'Modernity' tag archive

It was a matter of analyzing … the problemizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily thought – and the practices on the basis of which these problemizations are formed. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure1Michel Foucault is well known for having periodically redescribed his previous studies in light of his current project. [2] […]

Nazis as an event that had spelled out ʻwith unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our timeʼ. [4] And yet, as early as 1951, Arendt had explicitly stated what was at stake in her work, notably in the preface to the 1951 English edition, which was entitled The Burden of Our Time. That title is, […]

Interview agnes heller Post-Marxism and the ethics of modernity ST: Iʼd like to begin by asking you about your first encounter with philosophy. What made you decide to do philosophy and what were the practical ramifications of such a choice in the 1940s?Heller: When I started university I wanted to be a scientist and I […]

The space of flows and timeless time Manuel Castells’s The Information Age Simon bromley is not new. Giddens, for example, has argued that the world is increasingly moving towards a situation where ʻthe consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized than beforeʼ, and in both The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-Identity […]

Commentary The significance of the twentieth century Fred halliday The politics of the twentieth century have been marked by three great processes: war, revolution and democratization. The first half of the century was dominated by two world wars – conflicts which engulfed almost all of Europe, and much of the Middle and Far East, and […]

Since the mid-1980s there has been a major revival of interest in the work of Siegfried Kracauer, focusing on the essays he wrote during the Weimar Republic for the Frankfurter Zeitung. [1] As a result of this renewed interest in Kracauerʼs early writings, a revisionist school of Kracauer criticism has emerged, particularly in the USA. […]

Despite recent reassurances that ʻwe have never been modernʼ, owing to a conception of the modern based on the separation of nature from the order of society that has never functioned strictly according to the rules of its ʻconstitutionʼ, it is, nevertheless, this capacity to think the modern as temporally different from its antecedents that […]

Nihilism and faith Rose, Bernstein and the future of Critical Theory Tony gorman In a succession of books the late Gillian Rose and Jay Bernstein have sought to defend and elaborate upon the Adornian inheritance both within Critical Theory, contra Habermas, [1] and beyond Critical Theory, contra post-structuralist and postmodernist thought. [2] In these works, […]

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 […]

What future for utopia? Or, rather, what future for the utopian after the critique of utopia? What future for possibility after the critique of its depiction as actual?* Utopias have a notoriously contradictory structure: they evoke possibilities by depicting them as actual, yet thereby, in themselves partaking of the actual – as depictions – they […]

Recent cultural histories have gone to considerable lengths to define an ‘alternative modernity’ for China, going back to the commercial developments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. [1] As delineated via the complex relationship between dominant Western and ‘other’ versions of modernity, its general form has been indicated by, for example, Dorothy Hodgson, […]

Flux and flurry Stillness and hypermovement in animated worlds Esther leslie Animation, as any Wikipedia reader knows, is ‘the optical illusion of movement’, whether achieved through photographing drawings, moving clay models and recording the tweaks frame by frame, drawing directly on film or devising models digitally. But the definition is a weak one, or only […]

Spectres of anarchy Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part Three Irving wohlfarth There is an excel ent passage in Nadja on the ‘enchanting days spent looting Paris under the sign of Sacco and Vanzet i’ and Breton adds the assurance that in those days the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvel e [Boulevard of Good Tidings] fulfil […]

Interview rem koolhaas and reinier de graaf Rem Koolhaas is perhaps the most feted and influential figure in architecture today, as well as one of the most original contemporary theorists of its changing relations to urban and socio-economic forms. Co-founder in 1975 of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), he is also Professor in Practice […]

The jargon of finitude Or, materialism today Bruno bosteels To ask about materialism today means to ask about the time of materialism. This can be taken in at least two different senses. First, we can take the expression to imply a rephrasing of the larger question ‘What is materialism?’ as ‘When is materialism?’ and ask: […]

Notes on the photographic image Jacques rancière In the relation between art and image, photography has played a symptomatic and often paradoxical role. Baudelaire made of it the sinister instrument of the triumph of technical reproduction over artistic imagination. And yet we also know of the long struggle of photographers (pictorialistes) to affirm that photography […]

A sudden topicality Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis Peter osborne Karl Marx was a thinker of crisis. But in what sense was he a theorist of crisis? In what sense did he propound something that might legitimately be called a ‘crisis theory’?*The question may seem an odd one. After all, although there is […]

In our recent highlight from RP163, David Cunningham examines the relationship between Lukács' 'The Theory of the Novel' and his later Marxist works, and its asks how we are to read this work today.