Critique without ontology: Genealogy, collective subjects and the deadlocks of evidence

In the past few years, the number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea has dramatically increased due to the strengthening of border controls and a deliberate politics of migration containment put into place by the EU in cooperation with third countries. In 2018, according to UN Refugee Agency [UNHCR] estimations, an average of six […]

French philosophy today

Reivew of Christopher Watkin, French Philosophy Today
Christopher Watkin, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 272pp., £24.99 pb., 978 1 47441 473 9 Following an earlier study of ‘post-theological thinking’ in the work of Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux and Jean-Luc Nancy (2011), Christopher Watkin’s new book on several […]

Patent as credit: When intellectual property becomes speculative

Dossier: Property, Power, Law

Patent as credit When intellectual property becomes speculative Hyo yoon kang Intellectual properties, the various kinds of which are known as patents, copyright and trademarks, could be regarded as central techniques of accumulation in contemporary capitalism, if immaterial knowledge is indeed what now crucially drives accumulation in a ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘creative industries’. [1] In […]

‘For all that gives rise to an inscription in general’

‘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 […]

Ontogenetic machinery

Dossier: What is German Media Philosophy?

Media, as considered by media philosophy, are not what you expect them to be. In the first place, they have almost nothing to do with information, or transmission, or communication, or storage. They do not as such produce sense or distribute meanings. If they do so, it is as a side effect or a secondary […]

De-definition of media: A telegraphic postscript

Dossier: What is German Media Philosophy?

In my view, the question raised by this short and sharp Dossier concerns the relationship of the ‘regime’ of German media philosophy to the contemporary philosophy involved in its major operation: the de-definition of media. This is shown, immediately, by the very un/common notion used by Professors Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert: not ‘Philosophy of […]

68 Reviews

Jon Elster, Political Psychology Marcus Roberts Lin Chun, The British New Left Gregory Elliott Ross Harrison, Democracy Anne Phillips, Democracy and Difference David Copp, Jean Hampton and John E. Roemer, eds., The Idea of Democracy David Archard A. Phillips Griffiths, ed., A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, eds., A Companion to […]

Quartering the millennium

Despite recent reassurances that ʻwe have never been modernʼ, owing to a conception of the modern based on the separation of nature from the order of society that has never functioned strictly according to the rules of its ʻconstitutionʼ, it is, nevertheless, this capacity to think the modern as temporally different from its antecedents that […]

Networks

Dossier: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)

In an article first published in July 1968 in New Left Review, Perry Anderson gave an analysis of a critical weakness of British intellectual culture. His diagnosis is remarkable and surprising. One of the key problems, Anderson argued, was that Britain has failed to make any contribution to the classical sociological tradition; moreover, this failure […]