Domenico Losurdo

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Domenico Losurdo (2011)

Domenico Losurdo (born November 14, 1941 in Sannicandro di Bari , Italy ; † June 28, 2018 ) was an Italian publicist and professor of philosophy at the University of Urbino.

Life

Losurdo completed his studies in philosophy in 1963 at the University of Urbino with a dissertation on the Hegel student Karl Rosenkranz and worked there as a university lecturer for the history of philosophy. At the University of Urbino he was dean of the Philosophical Faculty. Losurdo was President of the International Hegel-Marx Society for Dialectical Thinking and a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin . Together with Hans Heinz Holz († 2011 ) he edited the philosophical half-yearly publication Topos .

In the 1960s he joined the Italian Communist Party , after its dissolution in 1991 he became a member of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista . Most recently he was a member of the Partito dei Comunisti Italiani . He was president of the Associazione Politica e Culturale MARX XXI, which publishes the communist magazine Marx Ventuno , among other things .

Losurdo is sometimes referred to as one of the most prolific Marxist authors of the past few decades. Losurdo wrote more than 50 books in Italian, was editor and published numerous works in German. In his book Die Gemeinschaft, der Tod, das Abendland he made clear the generally positive attitude of German humanities scholars towards the First World War .

Sometimes referred to as neo-Stalinist referred thinker, he was accused by critics, an apologist of Stalinism to be and to relativize it.

Battle for History - Demolition

Il revisionismo storico , published in Italy in 1996 and a new edition in 2002 . Problemi e miti was published in 2007 in German translation under the title Kampf um die Geschichte. Historical revisionism and its myths - Nolte, Furet and the others published. In this, Losurdo criticizes the historical revisionism of many authors that he believes to exist .

Similar to how Enzo Traverso speaks of a Second Thirty Years War following Arno J. Mayer and counts from the year 1914 with the beginning of the First World War including the so-called interwar period up to the end of the war in 1945, Losurdo consistently uses the image of the Second Thirty Years War, “ to use a term historians often use to describe the period of colossal upheaval between 1914 and 1945 ”. Losurdo accuses Ernst Nolte and François Furet in particular of ignoring the First World War as the trigger for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and only choosing it as the starting point for their thesis of a “ European civil war ” in 1917 , in order to exclusively relate Bolshevism and National Socialism as conflict-prone can. In doing so, according to Losurdo, they omit two main moments that are indispensable for understanding the "Second Thirty Years War": namely, the " total war " as an experience shared by all those involved in the war on the one hand and colonialism as a common modern European phenomenon on the other. So did Adolf Hitler exhibited in numerous statements, as the struggle for Lebensraum in the East had with the acquisition of a "German India" or the "Far West" compared the American conquest to the Pacific. The European Jews finally got into this colonialist scenario as “natives”: “The fact that the fate of the Jews has been sealed by their double stigmatization as oriental 'natives' and as carriers of oriental Bolshevism is not taken into account”. .

This view can be found in a similar way in Enzo Traverso, who wrote in 2002 (German 2003): “Eastern Europe certainly represented the 'living space' that one wanted to colonize, but this conquest implied the annihilation of the USSR and Bolshevism, a state and an ideology which the Nazis saw as the product of a connection between 'Jewish intelligentsia' and Slavic ' sub-humanity ' ”. So this total war was at the same time a war of conquest, a race war and a colonial war.

Fonts (selection)

