'Desire' tag archive

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, University of Oxford, and a contributing editor of the London Review of Books. Her collection of essays, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2021. In this interview with Radical Philosophy she is in conversation […]

Miguel de Beistegui, The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ix+295pp., £34.00 hb., 978 0 22654 737 4 Miguel de Beistegui’s new book is one of the most important contributions to the study of desire since the publication of René Girard’s Things Hidden Since […]

The tremor of reflection Slavoj Ziiek’s Lacanian dialectics Peter Dews In memory of Hinrich Fink-Eitel (1946-1995) At first glance, the work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek seems to offer an irresistible range of attractions for theorists wishing to engage with contemporary culture, without accepting the flimsy postmodernist doxa which is often the only available […]

‘Pure Lust’ The Elemental Feminist Philosophy of Mary Daly Jean Grimshaw … Pure Lust names the high humor, hope and cosmic accord/harmony of those women who choose to escape, to follow our heart’s deepest desire and bound out of the State of Bondage, Wanderlusting and Wonderlusting with the elements, connecting with auras of animals and […]

The Human Body in Social Theory: Reich, Foucault and the Repressive Hypothesis Russell Keat 1. Are human bodies human? / recurrent issue in both philosophy and the human sciences has been the possibility of identifying distinctively human characteristics – such as the capacities for language, purposive action and conscious experience; sodallty, historlcity, and cultural diversity; […]

Masters, Slaves and Others Genevieve Lloyd In The Second Sex; Simone de Beauvoir utilised some of the basic concepts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – concepts such as ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, ‘being-for-self’ and ‘being-for-others’, ‘bad faith’ and ‘authenticity’ – in a profound diagnosis of the con4ition of women. That she could thus use the framework […]

In the philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinasʼs early career, it is in a phenomenology of Eros that he claims to have uncovered the site of what he calls ʻtranscendenceʼ. This is no small claim. According to the argument of the later Totality and Infinity (1961),1 the history of Western philosophy is to be thought as […]

Across the last two or three decades identity and desire have been ʻtheorizedʼ relentlessly. Influences have been diverse: I remember especially the impact, for gay writing, of Barthesʼ dream, or plea, in 1975, for a radical sexual diversity wherein there would no longer be homosexuality (singular) but homosexualities, a plural so radical it ʻwill baffle […]

Oedipus as figure Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe It is probable, or at the very least plausible, that Western humanity now models itself on two figures or types – two ʻexamplesʼ, if you like. They appear to be antagonistic (or are at least supported by antagonistic discourses), but their antagonism also binds together, and founds, their kinship, as […]

Anti-Oedipus – thirty years on Éric alliez I, for my own part, made a sort of move into politics around May 1968…Gilles Deleuze, NegotiationsThis title was suggested to me some months ago by my best enemy – or my best fiend, to paraphrase Werner Herzog – who also happens to be a very good friend: […]