Article archive

Freud against oedipus? philippe van haute There is a popular story, even among scholars, that tells us that Freudian psychoanalysis was founded at the very moment that Freud wrote to Fliess (in 1897) that he no longer believed in his Neurotica: ‘Ich glaube an meine Neurotica nicht mehr.’ [1] This story reads this declaration as […]

‘For all that gives rise to an inscription in general’ hans-Jörg Rheinberger * This is a translation of ‘Al es, was überhaupt zu einer Inskription führen kann’, the first chapter of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Iterationen [Iterations], Merve Verlag, Berlin, 2005, pp. 9–29. It is published here with the kind permission of Merve Verlag. Its title cites Liechtensteiner […]

Helen macfarlane Independent object David black and ben watson Talking of the destructive nature of egoistic desire, its satisfaction that the other is nothing, Hegel made room for further development, an empirical moment which might surprise those who think German Idealism only ever allowed for abstraction: ‘In this satisfaction, however, experience makes it [the simple […]

The contingency of cheese On Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism David cunningham Fredric Jameson has been a busy man over the last decade. As well as two massive tomes on science fiction and modernism, combining republished essays with extensive new material, there has been a trilogy of books on Hegel and Marx which have […]

A metaphysical turn? Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence Patrice maniglier A book bearing the title An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, but with the subtitle An Anthropology of the Moderns,* will immediately prompt the question: is this a work of metaphysics, as suggested by the title (which was lifted from the philosopher […]

Rhetorics of populism Ernesto Laclau, 1935–2014 John kraniauskas The publication of Ernesto Laclau’s The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, only weeks after his death in April 2014, confirms his status as one of the foremost contemporary political theorists of the Left.* Since the 1980s, his influence has been extraordinary, particularly in the UK and Latin America: […]

Most branches of philosophy and many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences studied in the anglophone academy draw on texts written in languages other than English and therefore rely on the products of translation, especially translations of historical, European philosophy. However, surprisingly little philosophical attention has been paid to the role of individual […]

Bankocracy Greek money and the ‘new idea’ of Europe Marie cuillerai and Maria KakogianniJuly Monarchy–november democracy On the contrary, the faction of the bourgeoisie that ruled and legislated through the Chambers had a direct interest in the indebtedness of the state. The state deficit was really the main object of its speculation and the chief source […]

On 25 February 2002, Rafael Perez, a former oicer of the LAPD’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit (CRASH), appeared in court accused of various crimes: covering up a bank robbery, shooting and framing an innocent citizen, stealing and selling cocaine from evidence lockers, being a member of the Los Angeles gang called the Bloods, […]

Dossier BL ANQUI’ S E TERNAL GAP The radical gap A preface to Auguste Blanqui, Eternity by the Stars Jacques rancière I leaf through the programme and learn that the very stars themselves – which, I am irmly convinced, should be but rarely disturbed, and even then only for high reasons of meditative gravity … […]

Auguste Blanqui, heretical communistdaniel Bensaïd and Michael Löwy Within the history of French socialism there is an invisible, heretical, marginalized and suppressed current. It constitutes an orientation obscured by the dominant tendencies on the left from the end of the nineteenth century until today – tendencies represented by the rival and complementary pairings of Jaurès and […]

Blanqui’s bifurcationspeter hallward Auguste Blanqui’s Eternity by the Stars (1872) is perhaps the only text, across the scattered fragments of his œuvre, that poses a genuine problem of interpretation.1 How could this ultra-voluntarist revolutionary come to embrace a vision of the cosmos based on endless repetition and the eternal recycling of monotonous variation? Blanqui committed […]

From Abstraction to Wunsch The Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies Howard caygill DICTIONARY Say of it: ʻItʼs only for ignoramuses!ʼ . . ʻIʼd rather die than use one!ʼ Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received IdeasThe Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies* deserves a warm welcome from everyone interested in philosophy and its history. While connoisseurs of philosophical lexicography will […]

Kojève’s letter to stalin hager weslati The philosophical œuvre of Alexandre Kojève is often considered to consist of an eclectic and distorted Marxist–Heideggerian interpretation of Hegel. More recent biographical studies claim that his attempt to write a book that would define his ‘system of knowledge’ (interrupted by his sudden death in 1968) was an impossible […]

The postconceptual condition Or, the cultural logic of high capitalism today Peter osborne Those with long enough memories will no doubt recognize the crossed syntax of my title.* It mimics, first, that of a text which, while in historical terms still recent, is nonetheless already antiquated, even if not yet sufficiently so to have acquired […]

introduction to horkheimer, ‘sketch for a novel’ In autumn 1942, while working with T.W. Adorno on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer began to write a novel. Its lead character was the English prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940), who, in September 1938, after several meetings with Hitler and along with France’s Edouard Daladier, agreed not to […]

Drone geographies derek gregory Last year Apple rejected Josh Begley’s Drones+ app three times. The app promised to send push notifications to users each time a US drone strike was reported, but Apple decided that many people would find it ‘objectionable’ (they said nothing about what they might feel about the strikes). When he defended […]

Defiance or emancipation? peter hallward What is resistance? Rather than offering a conceptual definition, Howard Caygill’s new book* approaches resistance as a problematic and elusive practice that calls for reflective judgement in the Kantian sense. His point of departure is the claim that resistance demands appreciation on its own evolving terms, rather than as an […]

extra, extra, read all about it! Contemporary art is postconceptual art Antonia birnbaum * Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London and New York, 2013. vi + 282 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 78168 113 8 hb., 978 1 78168 094 0 pb. Numbers in parentheses in the […]

Humanist Marxist and prophet of modern life, Marshall Berman passed away on 11 September 2013, aged 72. He died of a heart attack, breakfasting with an old friend, photographer Mel Rosenthal, in one of his favourite Upper West Side eateries, the Metro Diner. Marshall Howard Berman grew up in humble Jewish Morrisania in the South […]

What is a no-fly zone? Formally, it is a prohibition on flying in order to call a halt to hostilities in the region, usually enacted in aid of a group or groups which might otherwise suffer violence. When the Libyan civil war broke out in early 2011 one of the first demands made by several […]