Witchcraft as praxis

Reivew of Jack Z. Bratich, On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death
Jack Z. Bratich, On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death (Philadelphia: Common Notions, 2022). 240pp., $20 pb., 978 1 94217 349 6 Unacquainted readers may think that ‘microfascism’ is perhaps analogous to contemporary terms such as ‘microaggression’: the prefix ‘micro’ implying a simple reduction in scale and scope for actions representing larger systems. But microfascism is […]
Yellow ladder, old statue

Chilean revolts and the crisis of neoliberal governance

On Friday 18 October 2019, a long series of mass demonstrations began in Chile against the right-wing government led by president Sebastián Piñera. 1 Despite brutal and continuous police repression, these demonstrations persisted, day after day, with remarkable stamina and inventiveness, right through to 13 March 2020, when the risks posed by Covid-19 led Piñera […]

A differing shade of green

Adrian Parr, The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Columbia University Press, New York, 2013. 224 pp., £20.50 hb., 978 0 23115 828 2. This book is a welcome addition to the spate of recent books on the ecological and resource calamities currently facing the planet. Unlike so many others – one thinks in […]

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky An Interview RP: In the 19S0s and ’60s, the bridge between your theoretical work and your political work seems to have been the attack on behaviourism, which then dominated not only psychology but the various social sciences as well, which were often used to justify capitalism and imperialism. But now, partly because of […]

Politics Re-entered: The State in its Place

Politics Re-entered: The State in its Place Tony Skillen Though we cannot turn our backs on it or imagine, or wish, that it will wither away, the idea that the state is by definition the sole locus of politics seems Increasingly archaic. The price of retaining ‘the statist conception of politics’ seems to me that […]

Jacques Rancière: Democracy means equality

INTERVIEW Jacques RancièreDemocracy means equalityPassages: Jacques Rancière, for more than twenty years you have been following a somewhat unusual philosophical itinerary. It is obvious that what you are doing has nothing in common with traditional academic work. Most of your books reveal philosophical thought in unexpected contexts or in contexts that have been reformulated in […]

Birth, love, politics

Properly speaking, the individual and the community should be considered as opposites. The first term refers to something indivisible that stands by itself, while the second term, as can be seen from its root (cum), expresses the very essence of relation. Corresponding to the concept of the individual there should be that of a collectivity […]

Families against ‘The Family’: The transatlantic passage of the politics of family values

Commentary Families against ‘The Family’ The transatlantic passage of the politics of family values Judith stacey Progressive Brits beware. Political campaigns conducted in the name of The Family are now in their third decade in the United States, and there are signs that transatlantic missionaries are finding prominent converts in the UK. Indeed, addressing the […]

Philosophy and politics

From Plato until today, there is one word which can sum up the concern of the philosopher with respect to politics. This word is ʻjusticeʼ. The philosopherʼs question to politics is the following: can there be a just political orientation? An orientation which does justice to thought? What we have to begin with is this: […]

Against security

We live, apparently, in insecure times. Sociologyʼs current ʻgrand thinkersʼ, for example, all highlight the issue of insecurity in their accounts of what is variously described as ʻrisk societyʼ, ʻreflexive modernityʼ and ʻpostmodernityʼ. For Anthony Giddens, existential anxiety is generated by the collapse of ontological security in the late modern age, while Zygmunt Bauman suggests […]

Signs of the Times, Critical Politics Conference, 30 October 1999, London School of Economics, UK Kant Society Annual Conference, University of Reading, 17–19 September 1999

In his History of the World in 10½ Chapters Julian Barnes remarks that to say that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, makes it sound too grand and considered a process. History just burps, he says, and we taste the rawonion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago. The opening […]