radical philosophy

Name of the Father, ‘One’ of the Mother: From Beauvoir to Lacan

To Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragossa, perched on her column, ‘But there is something more, a puissance beyond the phallus.’ If I take a few aspects of the thought of Jacques Lacan, and investigate their relation to Simone de Beauvoir around one specific point, I have no intention of making him out – [...]

Theory (Madness of)

Forty years or so after it initially rose as a rather new name for a rather new thing, theory is still an obtruse signifier, troubling and floating, requiring we go back to basics. Theory as we most often understand it today is the name given by the English-speaking intellectual community to a certain type of [...]

165 Reviews

Rob Chapman, Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head Julian Palacios, Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe Michele Mari, Rosso Floyd Howard Caygill Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life Andrew McGettigan Bruce C. Clarke and Mark B.N. Hansen, eds, Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches [...]

Andeanizing philosophy

The belated English translation of Rodolfo Kusch’s Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América (originally published in Spanish in 1970)* introduces this Argentine author to an English-speaking audience for the first time. What makes his work interesting is that it takes indigenous thinking seriously as philosophy – that is, as a contribution to truth rather than [...]

Levinas’s prison notebooks

The philosophical importance of Levinas’ notebooks from his time as a prisoner of war.

After life

Grounding Deleuze

The inorganic open

The promise of justice

Neo-classic

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

The Dreambird of Experience

Kostas Axelos

Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004

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 always ʻhauntedʼ him, this, he said, took [...]

Exchange on ‘Fixing meaning’

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 [...]

Going Back

The exemplary exception

Dominique Janicaud, 1937–2002

Systems theory and legal theory