  • Immanuel Kant - Freedom, Law and Revolution , Cologne 1987.
  • Philosophy as a defense of the whole of reason , Cologne 1988.
  • Hegel and the German Heritage , Cologne 1989.
  • Fichte - the French Revolution and the ideal of eternal peace , Berlin 1991.
  • Between Hegel and Bismarck , Berlin 1993.
  • The community, death, the west. Heidegger and the ideology of war , Metzler, Stuttgart 1995.
  • Philosophy of history and ethics , Frankfurt 1998.
  • Escape from history? Food 2000.
  • Hegel and the freedom of the modern , Frankfurt 2000.
  • Antonio Gramsci's Marxism , Hamburg 2000 (complete new edition 2012).
  • The Left, China and Imperialism , Essen 2000.
  • (with Erwin Marquit) On the history of the communist movement , Essen 2005.
  • Battle for history. Historical revisionism and its myths Papyrossa, Cologne 2007.
  • Democracy or Bonapartism. Triumph and decline of universal suffrage, ibid. 2008.
  • Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel. Intellectual biography and critical record. Argument, Hamburg 2009. ISBN 3886193381 .
  • Freedom as a privilege. A counter-history to liberalism. Translated by Hermann Kopp. Papyrossa, Cologne 2010.
  • The Germans. Special way of an incorrigible people? Berlin 2010. ISBN 978-3-89706-415-7 .
  • Stalin. History and criticism of a black legend. With an essay by Luciano Canfora , Papyrossa, Cologne 2012 (3rd, revised edition 2017).
  • Nonviolence. A counter-story , Argument, Hamburg 2015.
  • The class struggle or the return of the repressed? A political and philosophical story. Papyrossa, Cologne 2016.
  • When the left is missing ... a society of spectacle, crisis, war. Papyrossa, Cologne 2017.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry at prabook.com , accessed on June 28, 2018
  2. ↑ Death report , accessed on June 28, 2018
  3. ↑ Domenico Losurdo: Perchè iscriversi al Pdci , March 21, 2013.
  4. ^ Associazione Politica e Culturale MARX XXI - Consiglio Direttivo ( Memento of October 1, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), accessed October 1, 2015.
  5. ↑ Arnold Schölzel : A chunk in the front yard obituary in Junge Welt from June 30, 2018
  6. ^ Domenico Losurdo, Die Gemeinschaft, der Tod, das Abendland , Heidelberg (JP Meltzer) 1995, p. 302, ISBN 978-3476012999 .
  7. ↑ Christoph Jünke: Off to the last stand? On the criticism of Domenico Losurdo's neo-Stalinism. Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, August 2000, accessed on October 20, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Christoph Jünke: The long shadow of Stalinism: Socialism and democracy yesterday and today . ISP, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-89900-126-6 , p. 123-132 ( rosalux.de ).
  9. ↑ Christoph Jünke: Back to Stalin !? Domenico Losurdo's campaign against de-Stalinization . In: Emancipation . tape 4 , no. 2 , 2014 ( emanzipation.org ).
  10. ↑ Lettere su Stalin. In: Liberazione. April 10, 2009, archived from the original on January 16, 2010 ; Retrieved October 20, 2019 (Italian).
  11. ↑ Domenico Losurdo (1941-2018). In: Jacobin. July 2, 2019, accessed on October 20, 2019 (American English): “While he recognized the exorbitant, paranoid aspects of Stalin's leadership, his efforts to relativize it were often governed by a polemical zeal unjustified by the evidence marshaled. This made his reframing of Stalinism more 'interesting' than necessarily persuasive. "
  12. ^ Domenico Losurdo, Battle for History. Historical revisionism and its myths - Nolte, Furet and the others , Cologne (Papyrossa) 2007, ISBN 978-3-89438-365-7 .
  13. ^ Domenico Losurdo, Battle for History. Historical revisionism and its myths - Nolte, Furet and the others , Cologne (Papyrossa) 2007, p. 12, ISBN 978-3-89438-365-7 .
  14. ^ Domenico Losurdo, Battle for History. Historical revisionism and its myths - Nolte, Furet and the others , Cologne (Papyrossa) 2007, p. 236, ISBN 978-3-89438-365-7 .
  15. ^ Domenico Losurdo, Battle for History. Historical revisionism and its myths - Nolte, Furet and the others , Cologne (Papyrossa) 2007, p. 282, ISBN 978-3-89438-365-7 .
  16. ^ Enzo Traverso, Modernity and Violence. A European Genealogy of Nazi Terror , Cologne (Neuer ISP Verlag) 2003, p. 80. ISBN 3-89900-106-0 .
  17. ↑ Kurt Flasch : And yet he was a destroyer of reason. FAZ, February 21, 2003. (Review by Domenico Losurdo: Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico. Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico. Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2002.)
  18. ^ Richard Albrecht : Critique of Domenico Losurdo's book "Die Deutschen" ( sociologieheutenews.wordpress.com or infopartisan.net ).
personal data
SURNAME Losurdo, Domenico
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian publicist and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Sannicandro di Bari , Italy
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 2018