Jacques Derrida: The Deconstruction of Actuality

The Deconstruction of Actuality An Interview with Jacques Derrida This interview was conducted in Paris in August 1993, to mark the publication ofDerrida’ s Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilee, 1993), and was published in the monthly review Passages in September. This English translation appears in Radical Philosophy with permission. Passages: From Bogota to Santiago, from […]

Philosophy and politics

From Plato until today, there is one word which can sum up the concern of the philosopher with respect to politics. This word is ʻjusticeʼ. The philosopherʼs question to politics is the following: can there be a just political orientation? An orientation which does justice to thought? What we have to begin with is this: […]

What is feminist phenomenology?: Thinking birth philosophically

What is feminist phenomenology? Thinking birth philosophically Johanna oksala In one curious and exceptional fragment from 1933 Husserl discusses sexuality phenomenologically. Even if his taciturnity and his heterosexual prejudices concerning sexuality hardly make him a very original thinker on the topic, this fragment is interesting in relation to the question of the phenomenological importance of […]

Demanding Deleuze

Demanding Deleuze Keith ansell pearson The Shortest Shadow and The Puppet and the Dwarf are the first two books in a new series edited by Slavoj Žižek entitled ʻShort Circuitsʼ.* In his seriesʼ foreword Žižek proposes that the shock of short-circuiting provides one of the best metaphors for a critical reading. His proposal is that […]

Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004

Obituary symposium Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004 David Cunningham In an interview with Le Monde published a couple of months before his death at the age of 74 from pancreatic cancer on Friday 9 October 2004, Jacques Derrida confirmed what many already knew, that he was ʻdangerously illʼ, ʻat war against myselfʼ. If questions of ʻsurvivalʼ had […]

Neo-classic: Alain Badiou’s Being and Event

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 […]

Theatre and the public: Badiou, Rancière, Virno

Theatre and the public Badiou, Rancière, Virno Simon bayly and ‘relational’ turn in contemporary art practice. The claim restaged here is that the theatrical is still what makes a political problem of something like ‘the public’, which in many contemporary philosophical understandings no longer appears at all. Making public The lack of the appearance of […]