League of Engaged Frontier Theory and Praxis

The institution originated from an internal seminar group. Thought always gathers itself in drinking, in cafés, and in conversation.

Unlike other groups of intellectual experimentation, those without lived experience, or those who remain within mere romantic refinement, cannot grasp philosophy. At the same time, according to our present understanding, much of the academy cannot grasp philosophy as praxis; and much of the Left, especially the reformist Left shaped by the North American model, has over-generalised the categories of theory and practice to such an extent that leftist thought can only become an oppositionist cliché.

We hope, through serious theory and through forms capable of circulating within the academy, to re-empower theories that have previously been ignored or misread. This is also the purpose for which the institution was founded.

For this reason, from the standpoint of a research institution, we do not regard the institution itself as needing to separate from the academic community. Rather, it is present as a member that keeps pace with the present, dares to speak, and possesses both an interventionist character and a historical conscience.

An academic community must of course have its own departments and structures. Yet, as an academic Left, we hope to be more open than at least most academic communities; and, likewise, under the guidance of philosophical formation, we are also more serious than most academic communities in specific respects.

With regard to the so-called system of academic integrity, we care more about the posture through which specific concepts are interpreted. For example, we do not imagine that our members would treat the mere assembling of concepts as work. In our view, this is not intellectually luminous. Many journals we know, together with other forms of philosophy that take on the posture of scientific struggle — as in the path Althusser attempted to reach — have also fallen into an unspeakable condition.

We do not think that merely conforming to citation standards, or producing academic waste in any sense, amounts to academic integrity. At the very least, this is neither complete nor sincere. Yet the absence of citation standards or translation norms is certainly unacceptable. This is naturally re-presented here as a reasonable measure of legality, and as the labour concerning substantiality that finally appears; the beginning thus completed appears as a moment dependent upon self-consciousness, and as a demystifying work that undergoes the calamity of the imagination of the beyond.

Or, more simply, we do not support our members making reckless public statements. Apart from matters of negotiation, this is also a question of posture in the dimension of the private self; and, more broadly, it is a political question, the political result of capitalism’s unilateral war against everyone.

“Intervening in the world through leftist scholarship.”

Leftist scholarship is not the worldview imagined by the supporters of capitalism — I do not know who could authentically be a supporter of neoliberalism — as violence, or as the abuse of critical theory, Hegel, or Lacanian theory, a worldview awkwardly entangled with oppositionist and so-called amateur philosophers. In fact, we would rather face the living world, which always brings forth its potential and unfolds its history, with humility, curiosity, and a desire for knowledge. The task of leftist scholarship is to describe faithfully and without prejudice the problems faced by the present situation.

How, then, does this theoretical view operate in practice and in external exchange? Readers should first attend to our ethics. Let me clarify this first: apart from a serious leftist ethics, we have no better second option. Historically speaking, relatively speaking, it has been idealists of different origins who have inherited the greatest share of historical missions. They have different contingent motives, but their purpose is to improve the present condition.

It is not that one is an idealist because one is leftist. Rather, the Left is, at present, the best way of describing idealism; and it is precisely because of idealism that we choose to name ourselves as leftist. We know that this is, after all, also a metonymy; nevertheless, one always needs to find the relatively most appropriate way to describe oneself.

We are honoured to receive any potential formal cooperation.

At the beginning, on the wandering journey into which Plato’s Laws enters, for what had been lost — Quirinus, Yahweh, An, or Zeus — the determination contained in the casting upon which the gods depended, in this sense, had again to rely upon the earliest protection and encouragement that enabled people to be nurtured and to grow as children. It thereby appeared as the representation of the various kinds generated within the distinction of itself, and thus was identically realised as the representational unity which, in the contemporary spirit, exists only as spirit itself: a pure law in the sense of an identical kind.

Philosophy, in order to investigate this ambiguity and the conjecture that unfolds successively as natural science, thereby realised the stripping away, in the genealogical sense, of the supreme personhood of the divine, and remained with the spirit recognised within life and its soul as the place where the soul is.

We naturally mean that the premise according to which no one can, and no one is able to, produce any great or severe evil within such a perfected process is itself bound up with malice, and with the defect expressed by this process in which realities are merely combined with one another. The sum of the processes upon which a person depends, and through which the unfolding realised in one’s own already completed growth takes place, is what the soul has learned in a purely immediate sense.

What is recognised from this point onward is this: with respect to oneself, in relation to Socrates, in the will that arises from the world-spirit in which the gods show their concern here, and with respect to the first moment of spirit, there is the attempt formally to evade the continuation of Persian education, which first enjoyed the infinity of the infinite and the real infinity of the sublime. What is thereby continued is the ultimately realised self-consciousness, accustomed to the title of the “I” in determination, and the process by which, after death, only we, as the souls in which we have dwelt, can be dispersed here.

Succeeded by the classics as well as historial circumstances, we are ready to join the progress of the History formally, as a unique left-wing academic community.