On Bergson’s metaphysics of time

The last two decades have seen a revival of interest in the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), in large part because of its role in the writings of Gilles Deleuze. However, it has been a noteworthy characteristic of the new Bergsonism (or Deleuze-Bergsonism) that it has proceeded more or less as if earlier criticisms of […]

W.G. Sebald and the modern art of memory

W.G. Sebald and the modern art of memory Stewart martin been repressed within cultural consciousness, but with what has been repressed by the dominant scenes and institutions of memory, with what the memory of the repressed itself represses. This is controversial but also timely, as the recent commemorations of the bombing of Dresden indicate. It […]

Late Merleau-Ponty, revived

Late Merleau-Ponty, revived Eric matthews * Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 2003. xx + 296 pp., £69.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 8101 1445 3 hb., 0 8101 1446 1 pb.; Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of […]

The concept of metropolis: Philosophy and urban form

In what sense would a certain concept of the urban meet, as Henri Lefebvre asserted some thirty-five years ago, a ʻtheoretical needʼ? What forms of crosscultural and cross-disciplinary ʻgeneralityʼ would be at stake here? And if this is indeed, as Lefebvre always insisted, a question of a necessary ʻelaboration, a search, a conceptual formulationʼ, what […]

The concept of money

The concept of money Christopher J. Arthur In the history of philosophy the greatest minds have been aware that the existence and power of money pose a problem. One need only mention Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Simmel. Of course, if one accepts, as I do, that Capital is a work of philosophy as much as […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]