'State' tag archive

Cops forcibly removing someone from a bus for not wearing a face mask, arresting people for failure to socially distance on a crowded subway platform, moving people on if they look like they are socialising in excessive numbers, determining who can attend a public event. This is the new reality of policing the virus. The […]

On 26 January 2020, thousands of people cheered as four women hoisted the Indian flag in Shaheen Bagh, a predominantly Muslim locality in New Delhi, which had become the epicentre of protests against the highly controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) that was passed in December 2019. Three of the women referred to as the dadis […]

This conversation was recorded on Sunday 24 June 2018 as part of the closing plenary of the symposium ‘Planetary Utopias: Hope, Desire and Imaginaries in a Postcolonial World’ (curated by Nikita Dhawan) in the ‘Colonial Repercussions’ event series at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. It was transcribed by Anna Millan and has been revised for […]

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 […]

Internationality Jonathan Ree With the unification of Gennany and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and its satellites, nationhood has suddenly become a topical issue. * And, by good fortune, scholars are well prepared to debate it: in the past decade several historians and social scientists have revived and perhaps transfonned the whole question of […]

Freedom’s Devices The Place of the Individual in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right John Rosentha/ The ordinary man thinks he is free if it is open to him to act as he pleases but his very arbitrariness implies that he is not free. When I will the rational, then I am acting not as a particular […]

NEWS French Socialism and Philosophy Since May 1981 Has the new French Socialist Government made any moves to alter the position of philosophy in French education where (in spite of a diminution of the proportion of philosophy in the syllabus in the mid-seventies) philosophy still retains a role in school education not entirely unlike that […]

Sexing the state Familial and political form in Irigaray and Hegel Alison stone In her political writings since the mid-1980s, Luce Irigaray has developed a highly original and provocative conception of the good society, according to which every aspect of social life should be so arranged as to promote the expression, cultivation and accentuation of […]

Bruce Robbinsʼs excellent article in RP 116 points up the paradox of cosmopolitanism – that it seems ʻperpetually torn between an empirical dimension and a normative dimensionʼ. [1] For Robbins, the paradox of cosmopolitanism is rooted in the limited empirical sense of political community. For genuine democracy people need to belong to the same ʻcommunity […]

Commentary England, whose England? Jon Beasley-Murray By their fear you shall know them. The USA responded to al-Qaedaʼs September 2001 attacks with a proliferation of flags reaffirming national pride and widespread support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmed by George W. Bushʼs 2004 re-election. Spain reacted to the Madrid train explosions of March […]

Commentary The awfulness of the actual Counter-consumerism in a new age of war Kate soper It is more than four years since the September 11th attack; there is turmoil, daily death and anguish in Iraq, and no sign of a resolution to the ramifying problems created by the invasion and the subsequent ignominious actions of […]

Commentary Between imperial client and useful enemy Pakistan’s permanent crisis Justin podur Pakistani scholar–activist Eqbal Ahmed, who died in 1999, had a canny ability to predict events. In a 1974 article for the Journal of Contemporary Asia, he suggested that Pakistan was headed towards a police state structure because of the class and ideological composition […]

One of the forms in which the waves of protests against the ‘new world order’ in the 1990s and, particularly, the varied political and social movements of the new millennium have been registered in political philosophy has been in a renewed interest in the nature of ‘the political’ and its relationship with ‘politics’. Even and […]

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 […]

Body without image Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan Éric alliez [T]he great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. Herman Melvil e, Moby-DickThe IMAGE-grip is dislocated and a more fundamental element emerges … in short, IMAGE is not the work’s supreme motive or unifying end. Hélio Oiticica, Block Experiments […]

They the people Problems of alter-globalization Gayatri chakravorty spivak You have asked for current thinking about different concepts and forms of political collectivity.* If I were speaking as an academic, I would, I suppose, look once again at the implications of ‘multitudes’, as conceived by our colleagues and allies Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Speaking […]

Notes 1. ^ www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internetfree/68294/. [archive] 2. ^ Except for John Naughton in the Guardian: ‘the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.’ See www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/06/western-democracies-must-live-with-leaks. [archive] 3. ^ Johan Söderberg, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software […]