Department of Needed Translations: Jacques Camatte

While Criticism &c. categorically and definitively rejects the position that capital is the self-developing subject of history, the French revolutionary thinker Jacques Camatte—the former Bordigist who developed ideas along this line—deserves a higher profile than the one he currently enjoys. As Loren Goldner pointed out in a review of Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination (New Politics, Summer 2006), Camatte developed in the 1970s some aspects of the ideas that Postone (who suffers from no similar lack of attention) is acclaimed for today.

Camatte’s work has not been extensively translated into English. He was introduced to American readers by Fredy Perlman in 1975 with the publication of The Wandering of Humanity. Note that Perlman leaves the German Gemeinwesen untranslated in the text—in translations of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts it is typically translated as species being.

A year later, a group called New Space (one of the many under-chronicled small U.S. libertarian left groups of the 1960s and 1970s) published an essay by Camatte and a co-thinker called On Organization.

Autonomedia published a valuable collection of Camatte’s work with an introduction by Alex Trotter in 1995 (Trotter problematically translates Gemeinwesen as “human essence”) titled This World We Must Leave. This edition was described as the first of a series of three, but unfortunately, nothing else has appeared. An excellent review of the book by David Black (“Has Capital Autonomized Itself From Humanity?“) appeared in the British Marxist-Humanist journal Hobgoblin in 1999, which provoked a brief response from Camatte (“Comment From Jacques Camatte“) from France.

Community and Communism in Russia, another important work by Camatte was translated and published in by David Brown in Britain in 1978. This pamphlet is mentioned in passing in Marcel van der Linden’s Western Marxism and the Soviet Union.

Camatte maintains a web site with an abundance of writings from his journal, Invariance, that call out for translation into English. Who will undertake this important task?

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The HathiTrust Digital Library contains scans of On Organization and Community and Communism in Russia. Both are classified with an Open Access copyright status, so anyone should be able to download the full PDFs.

Both the Marxists Internet Archive and Libcom.org feature some writings by Camatte.

Department of Needed Translations: Ernst Bloch, Again

The HathiTrust Digital Library has made available a scan of a copy of Ernst Bloch’s, Thomas Munzer, Theologian of Revolution. This book, which has not been translated into English, was first published in 1921—between the Kapp Putsch and the onset of the Ruhr Crisis.

With the recent publication by Verso of a new edition of Atheism in Christianity, it seems like a good time to pursue Bloch translations. Among his other untranslated works (aside from Subjekt-Objekt, previously discussed on this blog) is Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, from the period of his return to Germany after World War II.

It seems incredible that, in a time of heightened interest in an encounter between Islamic and Western thought, this book has not yet appeared in English.

Department of Needed Translations: André Breton

I recently had the opportunity to examine the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of André Breton’s Œuvres Complètes, as well as the rare illustrated Album André Breton volume. The first volume came out in 1988 and the fourth, and final one, just appeared in 2008. The Pléiade editions are beautifully produced books, although one wishes that they were a little bigger in size to allow for slightly larger type face.

I’ll limit my remarks here to volume three, which covers the years 1941 to 1953. It contains a wealth of material yet to be translated into English, including—incredibly—the major poem Les États Généraux (an excerpt translated by Jean-Pierre Cauvin appears in the Black Widow Press Poems of André Breton, but the full text is—to my knowledge—not in English). Among the other remarkable pieces in this volume are the texts of the eight lectures Breton delivered in Port-au-Prince during his visit to Haiti from December 4, 1945 to February 16, 1946.

One other fascinating and untranslated piece in volume three is the text of a notebook Breton kept during the trip he and Elisa took to the southwest in 1945 (the ultimate aim of which was to secure a divorce in Reno from Jacqueline, his second wife). The subject of the notebook is a roughly monthlong sojourn (August) in Arizona and New Mexico among the Hopi and Zuni pueblos. Several pages of the original notebook which feature small sketches by Breton are reproduced. He details several ritual dances he and Elisa witnessed and includes an account of an unpleasant incident in which a pueblo resident objects to his notetaking at a dance ceremony. A Hopi police deputy inserted himself, but—despite the language barrier—Breton asserted his genuine interest in the culture and succeeded in talking his way out of trouble (notebook in hand).

Now, who will publish these texts in English?

Department of Needed Translations: Ernst Bloch’s Subject/Object

Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) can be called the outsider of German Marxist thought. While the members of the Frankfurt School and its extended circle have practically become household names in American academia, Bloch’s highly individualistic blend of Expressionism, Marxism, “Left” Aristotleanism, and messianism remains acknowledged by, but not assimilated into, the academic canon of Critical Theory.

There is no dearth of availability of Bloch’s work in English. Stanford University Press published Traces in 2006, the first time this work has appeared in English, and Verso made his Atheism in Christianity available again in a new edition last year.

Even with these welcome efforts, however, Bloch has at least one major work that has yet to be translated, a major study of Hegel and dialectics originally published in 1951 titled Subjekt-Objekt. Two chapters of the book have been published in academic journals (“Dialectics and Hope,” translated by Mark Ritter in New German Critique in 1976 and “The Dialectical Method,” translated by John Lamb in Man and World in 1983), but, unfortunately, the work as a whole remains unknown to the English-speaking world.

As a contribution towards bringing some much-needed attention to this important work, I am providing a brief excerpt (the first paragraph) from “The Dialectical Method” below.

***

The idiot never notices that everything has two side. He works with wooden ideas, with simple uniform ideas at which he can stop for breath and in which nothing happens. If he were to think a thought through to its end, he would notice that a struggle is taking place, that objections arise within which enrich it and disarrange its content. A is not always A, B must also be posited, and it it precisely consistency which shows B to be the contradiction. Above the consequent span C arises as apex and unity; that is until C splits too, and a new unity of contradictions emerges in irresistible dialectical development. Actual thought never runs in straight lines, like thought which is fixed, cut and dried, in which nothing expands or changes and which is therefore incapable of doing justice to transformation. Thought moves in triangles. These triangles, consisting of contradiction, unity, new contradiction, new unity, and so on, do not need to be schematically traced out each time. That would be incompatible with the free agility of elastic thought. Indeed, the triangle is not the only possible form, more contradictions than just this A and B are possible and they do not all have to refer to the same point of unity. But reliable, actual thought never takes a straight course, rigid and unchanged, like the rhythm of the nodding head of the pagoda or the dreadful, monomaniac, thoroughly undialectical thought of the madman. A man who continually entangles himself in contradictions is not for that a dialectician. If he cannot find his way out of the contradictions, he is much more a charlatan and, in the end, a perfect image of chaos. But thought which seeks a viable course, set on finding solutions, without going through the dialectical turn in which no determination is complete in itself, lands in chaos from the other side, namely in the chaos of rigidity. It cannot comprehend what is living and on the terrain of transformation—there is no other—with its fixed clumsiness, it will always stumble.

Translated by John Lamb