radical philosophy

Grande biog

Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2012. 603 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 74565 615 1. ‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking?’ Despite post-structuralist philosophies’ association with Beckettian questions such as these, they remain surprisingly bound to what Foucault called that ‘singular relationship [...]

Fabrication defect

François Laruelle, professor of philosophy at Paris X, Nanterre, has been publishing since the early 1970s and now has around twenty book-length titles to his name. English-language reception of his work owes most to the efforts of Ray Brassier, who published an account of Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’ in Radical Philosophy in 2003 and critically incorporated aspects of that [...]

The Valuation of Nature

How to value biodiversity and the mutable thing called nature, in the context of biodiversity loss in the UK and elsewhere, is a question that has been vexing biologists, conservation groups, environmental lawyers and indigenous groups. The question is posed in the context of that modestly named ‘sixth mass extinction event’, the Holocene Event, and [...]

Euphemism, the university and disobedience

Euphemism is the linguistic condition of contemporary society and spreads through the university as much as through any other institution. But what, exactly, is a euphemism? After having turned his attention to the different meanings of the Greek word from which ‘euphemism’ is derived, and having considered the fact that they seem to contradict each other and bring about a ‘euphemism of [...]

Subjectivity as medium of the media

Contemporary, let us say ‘post-modern’, discourses on media, communication, information and so on are functioning in our society in at least two different – if interconnected – ways.* First, they describe scientifically the functioning of contemporary media and their growing role in our society. But the development of media theory during recent decades was, in [...]

The performative without condition

‘Responsibility’ and the homonymy of autonomy ‘Take your time but be quick about it, because you don’t know what awaits you’, said French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1998 at Stanford.1 Indeed. He would not have expected to be cited like this by Valérie Pécresse, French Minster for Higher Education and Research, in January 2009: We [...]

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908–2009

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.

Who was Oscar Masotta?

As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s sardonic detective Pepe Carvalho ruefully observed, in a dictionary of Argentine clichés, psychoanalysis would have a crucial place, along with ‘tango and the disappeared’.1 ‘One’ knows that along with Paris, Buenos Aires is one of the centres of psychoanalytic practice, and one of the leading training centres for Lacanians. What is [...]

Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2

Aporias of free trade

The promise of justice

138 Reviews

Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism Steve Edwards Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy Ian James Matthias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida Andrew McGettigan Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left:The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s [...]

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

Re-presentation of the repressed: The political revolution of the neo-avant-garde

Philosophy’s malaise

Exchange on ‘Fixing meaning’

121 Reviews

Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi Philip Derbyshire Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy Alessandra Tanesini Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language Alberto Toscano Dieter Freundlieb, Dieter Henrich and Contemporary Philosophy:The Return to Subjectivity Stewart Martin Timothy Bewes, Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism Timothy Hall Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy Andrew [...]

Axiomatic heresy

There are at least two ways of evaluating philosophical originality. The most obvious is in terms of what a philosopher thinks. As well as proposing novel philosophical theses concerning the nature of being or truth or knowledge, a philosopher may produce new sorts of claim bearing on history, art, morality, politics, and so on. Another [...]

The ethics of conviction

119 Reviews

Kristin Ross, May ʼ68 and its Afterlives Daniel Bensaïd Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference:The Later Work of Luce Irigaray Monica Mookherjee Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday Ben Highmore Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind Nina Power John McMurtry, Value Wars: The [...]