In addition, if we are to take Althusser's retrospective word for it, the pieces he published during this period were intended as political-theoretical acts, polemics meant to respond to contemporary opinions and policies and to shift the terms of these arguments as well as the actions which were their results.
This short, punchy book is clearly meant as a polemic, and that's not necessarily bad.
All this is not meant to be a defeatist polemic, but rather a call for even more that needs to be done.
For the past two years, Libya has meant just one thing in Washington: a polemic about the attack on a U.S. diplomatic installation in Benghazi and the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Jaden Smith has started modeling for Louis Vuitton's women's line without offering a corresponding polemic on what it "means" that the greater implications of one of the most famous young men in the world is now wearing dresses.
"If it is simply meant to strengthen the European mechanisms already in place to govern finances, then it is not helpful, in my opinion, to stir up the polemic".
These men were anti-Stalinist Marxists in love with modernism, and bent on defying the CP's primitive understanding of literature as a tool of polemics; they loved Trotsky because he had said that art could best aid the revolution by being true to itself rather than to political correctness, by which was meant the social realism that dominated the fiction of the 1930s.
Whatever this work may have meant to its creators, for us right now it raises questions about the sources of art-making and embodies a forceful polemic against the idea that great art can arise only from within a narrow art-historical narrative.
Like you, I understand on a deep, visceral level--one that can't be duplicated by intellectual reasoning or academic polemics--what it means to live daily with the dialectical tension of loving your work every bit as much as your children and family, of trying to nurture mutually exclusive yet equally sacrosanct priorities.
Under Bavarian law, that means the 800-page polemic will enter into the public domain, its ban lifted.
