The reproach of abstraction

The reproach of abstraction Peter osborne This is a paper about abstraction, in particular, but by no means exclusively – and this ʻby no means exclusivelyʼ is a large part of its point – philosophical abstraction.* It is concerned at the outset with what might be called the reproach of abstraction: the commonly held view, […]

Spheres of action: Art and politics (introduction)

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 […]

What is to be done? (education): Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project (introduction)

Dossier documenta 12 magazines project What is to be done? (education)This dossier is Radical Philosophyʼs contribution to the documenta 12 magazines project. Documenta is an international exhibition of modern and contemporary art that has been held in Kassel, Germany, since 1955 and currently takes place once every five years. For many years now, it has […]

Neo-classic: Alain Badiou’s Being and Event

Neo-classic Alain Badiou’s Being and Event Peter osborne If anyone was in doubt about the continuing grip of French philosophy on the theoretical imagination of the anglophone humanities, the reception of the writings of Alain Badiou must surely have put paid to such reservations. The translation of his magnum opus, Being and Event, in spring […]

Marx and the philosophy of time

Marx and the philosophy of time Peter osborne What is Marx’s contribution to the philosophy of time? Or, to put it another way, what has a temporal reading of Marx’s writings to contribute to the understanding of the philosophical aspects of his thought? How, for example, might it reconfigure the relationship between the historical, analytical […]

A very different context: Dossier: Art and Immaterial Labour (with an introduction by Peter Osborne)

Dossier: Art and Immaterial Labour

Dossier Art and immaterial labour ‘Art and immaterial labour’… the conjunction is at once innocent and presumptuous. As Adorno suggested, if the general problem with using the word ‘and’ in titles is that it ‘permits everything to be connected with everything else and is thus incapable of hitting the mark’, in some instances it nonetheless […]

One hundred and fifty, not out

Editorial One hundred and fifty, not out Anniversaries can be anxious times, as the past piles high – and not only in the form of wreckage. As the revisitings of May ’68 running up to its fortieth birthday last month showed, the recent past retains its currency as a weapon in the present, constantly in […]

Undoing the aesthetic image: Dossier: Undoing the Aesthetic Image (introduction)

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

Dossier Undoing the aesthetic image The displacement of critical energies from politics into aesthetics has a history as long as that of aesthetics itself. Indeed, a case can be made that in its immediately post-Kantian formation ‘aesthetics’ simply is the name for the displacement of political desire into a philosophical discourse about the structure of […]

Introduction: Introduction to the dossier 'From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought' (RP 165/167)

Dossier: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)

The concept of transdisciplinarity is not part of the explicit discourse or self-consciousness of ‘French thought’. Rather, it is used here, imported from the outside as a kind of operator or problematizing device, to begin a process of rethinking one of that body of thought’s most distinctive but infrequently remarkedupon characteristics – its tendency to […]