EXPRESSIVE TOTALITY?

[kellner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

Martin:
I think "expressive totality" refers more toward Hegelian notion of 
reality being expression of idea, of whole as "spiritual totality... as 
an expressive totality." This quote is from Althusser's READING CAPITAL 
where he uses concept to attack Hegel's notion of totality, of unified 
totality, as opposed to what Althusser sees as a more complex and 
overdetermined totality in Marx. I think Althusser also uses the term 
polemically to attack Marxists who see everything in capitalist society 
as expressive of capitalism -- period -- that have an excessively 
economistic theory of society without antagonisms. A couple of days 
earlier, it was mentioned that Lukacs used the term "expressive totality" 
and I wonder if he used it in a positive sense, a descriptive sense, or 
like Althusser polemically against idealism...
Douglas Kellner

On Tue, 1 Oct 1996, Martin Spaul wrote:

> A last shot to tack onto all the other totalities - is this an
> aberrant translation of Hegel's 'ethical totality', I think that
> Charles Taylor uses terms like 'expressive unity', etc. when talking
> about Hegel's idea.
> 
> Martin Spaul
> 

Douglas Kellner, Dept of Philosophy, Univ of Texas, Austin, TX 78712
kellner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu  fax: 512 471-4806
Web sites: Postmodern theory= http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~kellner/pm/pm.html
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