radical philosophy

Figures of interpellation in Althusser and Fanon

Subjectivity as medium of the media

Contemporary, let us say ‘post-modern’, discourses on media, communication, information and so on are functioning in our society in at least two different – if interconnected – ways.* First, they describe scientifically the functioning of contemporary media and their growing role in our society. But the development of media theory during recent decades was, in [...]

Subject (Re-/decentred)

1 Modern French thought, ‘structuralism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postmodernism’, Marxism as well, are currently associated with the so-called ‘death of the subject’. Foucault’s ‘anti-humanism’, the celebrated ‘death of Man’, the declining popularity of the rational, Kantian, transcendantal subject, reigning over what Lyotard called ‘metanarratives’,1 are all parts of the process. Foucault’s rejection of the subject is unequivocally [...]

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 [...]

Structure: method or subversion of the social sciences?

It seems there’s no longer any real doubt as to the answer to this question, and that it is doubly negative. ‘Structuralism’, or what was designated as such mainly in France in the 1960s and 1970s (setting aside the question of other uses), is no longer regarded as a truly fertile method in the domains [...]

Everybody thinks

In his 1968 book Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze famously stresses the violent, unnatural and shocking character of thought, counterposing his own anti-representational philosophy of difference to what he depicts as a dogmatic, humanist ‘image of thought’. In his own words: ‘“Everybody” knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under [...]

Who was Oscar Masotta?

As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s sardonic detective Pepe Carvalho ruefully observed, in a dictionary of Argentine clichés, psychoanalysis would have a crucial place, along with ‘tango and the disappeared’.1 ‘One’ knows that along with Paris, Buenos Aires is one of the centres of psychoanalytic practice, and one of the leading training centres for Lacanians. What is [...]

Grounding Deleuze

Mirrors without images

Vocabulary of European Philosophies, Part 1 (Subject)

Introduction From Abstraction to Wunsch: The Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies Howard Caygill Subject Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, Alain de Libera

Transcendental cinema

Oedipus as figure

‘The history of truth’

Bodies and power, revisited

Feminism against ‘the feminine’

Kant’s ‘raw man’ and the miming of primitivism

Primordial Being

Cantor, Lacan, Mao, Beckett, meme combat

Writing as a man

Freedom’s Devices