At 19:00 p.m. on April 29th, our college held seventh lectures on the "short term lecture project of world famous scholars" on Tencent Conference. It's our honor to invite Dr. Antonis Balasopoulos is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of Cyprus, Cyprus. His research interests and publications involve the comparative study of literary and philosophical utopianism, political theory and political philosophy, Marxism and European and American literature, especially prose fiction, in the 19th and early 20th centuries.The theme of this academic lecture is "Toward a Revolutionary Philosophy of History? Repetition, Revolution, Betrayal and Fidelity in Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)". This lecture is presided over by vice dean Fang Yumei, translated by Mr. Song Liang and Yan Ping, and attended by all teachers and students.
Dr. Antonis Balasopoulos made the time as clues and reflected on the possibility that such a thing as a law of history exists—not as an abstract speculative category, but as an integral aspect of the development of the class struggle. He pointed that it was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history. This work at large will be concerned: counter-revolutionary repetition, the repetition of coups aiming, at least in theory, at the restoration of a conservative social orde. Then, Dr. Antonis Balasopoulos explained that why is there such repetition in the first place? He proposde the following two observations in response to this question. First, there is counter-revolutionary repetition because there is revolutionary repetition; the former constitutes a reactive repetition set against the active repetition of the latter. Considered in their struggles against each other, revolution and counter-revolution are not simply modern political phenomena, but phenomena that define the era of political modernity as an era where the “masses” finally play a determining political role. Second, there is counter-revolutionary repetition because the revolution has not gone far enough; it has not fully destroyed the old social relations and the ideologies that accompany them, therefore all sorts of residual forces (feudalism, monarchism, absolutism, etc.) attempt to make a “comeback” by reversing their own overthrow.
Dr. Antonis Balasopoulos concluded with a final question: is this diagnosis correct? The properly dialectical answer, I believe, is “yes and no”. Yes, to the extent that the Paris Commune, which will be the next major event of French history, will indeed vindicate Marx in featuring a new social actor (the working class), as well as institutional and ideological elements never before seen in history (from revocable and accountable representation to women’s emancipation); but also no, to the extent that the Commune will then become the prototype for all post nineteenth-century revolutions, the site to which a world-historical revolutionary like Lenin will obsessively return in search of lessons, which is to say, both fundamental models for revolutionary institutions and for errors to avoid.
Dr. Antonis Balasopoulos said that Marx here dwells on the phenomenon of language interference in the process of second language learning. But because he is, in the Brumaire perhaps more than anywhere else, also a master of metaphor, Marx is here using questions of second language learning to address precisely the question of the character of proletarian revolution, the revolution of the future
Dr. Antonis Balasopoulos concluded this lecture with a poetry “ remember without fixation, forget without oblivion”. He thought China might be able to teach all of us something about this apparently complex process of negotiating between apparent opposites.
At the end of the symposium, vice president Yumei Fang, on behalf of the faculty and students, expressed his gratitude to Dr. Antonis Balasopoulosrr for his deep and thoughtful sharing. Then it’s the interactive question section. All participants had a lively discussion on this issue.
