Lenin Revisited

Description

This book is another important monograph on classical texts of Marxist philosophy by the writer after he has finished Marx Revisited and after the second edition of Complete Works of Lenin was published in China. Zhang Yibing has dedicated an arduous effort to reveal the secrets of Lenin’s philosophical thoughts, especially analyses important shifts in Lenin’s scope of understanding on Marxist philosophy and evaluates his studies on Hegel’s philosophy in his later period. In this book the author puts forward a new type of reading method on how to read such quasi-texts as annotations and notes made by Lenin, that is, the theory of the constitution of the horizontal thought. Facing with the kernel reading texts, i.e., the most important Bern Notes in Lenin’s Philosophical Notes, the author radically gets rid of the method, which has been employed by the traditional studies in Soviet Union and in Western Lenin Studies. Author keenly reviews past works made by Soviet philosophers and tries to reconstruct Lenin’s changing process on logical contexts in his own “lab for thoughts”, esp. his momentous transformations during his readings on Hegel’s philosophy. This book contains an accurate classification on Lenin’s philosophical notes. All these qualify this book as a new, and thought provoking work on Lenin’s works.

Terrell Carver has made following comments on the book: “… Furthermore, unlike many commentators of Marxist theory in both the East and the West, he has not assumed a dogmatic necessity for orthodoxy or science at the beginning of his theory”. In his new work Lenin Revisited, Zhang Yibing begins with a broad, global scholarly scope in revealing that Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks are really a scholarly “mixture” that has been subjected to editing and refining. He goes on to conduct careful analysis of each constitutive element by unifying the dominant textual form and the editing expectations. This is doubtless a direct contribution to the improvement of interpretive theory. Zhang Yibing refers to this as “field work”; he has also learned much from this process. Building on the works of Roland Barthes, Zhang Yibing again demonstrates that textual interpretation is not a simple “return” to the “author himself” in a bookish sense; rather, it is a creative, productive thought experience shared by the researcher and the reader.