Archive for the ‘Obituary’ Category
León Rozitchner, 1924–2011
Politics and subjectivity, head-to-head
RP 172 Bruno Bosteels
When León Rozitchner passed away on 4 September 2011 after months in the hospital where he had been battling the complications of a cancer operation, his long-time friend and the current director of the National Library of Argentina, Horacio González, referred to him as ‘the philosopher the country has had for the past sixty years’. A man of untiring [...]
Friedrich Adolf Kittler, 1943–2011
‘Switch off all apparatuses’
RP 172 Gill Partington
It is a mark of how far Kittler’s reputation had spread in the English-speaking world that he had acquired his own cutely alliterative epithet: ‘the Derrida of the digital age’. It was probably an inevitable moniker for a figure who brought his own brand of poststructuralist thinking to bear on media technologies, but it is [...]
David Macey, 1949-2011
Biographer of the French intellectual Left
RP 171 Neil Belton, Peter Osborne
David Macey died from complications of lung cancer on 7 October. He embodied the paradox of being a fine public intellectual while remaining an intenselyprivate person. He was one of the best intellectual historians of his generation and added appreciably to scholarly knowledge, yet did his most significant work as a freelance writer outside the [...]
Margaret Whitford, 1947–2011
RP 170 Kathleen Lennon
‘It is difficult to convey the desert which faced women philosophers in Britain in the early 1980s’, Margaret Whitford once remarked. It was a desert that Margaret’s own work was pivotal in modifying. At a time when feminism was flourishing outside the academy, philosophy seemed especially immune from its influence; both in terms of content [...]
Sara Ruddick, 1935–2011
A Mother's Thought
RP 167 Lisa Baraitser
‘I speak about a mother’s thought’ wrote Sara Ruddick, the feminist philosopher who has died in New York at the age of 76. Along with Adrienne Rich, Ruddick was probably the most important philosophical thinker to address the issue of mothering and motherhood since second-wave feminism, and in a similar spirit to that of Grace Paley, [...]
Captain Beefheart, 1941–2010
Vorticist Artist
RP 166 Ben Watson
Ben Watson assesses Beefheart’s work as a protest against those who profit from the very separation of elite and mass music.
Colin Ward, 1924–2010
The incremental anarchist
RP 161 Stuart White
Colin Ward, who died on 11 February 2010, was the leading anarchist thinker and writer of postwar Britain. Ward’s anarchism was at once constructive, creative and immensely practical. It drew critical but sympathetic attention from many outside the anarchist movement, and arguably it still holds lessons for contemporary radical thought. Born in 1924 in suburban Essex, [...]
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908–2009
A Lévi-Straussian century
RP 160 Patrice Maniglier
Patrice Maniglier argues that if the next century might be one day be recognized as Deleuzian or Badiouian, it won’t be so without us first realizing that the one that has just ended was Lévi-Straussian.
Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004
RP 129 David Cunningham, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Butler, Simon Critchley, David Macey, David Wood
