radical philosophy

Spontaneous generation

In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, at the end of the transcendental deduction of the categories, Kant distinguishes the doctrine of transcendental idealism from competing theories of knowledge – or, more specifically, theories of the relation between concepts and experience – by characterizing them in terms of various theories of biological [...]

Also Sprach Zapata

Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw hisadversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance. (Clausewitz, On War, 1832) Receive our truth in your dancing heart. Zapatalives, also and for always in these lands. (Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee ZNLA, ‘Votan-Zapata or Five Hundred Years [...]

Sex: a transdisciplinary concept

What is sex? Some feminists have harboured suspicions about this form of question, given its philosophical (or ‘metaphysical’1) pedigree. But philosophy no longer has the disciplinary monopoly on it. Indeed, with regard to sex, the more interesting task today is to pose and to attempt to answer the question from within a transdisciplinary problematic. For [...]

Imaginative mislocation

The average Westerner … was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields. Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906 The controversy that erupted in March over the publication of Charles Pellegrino’s account of [...]

What is – or what is not – contemporary French philosophy, today?

The question that serves as the title of my lecture,* the question that motivates this lecture, is sustained by a negation that is absolutely necessary to the construction of the problematic I aim here to open. For I have found no other means than the ‘labour of the negative’, in the most literal sense, to [...]

Children of postcommunism

Transitology and the infantilization of postcommunist societies (part of RP 159′s dossier on ‘The Postcommunist Condition’).

After life

The Substance of Thought, Cornell University, NY, 10–12 April 2008

Grounding Deleuze

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity

An immanent transcendental

Vocabulary of European Philosophies, Part 2 (Object)

Introduction Gegenstand/Objekt Dominique Pradelle Object Olivier Boulnois Res Jean-François Courtine

Vocabulary of European Philosophies, Part 1 (Subject)

Introduction From Abstraction to Wunsch: The Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies Howard Caygill Subject Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, Alain de Libera

Transcendental cinema

The reproach of abstraction

Karatani’s Marxian parallax

The sublime from Lyotard to Schiller

The ethics of conviction

Exchange on Hegel’s racism

The aesthetics of appearing