radical philosophy

Thought of the outside

It is gladly believed that a culture is more attached to its values than to its forms, that these can easily be modified, abandoned, taken up again; that only meaning is deeply rooted. This is to misunderstand … that people cling more to ways of seeing, saying, doing, and thinking, than to what they see, [...]

The poetry and prose of the Russian elections

Between 10 December 2011, the day of the first mass protest against fraud in the recently held Russian parliamentary elections, and 4 March 2012, the day of the presidential vote, Moscow was a transformed place. The suffocating atmosphere of Putin’s rule was disturbed as if by a sudden breath of fresh air. People came onto [...]

Noam Chomsky

Peter Hallward I’d like to start by asking you about some of your basic philosophical principles, starting with your understanding of human freedom and creativity. In the modern European tradition I’m most familiar with, freedom is a dominant philosophical theme from Descartes through Rousseau to Kant. With Kant we have an affirmation of absolute freedom [...]

Lenin and Gandhi

The theme I shall address today has all the trappings of an academic exercise.* Still, I would like to attempt to show how it intersects with several major historical, epistemological and ultimately political questions. As a basis for the discussion, I will posit that Lenin and Gandhi are the two greatest figures among revolutionary theorist–practitioners [...]

Also Sprach Zapata

Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw hisadversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance. (Clausewitz, On War, 1832) Receive our truth in your dancing heart. Zapatalives, also and for always in these lands. (Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee ZNLA, ‘Votan-Zapata or Five Hundred Years [...]

Demonomics

The critical ethos that stands behind much of the most impressive and important work on modern forms of power seems to have constructed its own prison. A free and open concept of power – the concept that has guided so many enlightening histories of the present – has revealed itself as yet another technology of [...]

The gender apparatus

Feminist protest against US torture practices, including outcries over the use of sex, sexuality and sexual identity in the torture of prisoners at US detention sites from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, have understandably tended to focus on what the abuse destroys – the victim and his or her community. Here, though, I ask what the [...]

History (Problem with)

If the philosopher’s role is to forge concepts, the historian’s function is to provide proof of their pertinence. However, this presupposes that the historian uses the concept correctly, taking into consideration the conditions that formed it. A truly transdisciplinary approach makes this possible, thanks to its rigorous method, whereas an interdisciplinary approach is merely a juxtaposition [...]

Elasticity of demand

The materiality of the immaterial: Foucault, against the return of idealisms and new vitalisms

(T)error and poetry

Bodies and power, revisited

Continuous crisis

The fate of the body politic

The space of flows and timeless time

Writing as a man

Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence

Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism

Nietzsche: A Radical Challenge To Political Theory?

Only if mankind possessed a universally recognised goal would it be possible to propose ‘thus and thus is the right course of action’: for the present there exists no such goal. It is thus irrational and trivial to impose the demands of morality upon mankind. – To recommend a goal to mankind is something quite [...]

Socialism, Feminism and Men