Article archive

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 […]

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 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 […]

Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, Alain de Libera Introduction by Peter Osborne.

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 […]

Introduction Gegenstand/Objekt Dominique Pradelle Object Olivier Boulnois Res Jean-François Courtine

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 […]

[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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Answering the question: What is to be done? (education) David cunningham The question ʻWhat is to be done?ʼ, Adorno remarked, frequently ʻsabotages the logical progress of knowledge that alone allows for changeʼ . However, despite being always-already-inscribed within the imperatives of instrumental rationality, it is, he acknowledged, nonetheless ʻunavoidableʼ. [1] This is especially so for […]

An aesthetic education against aesthetic education Stewart martin Documenta 12ʼs commitment to the question of what is to be done in education is to be welcomed from an institution that has sought to sustain itself as an autonomous cultural realm, a public sphere, in the face of its fabulous state sponsorship and relations to the […]

Doing something and doing nothing Esther leslie Culture is put busily to work these days. In Europe, certainly, culture is made the bearer of promises – the promise of a better quality of life, of a more educated public, of a more efficient and value-added cultural sphere, and, not least, the promise of regenerated economies. […]

Writing in 1970, the French philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre proposed a ʻtheoretical hypothesisʼ: by ʻurban revolution I refer to the transformations that affect contemporary society, ranging from the period when questions of growth and industrialization predominate … to the period when the urban problematic becomes predominant, when the search for solutions and modalities […]

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 […]

Deleuze and cosmopolitanism John sellars The status of the political within the work of Gilles Deleuze has recently become a topic of contention. [1] Two recent books argue the case for two extremes among a range of possible interpretations. At one end of the spectrum, Peter Hallward has argued that Deleuzeʼs personal ethic of deterritorialization […]

Whatever happened to martial law? Detainees and the logic of emergency Mark neocleous Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated. Guantánamo guard diary entry, 20 December 2002What is a detainee? The term has been given a […]

The promise of justice Howard caygill Breaking the promise of justice is an act peculiarly repugnant to reason. It implies a double betrayal: not only of the promised justice but also of the justice of the promise. Nevertheless, how is it possible to do justice to the promise of justice? Especially when this very promise […]

Diderot’s egg Divorcing materialism from eliminativism Isabelle stengers I have taken the invitation to speak about materials and materialisms* as an opportunity to re-examine the position I adopted nearly thirty years ago now, when writing La Nouvelle Alliance (translated as Order Out of Chaos) with Ilya Prigogine. [1] In that book, I proposed a definition […]