Archive for the ‘Article’ Category
Corrationalism and the problematic
Dossier: Bachelard and the Concept of Problematic
RP 173 Gaston Bachelard
If the fear of being accused of psychologism were not so keenly felt by epistemologists they would no doubt pay more attention to the problem of the acquisition of ideas.* They would then notice that to each new idea there remains attached a perspective of acquisition, an approach structure which develops in a kind of space–time of [...]
What is a problematic?
Dossier: Bachelard and the Concept of Problematic
RP 173 Patrice Maniglier
Gaston Bachelard’s 1949 book, Le Rationalisme appliqué (RA; best translated as Reason Applied), is essential to an understanding of his work, and Bachelard is essential to an understanding of twentieth-century French philosophy. That this book has never been translated into English shows how little the anglophone world is yet acquainted with some key aspects of this corpus. [...]
What does Bachelard mean by rationalisme appliqué?
Dossier: Bachelard and the Concept of Problematic
RP 173 Mary Tiles
While Bachelard’s Rationalisme appliqué can readily be translated as Applied Rationalism, neither the French nor the English are very revealing of the position being advocated. In particular one would be led very far astray if one were to think of rationalism as a philosophical position which suggests that knowledge can be logically deduced from first principles that [...]
Faust on film
Walter Benjamin and the cinematic ontology of Goethe’s Faust 2
RP 172 Matthew Charles
Isn’t it an affront to Goethe to make a film of Faust, and isn’t there a world of difference between the poem Faust and the film Faust? Yes, certainly. But, again, isn’t there a whole world of difference between a bad film of Faust and a good one? (Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, N1a, 4) Whilst the [...]
Lenin and Gandhi
A missed encounter?
RP 172 Étienne Balibar
The theme I shall address today has all the trappings of an academic exercise.* Still, I would like to attempt to show how it intersects with several major historical, epistemological and ultimately political questions. As a basis for the discussion, I will posit that Lenin and Gandhi are the two greatest figures among revolutionary theorist–practitioners [...]
Also Sprach Zapata
Philosophy and resistance
RP 171 Howard Caygill
Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw hisadversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance. (Clausewitz, On War, 1832) Receive our truth in your dancing heart. Zapatalives, also and for always in these lands. (Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee ZNLA, ‘Votan-Zapata or Five Hundred Years [...]
Political theology, religious fundamentalism and modern politics
RP 171 Marilena Chauí
In order to define a single and indivisible sovereign political power, Western modernity needed to separate itself from the ecclesiastical power that impeded this unity and indivisibility. Consequently, public expressions of religion were placed under the control of rulers and intimate expressions were relegated to the private realm. This task was broadly supported by the [...]
The patient cannot last long
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
RP 170 Stéphane Douailler
The presence on our bookshelves of such texts as Louis Althusser’s Reply to John Lewis and Jacques Rancière’s Althusser’s Lesson immediately invites the readers who pick them up to ask themselves what might be at play between titles that so readily mix, miss or specify the genres – if there are any – through which a text [...]
Philosophy for children
RP 170 Matthew Charles
A well-orchestrated public relations campaign led primarily by educational charity The Philosophy Shop has helped raise the profile of the philosophy for children movement in the UK significantly over the last few years. Whilst The Philosophy Shop has been promoting its ‘Four Rs’ campaign to make ‘Reasoning’ a central feature of the National Curriculum since [...]
Reviewing Rancière. Or, the persistence of discrepancies
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
RP 170 Bruno Bosteels
In the nearly four decades since its original publication, Althusser’s Lesson has acquired a certain mythical aura as the dark precursor of things to come. Even with the wealth of translations of Jacques Rancière’s work that have been published at an increasingly feverish pace over the past few years in the wake of the author’s worldwide [...]
Red years: Althusser’s lesson, Rancière’s error and the real movement of history
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
RP 170 Nathan Brown
The dissolution of the organizational forms which are created by the movement, and which disappear when the movement ends, does not reflect the weakness of the movement, but rather its strength. The time of false battles is over. The only conflict that appears real is the one that leads to the destruction of capitalism. François [...]
Student problems (1964)
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy (with an introduction by Warren Montag)
RP 170 Louis Althusser
What are the theoretical principles of Marxism that should and can come into play in the scientific analysis of the university milieu to which students, along with teachers, research workers and administrators, belong?* Essentially, the Marxist concepts of the technical and social divisions of labour. Marx applied these principles in the analysis of capitalist society. [...]
The map is the territory
Dossier: What is German Media Philosophy?
RP 169 Bernhard Siegert
When I read the expression ‘The map is not theterritory’ for the first time, it occurred to me that it contained the quintessence of Anglo-American philosophyof common sense. The defiant insistence on a logic of representation, a common-sense belief in the evidence of an objective ‘reality’ that is prior to all mental representations or written [...]
Ontogenetic machinery
Dossier: What is German Media Philosophy?
RP 169 Lorenz Engell
Media, as considered by media philosophy, are not what you expect them to be. In the first place, they have almost nothing to do with information, or transmission, or communication, or storage. They do not as such produce sense or distribute meanings. If they do so, it is as a side effect or a secondary [...]
