconsider the status of democracy as a normative commitment. I proceed by carefully and closely reading Schmitt’s chapter and then by juxtaposing various currents of democratic theory (including liberal, deliberative, epistemic and various hybrids thereof) with the trajectory of Schmitt’s argument. This essay is therefore less of a contribution to Schmitt scholarship, in the sense that it does not take a panoramic view of his corpus to determine his final stance on democracy, and more of an intervention into contemporary democratic theory using Schmitt’s argument as a kind of lever.
Radical Philosophy Review, 2020
In Climate Leviathan, Mann and Wainwright address the political implications of climate change by... more In Climate Leviathan, Mann and Wainwright address the political implications of climate change by theorizing four possible planetary futures: Climate Leviathan as capitalist planetary sovereignty, Climate Mao as non-capitalist planetary sovereignty, Climate Behemoth as capitalist non-planetary sovereignty, and Climate X as non-capitalist non-planetary sovereignty. The authors of the present article agree that the depth and scale of destabilizations induced by climate change cannot be navigated justly from within the present social-political-economic system. We disagree, however, on which of the non-capitalist orientations is better suited for generating viable alternatives to the worst dystopian futures. The article thus stages a debate to elucidate the theoretical and political divergence betweenClimate X and Climate Mao (renamed Climate Jacobin). I: Introduction According to prevailing predictions, anthropogenic climate change will precipitate a major ecological crisis in the next few decades. This will result in drastic and unevenly distributed shortages of basic resources, the large-scale movement of climate refugees, and unprecedented weather emergencies. 1 Glimpses of the coming crisis are already upon us. The United Nations estimates that 22.5 million people have been displaced by climate related events since 2008. 2 Coastal communities worldwide are already facing significant destabilization and land loss, especially in the Far North. Extreme and unprecedented weather events (forest fires, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, flooding, polar freezes, etc.) have intensified in recent decades. 3 These realities, only the tip of the (melting) iceberg, indicate the scope and severity of the ecological and social disruption on the horizon if global greenhouse gas emissions maintain their current rates. They also present us with a burning question-a question that increases in temperature with each passing year: how do we theorize the unprecedented? 1 The 2014 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's) report projects "very high risk of severe, widespread and irreversible impacts globally" and recent projections from research at the University of Hawaii suggest "historically unprecedented" climates as soon as 2047. See Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 16-17. 2
Radical Philosophy Review, 2018
This paper considers the radical democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau with refe... more This paper considers the radical democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau with reference to the recent rise of Right-wing populism. I argue that even as Mouffe and Laclau develop a critical political ontology that regards democracy as an end in itself, they surreptitiously delimit the proper composition of the demos to coincide with particular political aims. In other words, they appeal to formal categories but decide the political content in advance, disqualifying Right-wing movements and discourses without justification. This ambivalence between form and content reveals the limits of Mouffe and Laclau's brand of radical democracy for understanding and critiquing the present political conjuncture.
Philosophy Today, 2018
This paper connects Merleau-Ponty’s conception of chiasm with his philosophy of history. I argue ... more This paper connects Merleau-Ponty’s conception of chiasm with his philosophy of history. I argue that history gives us an exemplary form of a chiastic relation and that Merleau-Ponty presages his later ontology of flesh when he investigates the paradox of thinking history. In brief, the paradox is this: history takes on significance only in light of a given reflection on it (just as the world is disclosed only by means of a given body). At the same time, “the given reflection” is overlaid and shot through with historical meaning and is nothing but the result of a historical inheritance (just as the body is bound up with the world and is nothing apart from it). I claim that, for Merleau-Ponty, to think history is to think that which is external to oneself and that which one is, in a deferred simultaneity or “circularity” that can be called chiastic.
Southwest Philosophy Review, 2017
This paper analyzes two forms of “flight from freedom” (or bad faith) embodied by characters in B... more This paper analyzes two forms of “flight from freedom” (or bad faith) embodied by characters in Beauvoir’s fiction, connecting these portrayals to the situation of women as described in The Second Sex as well as the discussion of social freedom in The Ethics of Ambiguity. The characters under consideration are Monique from the story “The Woman Destroyed” and Françoise from the novel She Came to Stay, who represent flight from freedom in related but distinct ways. My claim is that considering these two characters in conjunction allows us to see the two decisive moments of Beauvoir’s theory of authentic freedom in negative manifestations. Monique attempts to make herself into an object by abdicating her freedom, while Françoise takes herself for a sovereign subject and is unable to recognize the freedom of others.
Chiasmi International, 2017
The problem of the transcendental has haunted philosophy for some time now. How can we think that... more The problem of the transcendental has haunted philosophy for some time now. How can we think that which is external to our thought without by that token assimilating it to our thought? In other words, how can we speak of the outside without by that very gesture bringing it inside? While this conversation spun its complex tapestry over centuries, there developed alongside various attempts to dismiss or deflate the problem altogether. The most recent manifestation of this deflationary tendency is the “speculative materialism” movement, represented with most clarity by Quentin Meillassoux in his 2006 work After Finitude. He attempts here to restore “the Great Outdoors” to a philosophical tradition mired in what he calls “correlationism,” which he characterizes as a kind of narcissism. So the present conjuncture seems to offer us a choice between the subjective transcendental cellar and the wilderness of speculative materialism. In this essay, we articulate an alternative to this choice rooted in readings of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Our intent here is not to compare or contrast their bodies of work as wholes, but to trace a distinct philosophical maneuver that is not only common to the two thinkers but reveals a link between them. Rather than annulling the transcendental question, these figures encourage us to reverse it, and ask instead “how can we think the inside without by that very token bringing it outside?” This provides us with a response to the problem of philosophy’s narcissism without recourse to Meillassoux’s “speculative” solution
Rethinking Marxism, 2017
This essay examines Machiavelli's dissonant relationship to the liberal tradition by drawing on t... more This essay examines Machiavelli's dissonant relationship to the liberal tradition by drawing on the interpretations of Althusser and Merleau-Ponty. Reading The Prince following these critics allows us to see that, in an important sense, the ostensibly non- or anti-Machiavellian character of the liberal classics is nevertheless Machiavellian in an inadvertent way. In other words, liberal political theory is Machiavellian in form, even if anti-Machiavellian in content; the distinctive movement of The Prince is to reinscribe the form in the content. The essay begins by describing one plausible perspective on Machiavelli's distinction in the tradition, drawing mostly from Althusser's Machiavelli and Us. Then, after a brief gloss on the standard Marxist critique of liberalism, it uses Merleau-Ponty's “Note on Machiavelli” and Humanism and Terror to develop an understanding of Machiavelli as restoring to political theory what is left out by the liberal canon, revealing that liberalism's disavowal of Machiavellianism is itself a Machiavellian undertaking.
Mediations, 2016
It is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia ... more It is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality-in late capitalist consumerist society, 'real social life' itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbours behaving in 'real' life like stage actors and extras…Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of 'real life' itself, its reversal into a spectral show."-Žižek 1
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Books by Larry Alan Busk
Papers by Larry Alan Busk