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Spontaneous generation

The fantasy of the birth of concepts in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

by Stella Sandford / RP 179 (May/Jun 2013)

In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, at the end of the transcendental deduction of the categories, Kant distinguishes the doctrine of transcendental idealism from competing theories of knowledge – or, more specifically, theories of the relation between concepts and experience – by characterizing them in terms of various theories of biological [...]

Philosophy and the Black Panthers

by Howard Caygill / RP 179 (May/Jun 2013)

The vanguard party only teaches the correct methods of resistance. Huey P. Newton, 1967 ‘Hey Joe! How many of you motherfuckers are coming out here?’ ‘Here’ was Santa Rita Jail, California, early morning, Thursday 3 December 1964. ‘Joe’ was Joe Blum, a student radical, and the accompanying ‘motherfuckers’ were the 814 students who had been [...]

The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process

With introduction by Bruno Bosteels

by Alain Badiou / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013)

After achieving considerable critical acclaim with Almageste and Portulans – two avant-garde novels that promptly caught the attention of his long-time intellectual model Jean-Paul Sartre – Alain Badiou published ‘The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process’, his first work as a philosopher.1 Written in 1965 as part of a seminar presented under the aegis of his [...]

Name of the Father, ‘One’ of the Mother: From Beauvoir to Lacan

With introduction by Penelope Deutscher

by Françoise Collin / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013)

To Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragossa, perched on her column, ‘But there is something more, a puissance beyond the phallus.’ If I take a few aspects of the thought of Jacques Lacan, and investigate their relation to Simone de Beauvoir around one specific point, I have no intention of making him out – [...]

Extraction, logistics, finance

Global crisis and the politics of operations

by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013)

Now that the global crisis of capitalism is entering its fifth year, it is possible to discern the contours of its unfolding. No New Deal or world war is emerging to save the day. The ritual purification of austerity has not cleansed the global sewer of finance despite the harsh and unequal punishments it has [...]

An introduction to Alain Badiou’s ‘The autonomy of the aesthetic process’

by Bruno Bosteels / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013)

See Alain Badiou, ‘The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process’ (in the same issue)

An introduction to Françoise Collin’s ‘Name of the father’

by Penelope Deutscher / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013)

See Françoise Collin, ‘Name of the father’ (in the same issue).

The Two Names of Communism

by John Roberts / RP 177 (Jan/Feb 2013)

Toujours avec l’espoir de rencontrer la mer, lis voyageaient sans pain, sans batons et sans urnes, Mordant au citron d’or de l’ideal amer. Stephane Mallarme, 18621 The recent explosion of writing on the communist idea, ideal and ‘communization’ recovers or expands a moment in the early to mid-1980s when French political theory and philosophy (in [...]

More than everything

Žižek’s Badiouian Hegel

by Peter Osborne / RP 177 (Jan/Feb 2013)

There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although no one has actually read them page by page… a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us. Slavoj Žižek1 Allow me to be that figure (for now anyway), for [...]

Strategies of distinction

Rancière’s Aisthesis and the two regimes of art

by Nicolas Vieillescazes / RP 177 (Jan/Feb 2013)

At the root of Jacque Rancière’s work lies a gesture of dissociation: to unfasten the people, the poor and the proletariat from the Marxist discourses to which they were so firmly fixed that one might think them to be sewn from the same cloth; to reveal the will to mastery and domination inherent in the [...]

Juddering

On Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure

by Art & Language / RP 176 (Nov/Dec 2012)

Discourse, Figure* represents an early transition in Lyotard’s eclectic philosophical development.1 And yet it has acquired a certain authority in the field of Cultural Studies, attracting enthusiasts who are willing to make significant claims on its behalf: it overturns the distinction between theory and practice, it reconciles aesthetics with both historical materialist and psychoanalytical theories, [...]

The Philosophy of Anonymous

Ontological Politics without Identity

by Harry Halpin / RP 176 (Nov/Dec 2012)

You cannot arrest an idea. The last tweet of Topiary, before his arrest Ranging from WikiLeaks to the global struggle against treaties such as ACTA, over the last few years the Web has become a centre of political struggle in and of itself rather than a mere adjunct of other struggles. At the same time, [...]

Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life?

Adorno Prize Lecture

by Judith Butler / RP 176 (Nov/Dec 2012)

I am most honoured to be here on this occasion to receive the Adorno Prize.* I would like this evening to talk to you about a question that Adorno posed, one that is still alive for us today. It is a question to which I return time and again, one that continues to make itself [...]

Thought of the outside

Foucault contra Agamben

by Marie-Christine Leps / RP 175 (Sep/Oct 2012)

It is gladly believed that a culture is more attached to its values than to its forms, that these can easily be modified, abandoned, taken up again; that only meaning is deeply rooted. This is to misunderstand … that people cling more to ways of seeing, saying, doing, and thinking, than to what they see, [...]

The walled city

Cannot one dream of a ‘computer hypothesis’?

by Finn Brunton / RP 175 (Sep/Oct 2012)

This essay is in many ways a companion piece to Gary Hall’s ‘Pirate Radical Philosophy’ in RP 173 (May/June 2012). Consider it a prequel, or something akin to a video game’s expansion pack, extending and elaborating on the original’s materials. It is a story of the spatial history of escape routes, secret countries, renegade zones [...]

Fabrication defect

Fabrication defect: François Laruelle’s philosophical materials

by Andrew McGettigan / RP 175 (Sep/Oct 2012)

François Laruelle, professor of philosophy at Paris X, Nanterre, has been publishing since the early 1970s and now has around twenty book-length titles to his name. English-language reception of his work owes most to the efforts of Ray Brassier, who published an account of Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’ in Radical Philosophy in 2003 and critically incorporated aspects of that [...]

Disguised as a dog

Cynical Occupy?

by Peter Osborne / RP 174 (Jul/Aug 2012)

I take my title and my philosophical cue from a passage in Marx’s 1839 ‘Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy’. I take my artistic cue from the early work of Valie Export. The passage from Marx reads as follows: As in the history of philosophy there are nodal points which raise philosophy in itself to concretion, apprehend [...]

Adorno and the Weather

Critical Theory in an Era of Climate Change

by Ackbar Abbas / RP 174 (Jul/Aug 2012)

In Beckett’s Endgame – about which Adorno wrote an important essay – nature is in ruins (‘corpsed’, as Clov describes it), yet the weather is still important.* The pathetic story that Hamm tells (and he has to bribe Nagg to listen) about a man crawling to him on his belly to ask for help on one Christmas [...]

Corrationalism and the problematic

Dossier: Bachelard and the Concept of Problematic

by Gaston Bachelard / RP 173 (May/Jun 2012)

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 does Bachelard mean by rationalisme appliqué?