Robinson in Ruins
New materialism and the archaeological imagination
RP 169 Paul Dave
Robinson in Ruins (2010) is the third of Patrick Keiller’s fictionalized documentaries featuring the investigations and struggles of his character, the ‘wandering, cracked scholar’ and political visionary, Robinson.1 The first in the trilogy, London, was released in 1994, and the second, Robinson in Space, in 1997. Together they represent, aesthetically and politically, some of the most enlivening [...]
Subjectivity as medium of the media
Dossier: What is German Media Philosophy?
RP 169 Boris Groys
Contemporary, let us say ‘post-modern’, discourses on media, communication, information and so on are functioning in our society in at least two different – if interconnected – ways.* First, they describe scientifically the functioning of contemporary media and their growing role in our society. But the development of media theory during recent decades was, in [...]
Demonomics
Leibniz and the antinomy of modern power
RP 168 Kyle McGee
The critical ethos that stands behind much of the most impressive and important work on modern forms of power seems to have constructed its own prison. A free and open concept of power – the concept that has guided so many enlightening histories of the present – has revealed itself as yet another technology of [...]
The gender apparatus
Torture and national manhood in the US ‘war on terror’
RP 168 Bonnie Mann
Feminist protest against US torture practices, including outcries over the use of sex, sexuality and sexual identity in the torture of prisoners at US detention sites from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, have understandably tended to focus on what the abuse destroys – the victim and his or her community. Here, though, I ask what the [...]
Architectural Deleuzism
Neoliberal space, control and the ‘univer-city’
RP 168 Douglas Spencer
For many thinkers of the spatiality of contemporary capitalism, the production of all social space tends now to converge upon a single organizational paradigm designed to generate and service mobility, connectivity and flexibility. Networked, landscaped, borderless and reprogrammable, this is a space that functions, within the built environments of business, shopping, education or the ‘creative [...]
Rhizome (With no return)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)
RP 167 Eric Alliez
In the invitation to speakers for the conference From Structure to Rhizome, we suggested that talks might set out by re-examining (and hence ‘re-founding’) texts that we qualified – in far too rapid and expeditious a fashion – as ‘founding’. But we did notmake this suggestion without being conscious of the difficulty involved in the [...]
History (Problem with)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)
RP 167 Michèle Riot-Sarcey
If the philosopher’s role is to forge concepts, the historian’s function is to provide proof of their pertinence. However, this presupposes that the historian uses the concept correctly, taking into consideration the conditions that formed it. A truly transdisciplinary approach makes this possible, thanks to its rigorous method, whereas an interdisciplinary approach is merely a juxtaposition [...]
Theory (Madness of)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)
RP 167 François Cusset
Forty years or so after it initially rose as a rather new name for a rather new thing, theory is still an obtruse signifier, troubling and floating, requiring we go back to basics. Theory as we most often understand it today is the name given by the English-speaking intellectual community to a certain type of [...]
Subject (Re-/decentred)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)
RP 167 Alain de Libera
1 Modern French thought, ‘structuralism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postmodernism’, Marxism as well, are currently associated with the so-called ‘death of the subject’. Foucault’s ‘anti-humanism’, the celebrated ‘death of Man’, the declining popularity of the rational, Kantian, transcendantal subject, reigning over what Lyotard called ‘metanarratives’,1 are all parts of the process. Foucault’s rejection of the subject is unequivocally [...]
Risked democracy
Foucault, Castoriadis and the Greeks
RP 166 Mathieu Potte-Bonneville
The delay involved in the publication of lectures or seminars has strange effects: what comes late and in a different time to its own is research and words which were caught up – more so than the books – in the historical circumstances of their elaboration; and the text that is finally published, with the [...]
Between sharing and antagonism
The invention of communism in the early Marx
RP 166 Antonia Birnbaum
London calling Why talk about communism today?* A first point everybody will be agreed upon: the spectre of communism is not haunting Europe, nor for that matter any other region of the world. The only place where ‘communism’ is a positive name for anything is China, where it designates the ruling party of one of [...]
Structure: method or subversion of the social sciences?
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)
RP 165 Étienne Balibar
It seems there’s no longer any real doubt as to the answer to this question, and that it is doubly negative. ‘Structuralism’, or what was designated as such mainly in France in the 1960s and 1970s (setting aside the question of other uses), is no longer regarded as a truly fertile method in the domains [...]
Science: The invisible transdisciplinarity of French culture
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)
RP 165 Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond
Let me start with an apology: this conference obviously is concerned mainly with philosophy, literature, the social and human sciences, much more than with those sciences that are known as exact, natural or whatever – but which could probably, more to the point, be called ‘inhuman’ and ‘asocial’. It is thus for me, as a [...]
Networks
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)
RP 165 Andrew Barry
In an article first published in July 1968 in New Left Review, Perry Anderson gave an analysis of a critical weakness of British intellectual culture. His diagnosis is remarkable and surprising. One of the key problems, Anderson argued, was that Britain has failed to make any contribution to the classical sociological tradition; moreover, this failure [...]
Sex: a transdisciplinary concept
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)
RP 165 Stella Sandford
What is sex? Some feminists have harboured suspicions about this form of question, given its philosophical (or ‘metaphysical’1) pedigree. But philosophy no longer has the disciplinary monopoly on it. Indeed, with regard to sex, the more interesting task today is to pose and to attempt to answer the question from within a transdisciplinary problematic. For [...]
