Poor Bertie

Poor Bertie Jonathan Rée In the dark midwinter of 1916, Londoners had an unusual opportunity to see radical philosophical principles applied to the urgent issues of the day. The peace campaigner and feminist C.K. Ogden had hired the Caxton Hall for a series of eight weekly lectures on politics, to be given by Bertrand Russell. […]

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Tate Modern, London, 3 June 2001

News Hegemony or Socialism? 15 Years: Hegemony and Socialist StrategyTate Modern, London, 3 June 2001 The historical claims of the conference celebrating the fifteenth (actually, the sixteenth) anniversary and second edition of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffeʼs Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, were ambivalent. Sitting in the Tate Modernʼs ʻRed Roomʼ […]

Levinas’s prison notebooks

In June 1940 the French 10th Army was surrounded by invading German forces at Rennes. Among those captured was Emmanuel Levinas, mobilized as an officer/interpreter in 1939 and now imprisoned as an enemy combatant under the terms of the Geneva Conventions. Levinas passed five years in captivity, first at Frontstalags in Rennes and Laval, then […]