Search results for ""Author Don Milligan""

The "spectre of communism" which Karl Marx confidently evoked in 1848 is now nothing more than a ghostly and ghastly nightmare, without form or substance. This is because working people have developed a love-hate relationship with capitalism. They hate insecurity, inequality, and greed, and love civic and political freedom. They love mass consumption, and accept the logic of commerce. Barreling along through wars, revolutions, epidemics, and crises of all sorts, working people in their millions have consistently dumfounded and dismayed the left, by their refusal to countenance any alternative to the capitalist mode of life. We have to ask: Is it possible to reverse this reality, and once again talk of the necessity of communism?

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'Desire, sexuality and biology appear to be inextricably linked. Not simply because we exist "as", "with" and "in" our bodies , but because our sexual feelings ... continue to be represented and understood as expressions of our biological constitution. Yet somehow the idea that sexuality is an "ideological imposition upon the body" - that is, a social construction - has taken firm root in the academy and among the political opponents of phallocentric sexuality. The dissonance between the theory of sexuality - the history of sexuality - and its lived practice continues unabated.' In Sex Life, Don Milligan explores the variety of ways in which sexuality has been theorised in the twentieth century - from Freud to the modern critical theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and Lacan. He examines the conflicting claims of biological essentialism and social determinism, and argues, the the course of a lucid critical review of the history of ideas about sexuality, that the apparent contradiction between these two extremes is misleading, simplistic and ultimately unhelpful. Milligan's controversial and provocative study provides the grounding for new developments in the debates over sexuality.

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