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Beyond Barthes: Rethinking the phenomenology of photography

Beyond Barthes Rethinking the phenomenology of photography Andrew fisher This article attempts to outline a phenomenology of photography, oriented by the situation of photography in contemporary media culture. Various recent photographic art practices have come to emphasize what may be seen as specifically phenomenological issues of appearance, perception and form. The widespread use of photography to address questions of cultural identity has te...

The Dreambird of Experience: Utopia, Possibility, Boredom

What future for utopia? Or, rather, what future for the utopian after the critique of utopia? What future for possibility after the critique of its depiction as actual?* Utopias have a notoriously contradictory structure: they evoke possibilities by depicting them as actual, yet thereby, in themselves partaking of the actual – as depictions – they necessarily foreclose the most radically possibilizing aspects of their own imaginings (the infinity ...

The awfulness of the actual: Counter-consumerism in a new age of war

Commentary The awfulness of the actual Counter-consumerism in a new age of war Kate soper It is more than four years since the September 11th attack; there is turmoil, daily death and anguish in Iraq, and no sign of a resolution to the ramifying problems created by the invasion and the subsequent ignominious actions of the occupying forces, or by the ʻinsurgentsʼ whom the illegal invasion has predictably summoned into being. Terrorist retaliation...

Israel/Palestine and the paradoxes of academic freedom

In the last few years, two separate debates on academic freedom have emerged in the United States, and both of them have Israel/Palestine at their centre. The first has to do with arguments against the academic boycott of Israeli institutions on grounds of academic freedom, and the second has to do with the new Academic Bill of Rights, sponsored by David Horowitz, which maintains that the classroom should present balancing points of view on politi...

Commodity aesthetics revisited: Exchange relations as the source of antagonistic aesthetization

Thus much of this, will make black white; foul, fair…This line from Shakespeare figures in a longer quotation in Marxʼs Capital, in the chapter on hoarding. The sentence to which the footnote with the Shakespeare quotation is attached, reads: ʻJust as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too, for its part, as a radical leveller, it extinguishes all distinctions.ʼ [1] However, this is not a complete descript...

Orientalisms in the interpretation of Islamic philosophy

Orientalisms in the interpretation of Islamic philosophy Muhammad ali khalidi The recent death of Edward Said has reignited the debate as to whether his landmark work Orientalism still has something to teach us about the study of Arab-Islamic civilization. In this article, I will argue that Saidʼs central thesis in Orientalism has a direct explanatory role to play in our understanding of the work produced in at least one area of scholarship about...

Walking through walls: Soldiers as architects in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

This article is based around several interviews I conducted with both Israeli military personnel and Palestinian activists following the 2002 Israeli incursion into Palestinian areas as part of operation ʻDefensive Shieldʼ. [1] Using these interviews I will try, in what follows, to reflect upon an emergent relationship between armed conflicts and the built environment. Contemporary urban operations play themselves out within a constructed, real or ...

The future of fascism

Since the collapse of actually existing socialism and the abrupt ending of the Cold War that had polarized the world along the lines of contending theories of modernization, there has been a steady attempt to recover historical intensities that had been displaced by the reduction of political differences to a dyadic struggle between ʻtotalitarianismʼ and the ʻfree worldʼ. Almost as if the flood gates had been lifted, the suppressed experiences of ...

War on latency: On some relations between surrealism and terror: Dossier: Spheres of action - Art and politics

Dossier: Spheres of action - Art and politics

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer through to ʻmiddle periodʼ Habermas). On the other hand it has come to denote a far broader but nonetheless discrete trad...

Re-presentation of the repressed: The political revolution of the neo-avant-garde: Dossier: Spheres of action - Art and politics

Dossier: Spheres of action - Art and politics

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer through to ʻmiddle periodʼ Habermas). On the other hand it has come to denote a far broader but nonetheless discrete trad...

The politics of equal aesthetic rights: Dossier: Spheres of action - Art and politics

Dossier: Spheres of action - Art and politics

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer through to ʻmiddle periodʼ Habermas). On the other hand it has come to denote a far broader but nonetheless discrete trad...

Nihilism and faith: Rose, Bernstein and the future of Critical Theory

Nihilism and faith Rose, Bernstein and the future of Critical Theory Tony gorman In a succession of books the late Gillian Rose and Jay Bernstein have sought to defend and elaborate upon the Adornian inheritance both within Critical Theory, contra Habermas, [1] and beyond Critical Theory, contra post-structuralist and postmodernist thought. [2] In these works, Rose and Bernstein are clearly engaged in a shared project and present a common front t...

Mirrors without images: Mimesis and recognition in Lacan and Adorno

Mirrors without images Mimesis and recognition in Lacan and Adorno Vladimir safatle Mène-moi vers la vieAu-delà de la grille basseQui me sépare de moi même Qui divise tout sauf mes cendresSauf la terreur que jʼai de moi.Paul ÉluardIn the history of the relations between philosophy and psychoanalysis, there have been two major developments: one in France and the other in Germany. It is widely accepted that these intellectual experiences have taken...

The philosopher’s fear of alterity: Levinas, Europe and humanities ‘without Sacred History’

Europe, thatʼs the Bible and the Greeks. It has come closer to the Bible and to its true fate. Everything else in the world must be included in this. I donʼt have any nostalgia for the exotic. For me Europe is central. Emmanuel Levinas, 1986 [1] Those who have sought resources in Levinas for a project of anti-racism have been confounded by some of his comments about non-Western cultures: ʻthe exoticʼ. In addition, many of his advocates have been ...

Making life livable: Transsexuality and bodily transformation

[We] do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of oneʼs gender and hence the unrecognizability of oneʼs personhood. [1] The aim of this artucke is to try and make sense of transsexual2 desire f...

Inside out: Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Papers

Inside out Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Papers Daniel W. Smith Félix Guattari met Gilles Deleuze in Paris shortly after the events of May 1968, through a mutual friend. Over the next twenty-five years, he would co-author five books with Deleuze, including, most famously, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia – AntiOedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1981). Their collaboration, a kind of French version of Marx and Engels, sparked enormous i...

An immanent transcendental: Foucault, Kant and critical philosophy

An immanent transcendental Foucault, Kant and critical philosophy keith robinson Every philosophy conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilThe relation of Foucaultʼs work to philosophy remains an unsettled issue. Indeed, Foucault sometimes preferred to present himself as ʻthe masked philosopherʼ. Much like Nietzscheʼs ʻhermitʼ, Foucault wrote books to conceal what lies wit...

Petrified life: Adorno and Agamben

In his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, Adorno maintained that ʻthe form in which metaphysics impinges on us urgently todayʼ is ʻthe question whether it is still possible to liveʼ. [1] Such a question is speculative, since the possibility of life is taken to have migrated to the margins of human experience. For Adorno, life in postwar capitalist societies was a life that ʻdoes not liveʼ. [2] The contemporary philosopher who has most insistently take...

The involution of photography

The involution of photography Andrew fisher As we settle further into the era of digital media and globalized visual culture, it might be tempting to think that photography holds no more than historical interest. Yet it continues to feature in debates with considerable significance for the present. [1] The terms by which it was negotiated in the twentieth century – the print, the negative and the mechanical-optical apparatus, the affective experi...