Exchange on ‘Fixing meaning’: Where does meaning get its fix? A response to Rachel Malik’s ‘Fixing meaning’ & Reply

Letter Where does meaning get its fix? A response to Rachel Malik’s ‘Fixing meaning’ The questions of pragmatic and intertextual accounts of communication raised in Malikʼs ʻFixing meaningʼ (RP 124) are not answered by suggesting a kind of complementarity between them or their complexification via the ʻhorizon of publishingʼ. This is arguably because, as the […]

Re-presentation of the repressed: The political revolution of the neo-avant-garde: Dossier: Spheres of action - Art and politics

Dossier: Spheres of action - Art and politics

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

138 Reviews

Reviews October’s tombHal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004. 704 pp., 637 illustrations, 413 in colour, £45.00 hb., 0 500 23818 9. ^ For nearly thirty years the journal October has provided the most significant platform for addressing twentieth-century art. Art Since […]

The promise of justice

The promise of justice Howard caygill Breaking the promise of justice is an act peculiarly repugnant to reason. It implies a double betrayal: not only of the promised justice but also of the justice of the promise. Nevertheless, how is it possible to do justice to the promise of justice? Especially when this very promise […]

Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2

Critique of Violence: the deposing of the law Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2 Irving wohlfarth Things fal apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’The ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921, hereafter abbreviated to ‘Critique’) is the only published statement of Benjamin’s on politics and […]

Who was Oscar Masotta?: Psychoanalysis in Argentina

Who was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysis in Argentina Philip derbyshire 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 […]