News It’s a struggle ‘For a New Europe: University Struggles Against Austerity’, École des hautes études en sciences sociales/Université Paris VIII, February 2011This three-day meeting, hosted by the Italian activist collective Edu-factory, attracted 300–400 university students, faculty, community leaders and activists from across Europe, as well as from Tunisia, Russia, Ukraine, Canada, the United States […]

Obituary A mother’s thought Sara Ruddick, 1935–2011 ‘i speak about a mother’s thought’ wrote the feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick, who has died in New York at the age of 76. ^ Along with Adrienne Rich, Ruddick was probably the most important philosophical thinker to address the issue of mothering and motherhood since second-wave feminism, and, […]

It is perhaps appropriate that this collection of political writings by Maurice Blanchot is marked by a troubling absence. Yet it is hard to join the editor and publisher of this translation in respecting the decision of the editors of the French collections to begin their coverage in the 1950s: the first edition published in […]

The smell of power A contribution to the critique of the sniffer dog Mark neocleous On 8 July 2005, the day after the London bombings, the International Association of Chiefs of Police issued its new guidelines on the detection and prevention of suicide bombings. The IACP is the primary organization through which senior police executives […]

Commentary ‘New providers’ The creation of a market in higher education Andrew mcgettigan At the end of 2009, the Labour government commissioned a review panel, led by John Browne, formerly chief executive of the London-based oil and gas multinational BP, to report on the financing of higher education in England. Its basic remit was to […]

On Saturday 13 June this year, hours after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Ministry of the Interior announced his landslide victory as Iran’s president and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the religious head of state, prematurely and unconstitutionally embraced these results, Tehran and several other major cities became the stage for spontaneous, sporadic and widespread protests. Despite the government’s arrest […]

Who was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysis in Argentina Philip derbyshire 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 […]

As flowers turn towards the sun Walter Benjamin’s Bergsonian image of the past Andrew mcgettigan Benjamin’s theses ‘On the Concept of History’, the final precipitate of the unfinished Arcades Project, was intended to strike at the fundamental pil ars of a thought complicit in its times. [1] On the seventieth anniversary of the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact, […]

The absent philosopherprince Thinking political philosophy with Olympe de Gouges Ariella azoulay Since the publication of Olivier Blanc’s biography of Olympe de Gouges and the first collection of her texts, compiled and edited by Benoîte Groult, [1] dozens of articles on various aspects of de Gouges’s work have been published. All of them share the […]

Reviews Of princes and principlesGraham Harman Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Re.Press, Melbourne, 2009. 247 pp. £16.00 pb., 978 0 9805440 6 0. Unlike those of some of his compatriots, the name of Bruno Latour is not one to have graced the pages of Radical Philosophy with much frequency. It is not just […]

Sports news A day in the life of Ivan Ergich Bursaspor gets a Marxist playerA Marxist footballer in Turkey? A player who is as comfortable reeling off critical theorists of the Frankfurt School as he is of his favourite footballing colleagues, such as Messi, Ronaldinho and Zidane? This is particularly anomalous given Turkey’s history of […]

Commentary The global moment Seattle, ten years on Rodrigo nunes What are we to make of an anniversary that no one celebrates? The year 2009 may be remembered for many things: the greatest capitalist crisis in over a century, the first year of the Obama presidency, the transformation of the G8 into a G20 (and […]

War as peace, peace as pacification Mark neocleous To stress one’s own love of peace is always the close concern of those who have instigated war. But he who wants peace should speak of war. He should speak of the past one … and, above al , he should speak of the coming one. [1] […]

Dossier The PosTcommunisT condiTionchildren of postcommunism Boris buden A curious set of metaphors marks the jargon of postcommunist transition: education for democracy, classrooms of democracy, democratic exams, democracy that is growing and maturing, but which might still be in diapers or making its first steps or, of course, suffering from children’s il nesses. [1] This […]

Towards a critical theory of postcommunism? Beyond anticommunism in Romania Ovidiu ţichindeleanu In Eastern Europe, 1989–2009 has been a time of fundamental changes in the meaning of social and political concepts, accompanied at different speeds by the radical transformation of society. I consider transition the fundamental thematic concept of this historical shift, its operative terms […]

down to earth Detemporalization in capitalist Russia Svetlana stephenson and elena danilova There is a place in northern Moscow that represents, in a very focused and concentrated way, the tremendous change that has taken place in Russia since the start of market transition. This is VDNKh, the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy. […]

sovereign democracy Dictatorship over capitalism in contemporary Russia Julia svetlichnaja with james heartfield Economists tell us that Russia is on its way to completing the transition to capitalism. The only problem remaining now is a political one – the paradise of a fully fledged ‘free-market’ economy is suspended by the lack of liberal democracy, while, […]

Comment Rentier capitalism and the iranian puzzle dariush m. doust The word ‘Iran’ usually signifies unpredictability, offering either raw material for the narratives of news agencies, or a fascinating enigma. Recent events have once again underlined the fact that the 1979 Iranian Revolution is still poorly conceptualized. To state the obvious: the outcome of the […]

Reviews Trend lines and frontlines Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War, Verso, London and New York, 2009. xiv + 290 pp., £14.99 pb., 978 1 84467 269 1. ^ Geopolitics and political economy are registers that the recent revival in the fortunes of radical political thought has largely evaded or […]

News Faint signal The student occupations in California and the Communiqué from an Absent FutureFrom 24 September to 2 October 2009, students from the University of California, Santa Cruz occupied and blockaded the University’s graduate student commons: nominally in protest against the cuts in education spending in the UC system, more generally against the entire […]

Commentary the Question of caster semenya Mandy merck Caster Semenya, the South African runner, won the 800 metre gold medal at the World Championships. What did Pierre Weiss, head of the world athletics governing body, say in response to questions about her sex?The Times Sport Quiz, 26 December 2009 What indeed? The question of Caster […]