"an intellectually & politically independent rag which does not whitewash YUFA nor the administration, nor PEN nor AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL but which is generously
contributed to by YUFA members.

Paulo Freyre

Paulo Freire recently passed away--his tragic death has robbed us of one of the most radical, politically engaged, public intellectuals of our time--but this tragic event cannot rob us of Freire's legacy nor can it diminish the promise and insights of his life's work. His work emanated a spirit--between every line there was a sense of urgency, a passion, and an immediateness which was and is as rare as it is refreshing--he was someone who really took the theory/practice nexus seriously--someone who was engaged in struggle all his life, someone who was much more than an armchair academic...

Although Freire's thought is most often taken up in education circles, and more specifically in the discourse of critical pedagogy, his work I believe provides us with a richness that should not be restricted to any one discipline. Indeed, his analyses provide a source of radical hope in an age marked by postmodern despair and Nietzschean nihilism. While postmodern prophets have, for the last two decades or so, been busily proclaiming the death and/or implosion of the subject or treating subjects as mere functions of discourse and as entities which float aimlessly in a sea of ever-proliferating signifiers, Freire reminds us of the living, breathing, and bleeding subjects of history. In an intellectual environment full of decentered subjects, Freire calls our attention to the children of the damned, the wretched of the earth, the victims of the culture of silence. Unlike those various strands of poststructuralism which seem to believe that history and politics happen without the agency and will of embodied social actors, Freire reminds us that people make history, although not always in conditions of their choosing. Social subjects in Freire's narratives are firmly rooted in historical struggle and social agents never lose their capacity for effecting social transformation. Freire's dialectical posturing where the world and action are intimately intertwined reveals the potency of human enterprise and human knowledge as both products of, and forces in shaping, social reality.

Moreover, Freire's dialectical understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity still has much to offer to contemporary theoretical debates for Freire insists that the notion of subjectivity should not subvert the reality of the conditions of everyday life. For Freire the radical is never a subjectivist--the subjective aspect exists only in relation to the objective aspect (the concrete reality which is the object of his/her analysis). Subjectivity and objectivity thus join in dialectical unity producing knowledge in solidarity with action and vice versa. This is a point which deserves special attention in light of certain postmodernist claims that all notions of a real, objective world are but metaphysical tales.

While there are many who seek to bury objective reality beneath the priority of significations and discourses--Freire reminds us that the polarization of wealth and the rampant poverty, exploitation, and alienation engendered by global capitalism are historical processes whose objective reality cannot be denied. This is a strand of Freire's thought that bears mentioning here especially in light of the "culturalist" turn which has characterized alot of recent social theory. Indeed, in the rush to avoid the "theoretically incorrect" sins of totalization and economism, many postmodernists have elided even a minimalist concern with political economy, class formation, etc. As a result many have replaced the economic reductionism of orthodox Marxism with a new form of reductionism--that of culturalism. As a number of astute critics have aptly noted, the current romance with the cultural and the concomitant ignorance of political economy has helped to advance the importance of cultural identification, especially for marginalized constituencies, but at the same time has obfuscated the political and economic roots of their marginalization; undermined an exploration of the ways in which difference is actively produced in relation to the history and social organization of capital--inclusive of imperialist and colonialist legacies; and failed to apprehend the structural and institutional parameters that produce difference.

Freire's insights are crucial here for he insists on a deep connection between the culture of everyday life and an understanding of capitalist contradictions--his work represents an important dialectical understanding of culture and political economy--the significance of which cannot be elaborated on in one post. Finally, at a time when the discourse of humanism has been relegated to the dustbin of history, Freire's revolutionary humanism (as opposed to bourgeois liberal humanism) provides a constant reminder that the project of humanity remains unfinished--that one must remain committed to the project of socialism precisely because [to paraphrase Eagleton (1996)] the values of the radicalized Enlightenment have not yet been universalized. Freire reminds us, in short, that in a world where too many do not eat, where too many are deprived of justice, and where too many are deprived of their humanity, it is still too early to write the obituaries of revolutionary humanism and the radicalized Enlightenment project.

I'll end with a parting remark uttered by Freire only a few days before his untimely death--Freire would have gone to Cuba next week to receive an award from Fidel Castro and it was something he was looking forward to--in discussing his upcoming trip Freire said: "I could never think of education without love and that is why I think I am an educator,
first of all because I feel love . . ." As one of his close friends remarked--"Freire is not leaving the struggle, he has merely changed his location." Yes indeed.

Valerie Scatamburlo