Reviews Appreciating our beginningsRachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, eds, The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Womenʼs Liberation, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1998. xii + 531 pp., $20.00 pb., 0 609 80384 0. Sheila Rowbotham, Threads Through Time: Writings on History and Autobiography, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1999. 432 pp., £8.99 pb., 0 1402 275541. The […]

According to a recent article in The Observer (10 October 1999) the fashionable dinner tables of German society are buzzing with controversy over ʻthe death of critical theory and the future of metaphysicsʼ. The article refers to a debate provoked by a conference address given at Elmau in Bavaria last July by Peter Sloterdijk. His […]

Radical philosophy has become one hundred in the year 2000, mimicking the Christian millennium with a numerological accident of its own. Arbitrary as such anniversaries are, it nonetheless provides an occasion to reflect upon some of the changes in the context of the journal over the last three decades.RP is the only one of the […]

Commentary On minorities: cultural rights Homi K. Bhabha After the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we still need to ask: what is the human ʻthing itselfʼ? Who is ʻone of usʼ in the midst of the jurisdictional unsettlements of migration, minoriti-zation, the clamour of multiculturalism? To whom do we turn in […]

We live, apparently, in insecure times. Sociologyʼs current ʻgrand thinkersʼ, for example, all highlight the issue of insecurity in their accounts of what is variously described as ʻrisk societyʼ, ʻreflexive modernityʼ and ʻpostmodernityʼ. For Anthony Giddens, existential anxiety is generated by the collapse of ontological security in the late modern age, while Zygmunt Bauman suggests […]

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 […]

Primordial Being Enlightenment, Schopenhauer and the Indian subject of postcolonial theory Chetan bhatt century Enlightenment philosophers – others could have been chosen – considered the place of ʻIndiaʼ and some of its religions and philosophies in their grand civilizational, cultural and philosophical chronographies. This is a difficult area whose complexities can be elided by the […]

Political identities have received bad press for quite some time. Sexual identities constitute no exception to this trend. Nearly ten years ago Judith Butler expressed her ambivalent relation to identity categories by calling them ʻnecessary errorsʼ, whilst at the same time holding that ʻthere remains a political imperative to use [them]ʼ.1 In more recent times, […]

At a New York party in 1987, A.J. Ayer, then in his late seventies, walked into a bedroom where Mike Tyson was forcing himself on a young woman. In reply to Ayerʼs warning that he should desist, Tyson replied: ʻDo you know who the fuck I am? Iʼm the heavyweight champion of the world.ʼ Ayerʼs […]

In his History of the World in 10½ Chapters Julian Barnes remarks that to say that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, makes it sound too grand and considered a process. History just burps, he says, and we taste the rawonion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago. The opening […]

Commentary Third Way or Réalisme de Gauche? The new social democracy in France Ben clift The ʻThird Wayʼ remains nebulous and ill-defined, yet advocates argue that it stands for ʻmodernizedʼ social democracy – a vision around which the European Left must cohere. However, not all subscribe to Blairʼs singular reading of the modernization of European […]

In recent years, political philosophers have paid increasing attention to the claims of indigenous people. [1] Not surprisingly, this attention has been greatest in those countries which were products of the European expansion into the rest of the world in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, […]

What’s material about materialist feminism? A Marxist Feminist critique Martha E. Gimenez In the heady days of the Womenʼs Liberation Movement, it was possible to identify four main currents within feminist thought: Liberal (concerned with attaining economic and political equality within the context of capitalism); Radical (focused on men and patriarchy as the main causes […]

What, then, should the new relationship between society and individual consist of? First, it involves a new concept of citizenship, in which rights and responsibilities go together.… As is so clear the more you examine the rise in crime and social disorder in Britain, the problem has been that the Left has tended to undervalue […]

Althusser and usLouis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, edited by François Mathéron, translated and introduced by Gregory Elliott, Verso, London and New York, 1999. xxii + 136 pp., £20.00, 1 85984 711 0. It suffices to know the history of the constitution of nation states in broad outline to appreciate that Machiavelli does nothing but think […]

News Compulsory downshiftingThe landmark case of the Open University v. its part-time staff is grinding its way through the courts towards likely victory for the associate staff on pro-rata fulltime employment benefits. Whilst this highlights a particularly bad case of handme-down employment conditions in the HE sector (one recent estimate puts pay at £8.00 per […]

Commentary Philosophy on television Ben watson Marx remarks somewhere that all true philosophy begins with the criticism of religion. If he had lived through the postwar era, he would have added: and the religion of a triumphant capitalism is television. Just as the medieval cathedral was the apotheosis of feudalism, television is the techno-exemplification of […]

Nous sommes tous néokantiens.Michel Foucault1In the 1980s and early 1990s, when poststructuralism set the agenda in cultural theory and shaped the way in which theorists from other traditions were received, the work of the Bakhtin Circle was often seen as anticipating contemporary concerns to a quite uncanny extent. While some adopted Bakhtin as a poststructuralist […]