this week in platypus. 8.8.16 - 8.14.16.
Robert Weitzer
this week in platypus:
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weekly coffee breaks
Platypus Coffee Breaks are the informal conversations about the meaning and future of the Left that Platypus hosts on a weekly basis. They are a great time to meet with members of Platypus, fellow travelers, and allies of the group. It’s an opportunity to discuss issues raised in the latest issue of the Platypus Review, consider the state of the Left, and just hang out with people who have similar political interests. Please join us!
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NYC Coffee Break
Tuesdays @ 6:00pm
Think Coffee
//73 8th Ave
Contact: vcs...@platypus1917.org
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Week A. Radical bourgeois philosophy I. Rousseau: Crossroads of society | Aug. 6, 2016
Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from which, in a sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and independent existence. He has to take from man his own powers, and give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without the help of other men.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract (1762)
• epigraphs on modern history and freedom by James Miller (on Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Louis Menand (on Edmund Wilson), Karl Marx, on "becoming" (from the Grundrisse, 1857–58), and Peter Preuss (on Nietzsche)
+ Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (1908)
+ Robert Pippin, "On Critical Theory" (2004)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) PDFs of preferred translation (5 parts): [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
• Rousseau, selection from On the Social Contract (1762)