2 Commentary Beyond the Soundbites The general election in Britain Colin leys and leo panitch The 1997 general election result has rightly been celebrated as a huge relief, the lifting of a choking fog. For a while New Labour has the benefit of almost everyoneʼs doubt. There is, after all, an alternative, and people are […]

6Socialist Socrates Ernst Bloch in the GDR Anna-Sabine Ernst and Gerwin Klinger Aphilosopher is being ‘turned’ Ernst Bloch is experiencing a peculiar revival. Peculiar in the sense that, currently fashionable discourses of ʻthe futureʼ notwithstanding, contemporary interest in his philosophy focuses not so much on his concept of concrete utopia as on reshaping the Bloch […]

22In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler attempts to deconstruct the body and matter in the same way that the self-constituting, stable, centred subject has been deconstructed in recent years. [1] In the process, Butler claims to be operating in a theoretical realm beyond the frameworks of materialism and idealism. While I concur with many things […]

36* Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, edited by François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London and New York, 1996. Fateful rendezvous The young Althusser Gregory elliott I enclose…a picture of the Dijon railwaymen which appeared in LʼHumanité… I hope that people, observing the calm strength and dignity of these men, will not […]

41Frantz Fanon would have been seventy in the summer of 1995 and the volumes under review celebrate the anniversary of his birth. Most of the twenty-one contributions to the Critical Reader are papers delivered at the ʻFanon Todayʼ conference held at Purdue University in March 1995; the handsomely produced The Fact of Blackness originates in […]

55 Letters Lesbians, gays and mainstream politicsFor Radical Philosophy, Angela Masonʼs commentary on lesbian and gay politics in the 1990s was remarkably un-radical. The piece, which is little more than an electoral apologia, charts ʻourʼ progress over the last twenty or so years and weds our future ʻliberationʼ and equality to the antics of politicians, […]

56with this point on page 94. ^ I am perfectly aware of the relationship between Hocquenghem and Schérer, but this book is not a biography, and detail of the literal-minded kind not its concern. More bizarrely and substantially, the reviewer chooses to ignore whole aspects of the book – the specificity of the French context […]

Commentaryculture clashsimon bromley Almost as soon as the Cold War framework of Western and United States foreign policy began to dissolve in the early 1990s, the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and such conservative periodicals as The National Interest and The Atlantic Monthly began to feature articles about ʻThe […]

Such a critique confines all our speculative claims rigidly to the sphere of possible experience; and it does this not by shallow scoffing at ever-repeated failures or pious sighs over the limits of our reason, but by an effective determining of these limits in accordance with established principles, inscribing its nihil ulterius on those Pillars […]

Bakhtin, Cassirer and symbolic forms Craig brandist represent Marburg Neo-Kantian epistemology. [2] Thus, while many have noted the importance of Neo-Kantianism in Bakhtinʼs work, though with little or no archival evidence, Cassirer has remained simply one among many thinkers. Recently published interviews with Bakhtin shortly before his death make it very clear, however, that Cassirerʼs […]

Cosmopolitanism and boredom Bruce robbins * Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, edited by Josh Cohen, Beacon Press, Boston MA, 1996, 151 pp, $15.00, pb., 0 8070 4313 3. ʻIn the course of my lifeʼ, Joseph De Maistre famously observed, ʻI have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians; I […]

In the Preface to The Politics of Time Peter Osborne claims that it comprises two books: ʻa book about the philosophy of time which grew out of a book about the culture of modernityʼ (p. x). The reason for this is that metaphysical questions about time and temporality inevitably confront anyone who inquires deeply enough […]

News Dictating researchFeminist philosophy and the RAEIn an essentially contested subject such as philosophy, it makes little sense for a small Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Panel to make judgements across the whole breadth of the discipline, however well-intentioned that panel might be. As I work between the ʻcontinentalʼ and ʻanalyticalʼ traditions – in the field […]

Obituary WalSuchting, 1931–1997 In March of this year, I received the sad news of the passing of Wal Suchting the previous January. I never met Wal in person. But, from a correspondence of some hundreds of pages stretching over five or six years, I felt I had come to know him and I thought of […]

Commentary The soul of soulless conditions? Accounting for genetic fundamentalism Joseph schwartz Twenty-five years ago, I was browsing in my university library when I came across Richard Hernnsteinʼs article ʻIQ and the Meritocracyʼ in the Atlantic Monthly. My heart sank. ʻNot that againʼ, I thought. A few days later my brother Mike rang. He insisted […]

At first glance, Deleuze and Guattariʼs What is Philosophy? may appear to confirm the mainstream critical opinion that poststructuralism has gone astray. [1] What was once a radical agenda questioning the legitimacy of social institutions and the nature of modern subjectivity has now become, in the words of one reviewer, a matter of doing ʻphilosophy […]

Properly speaking, the individual and the community should be considered as opposites. The first term refers to something indivisible that stands by itself, while the second term, as can be seen from its root (cum), expresses the very essence of relation. Corresponding to the concept of the individual there should be that of a collectivity […]

A leading figure of the New Left in the 1960s, Stuart Hall is one of the founders of cultural studies in Britain and its most influential representative, internationally. The first editor of New Left Review, 1960–61, and author (with P. Whannel) of The Popular Arts, Hall was Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies […]