'Subjectivity' tag archive

Miguel de Beistegui, The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ix+295pp., £34.00 hb., 978 0 22654 737 4 Miguel de Beistegui’s new book is one of the most important contributions to the study of desire since the publication of René Girard’s Things Hidden Since […]

Arendt’s love affair with Heidegger and its aftermath, and Adorno’s love of the high life, than we learn about their philosophies and the ways in which these might emerge out of experience of and reflection on Nazi domination. (Sherratt has written elsewhere on Adorno’s philosophy, in a study titled Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, 2002.) The opponents […]

Commentary Moving borders The politics of dirt Peter nyers Who can move? Who can speak? Who can act politically? The struggles of refugees and migrants have problematized conventional answers to these questions in a profound manner. Their struggles have demonstrated that, despite the considerable risks and dangers, new political subjects are being formed within securitized […]

In Beckett’s Endgame – about which Adorno wrote an important essay – nature is in ruins (‘corpsed’, as Clov describes it), yet the weather is still important.* The pathetic story that Hamm tells (and he has to bribe Nagg to listen) about a man crawling to him on his belly to ask for help on […]

Irigaray anxiety Luce Irigaray and her ethics for improper selves Penelope Deutscher The essays Luce Irigaray has published in the recent works le, tu, nous, Thinking the Difference and I Love To You are usually described as her more simplified work. Questions are raised concerning the extent to which Irigaray’s writing, and her concerns, have […]

Fatal Attraction Jean Laplanche on sexuality, subjectivity and singularity in the work of Sigmund Freud Philippe Van Haute Freud considered sexuality to be the shibboleth of psychoanalysis. With a surprising stubbornness, he repeats over and over again: ‘and yet the libido is sexual’. 1 But when we ask for his arguments for this rather audacious […]

NEWS Uneasy Excitement ‘Technology and Subjectivity’, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy Middlesex University, 29 October 1994 A few days before the ‘Technology and Subjectivity’ conference there was an item on MTV about ‘surfing on the cyberspace’ followed by a report on a surfers’ convention organised to raise awareness of the problem of sea […]

Towards a Theory of Videotics Richard Osborne In the post-structuralist diaspora the search for a nontaxonomic ‘truth’, an understanding of the political history of the presentation of signs, demands that we interrogate our relationship to the notion of the materiality of the sign. From Copernicus to Warhol we have witnessed the destabiliza tion of the […]

Masters, Slaves and Others Genevieve Lloyd In The Second Sex; Simone de Beauvoir utilised some of the basic concepts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – concepts such as ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, ‘being-for-self’ and ‘being-for-others’, ‘bad faith’ and ‘authenticity’ – in a profound diagnosis of the con4ition of women. That she could thus use the framework […]

Sartre is Dead In place of our usual editorial, in this issue we publish differing responses to Sar.tre’s death by two members of the Editorial Collective. Sartre’s productive career was at a close some time ago. Death formally completed what had always been a career of incompleteness – unpublished works, projects announced but never undertaken, […]

Whomakas hislory? Allhassel”s anli-hamanis.. John Mepham Introduction I am very much aware that in what follows I solve no philosophical problems. I attempt some conceptual clarifications and I propose some interpretations of theses of Louis Althusser. I hope this will at least make it possible to pose some problems more clearly than they are posed […]

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 […]

It was a matter of analyzing … the problemizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily thought – and the practices on the basis of which these problemizations are formed. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure1Michel Foucault is well known for having periodically redescribed his previous studies in light of his current project. [2] […]

This article is intended to raise a number of connected issues. It concludes by suggesting that certain theories of self-organization, in particular the theory of autopoiesis developed by Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and, latterly, Fritjof Capra, might help us to reassess how we view the relationship between discipline, subjectivity and freedom. However, the first half […]

It has been long forgotten, since Japanʼs defeat and the loss of its empire, that during the Asia–Pacific war (1931–45) a large number of scholars, journalists and bureaucrats were eagerly engaged in academic and public discussions of racism and colonialism. In contrast to the overall poverty of the critique of racism and ethnic nationalism in […]

Not so long ago, theoretical insight was usually defended in terms of its universal inclusiveness or powers of generalization. It used to be that any theory worth the name – a theory of evolution or class conflict, a theory of the unconscious or of signification – shared something of the ambition and scope associated with […]

What is ethical experience for Alain Badiou? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? Let me begin by trying to pick out the formal structure of ethical experience, or what with Dieter Henrich we can call ʻthe grammar of the concept of moral insightʼ, [1] and explaining how such experience implies […]

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905, is undoubtedly one of Freudʼs most important texts and, in many respects, the most contemporary. It is a summa in which Freud summarizes and articulates his insights into the meaning of sexuality for human existence in general, and for psychopathology in particular. As can […]

Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, Alain de Libera Introduction by Peter Osborne.