Frames of modernity

Reivew of Susan Buck-Morss, Year One: A Philosophical Recounting
Susan Buck-Morss, Year One: A Philosophical Recounting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021). 416pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 26204 487 5 Philosophers of the enlightenment such as Rousseau, Kant and Hegel imagined their projects as universal in reach and scale. Whether these philosophers were writing about the social contract, the foundations of moral law or the […]

Ruined resentments

Reivew of Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 264pp., £62.00hb., £22.00 pb., 978 0 23155 053 6 hb., 978 0 23119 385 6 pb. Wendy Brown has been one of the foremost critical theorists and political commentators on the left since the […]

Nietzche reception today

Nietz5che reception today Pauline Johnson I want no ‘believers’. I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses. – I have a terrible fear that one day I shall be pronounced biological’ revolution was enticingly projected in contrast to the ‘superficial’, ‘external’ social revolution. 2 holy. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce […]

Gillian Rose, 1947-1995

NEWS Gillian Rose, 1947-1995 Gillian Rose died on the evening of 9 December 1995 after a long and courageous struggle with cancer. The hour of her death coincided with the closing moments of a conference dedicated to her work at Warwick University. Although her rapidly deteriorating health prevented her from attending as planned, the conference […]

Philosophy and racial identity

Philosophy and racial identity Linda Martin Alcoll In the 1993 film Map of the Human Heart an Inuit man asks a white engineer who has come to northern Canada to map the region, ‘Why are you making maps?’ Without hesitating, the white man responds ‘They will be very accurate.’ Map-making and race-making have a strong […]

Marx the uncanny? Ghosts and their relation to the mode of production: Spectres of Derrida Symposium

Where Marx is closest to the spirit of deconstruction is, arguably, in these formulaic gestures towards a society that had so far transcended existing actuality that its conditions of realization could no longer be conceptualized. Marx is spectral Marx in his refusal to envision communism in his envisaging of it, in his anti-utopian utopianism. Now, […]

‘The world spirit on the fins of a rocket’: Adorno's critique of progress

‘The world spirit on the fins of a rocket’ Adorno’s critique of progress Michael Lowy and Eleni Varikas The ideology of progress, born (in its modern guise) during the Enlightenment, finds its culminating philosophical expression in Hegel’s conception of history. Here, everything that happens marks a further step in mankind’s march towards freedom: watching Napoleon […]

The Politics of Time

The Politics of Time Peter Osborne The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise … is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token, its logic. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there is depressingly little belief at […]

Incomplete Modernity: Ulrich Beck's Risk Society

Incomplete Modernity: Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society Michae/ Rustin There has been good reason to fear that ‘post-modem’ and ‘post-industrial’ currents of thought have been sweeping away the foundations of radical critiques without offering to put anything very substantial in their place. It is all very well criticising the limitations of social democracy, the welfare state, […]

66 Editorial

EDITORIAL – . =.. .:’1._”it!!!! • =:-= -=111 .,-. · ~-1-. 1 …. – -= – -:. I — ..-. 1=1 .– 11 I . -• • -~-EE A letter recently leaked to The Observer (10.10.93) revealed that government scientists are privately extremely concerned about the problem of long-term nuclear waste storage. Behind the facade […]

63 Editorial

EDITORIAL L ,. One major preoccupation of recent critical debates has been the attempt at a philosophical definition of the present through an account of our relations to the Enlightenment. Whether for or against ‘modernity’, contributors to these debates have tended to identify modernity with the Enlightenment, and to make their respective philosophical stands on […]

The Spirit of Modernity and its Fate: Jürgen Habermas

The Spirit of Modernity and its Fate: JOrgen Habermas Nick Smith Jurgen Habennas’s ongoing opus is organised around distinctive conceptualisations of ‘modernity’, ‘crisis’, and critique’. * The Theory of Communicative Action (2 volumes, Boston, 1984 & 1987), in which these internally related concepts are articulated into a theory of rationality, was written by Habennas to […]

Philosophy as Exile from Life: Lukács' 'Soul And Form'

Philosophy as Exile from Life: Lukacs’ ‘Soul And Form’ Paul Browne As ethical explorations of the world of literary and philosophical works, Georg Lukacs’s essays are so many restatements of a fundamental question: what are the relationships between such works, the lives of their individual creators, and social existence in general? In giving new expression […]

Place and Time in Socialist Theory

Place and Time in Socialist Theory Michael Rustin Sources of Contemporary Pluralism Pluralism has become fashionable on the left. This new-found enthusiasm for diversity and choice is in part a defensive response by socialists to the decline of the mass support hitherto provided by the working class, to the ‘Forward March of Labour Halted’ 1, […]