NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on the new planetary vulgate

Commentary NewLiberalSpeak Notes on the new planetary vulgate Pierre bourdieu and loïc wacquant Within a matter of a few years, in all the advanced societies, employers, international officials, high-ranking civil servants, media intellectuals and high-flying journalists have all started to voice a strange Newspeak. Its vocabulary, which seems to have sprung out of nowhere, is […]

Feminism against ‘the feminine’

Whilst the distinction between French and AngloAmerican feminism was always rather dubious (failing to be accurate, consistent or inclusive at the level of either national origin, language of choice or theoretical commitment; seeming to parcel feminist theory – or at least the feminist theory that mattered – out into two Western blocks from which the […]

Compendium Bookshop, 1968–2000

Obituary Compendium Bookshop, 1968–2000Londonʼs Compendium Bookshop, a landmark in a certain sort of vanguard bookselling, finally closed its doors in early October. Born in that fabled annus mirabilis, Compendium opened a window into the stuffy predictability of English bookshops, importing literature from the States and Europe, and providing a connection to the most advanced currents […]

Art, politics and provincialism

Commentary Art, politics and provincialism John roberts The Sunday afternoon I visited the recent ʻProtest & Surviveʼ exhibition at Londonʼs Whitechapel Gallery, I was witness within a period of twenty minutes to four different demonstrations outside the gallery. A single demonstration outside a gallery these days is pretty rare; four is a miracle. That they […]

The sword and the bridge: The anatomical and the political in conceptions of sexual difference

Although texts dating from antiquity, particularly those of Aristotle, see the issue of sexual difference as one of a set of themes relating to sovereignty – domination of the other or self-control – it is generally recognized today that these domains are relatively separate. Questions concerning the differences between men and women have been left, […]

106 Reviews

Friedrich Schlegelʼs two-hundred-year-old fragment ʻNothing is more rarely the subject of philosophy than philosophy itselfʼ shows its age. Now, its inversion seems true. Whether through recognition that philosophyʼs self-legitimating critique of the unexcavated presuppositions of other disciplines threatens to prove itself wanting; or, through various concerns for philosophyʼs apparently imminent death (which philosophers frequently seem […]

Holocaust Day

News Holocaust day The inauguration of a Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK on 27 January 2001 was a belated recognition of the central trauma of the twentieth century, and of the suffering of the (relatively few) Jewish refugees and survivors who came to Britain before and after the war, members of a generation now […]

Levinas and the Right: With Reply to Stone

Letters Levinas and the Right Itʼs amazing what can pass for a ʻradicalʼ philosophy nowadays. Howard Caygillʼs article, ʻLevinasʼs Political Judgement: The Esprit Articles 1934–1983ʼ in RP 104 raises a number of questions about Caygillʼs own political judgement, and, indeed, about the judgement of the RP collective. Caygill tells us that ʻit is necessary first […]

Two views on recent anti-capitalist protests

Commentary Two views on recent anti-capitalist protests Nationalize this! What next for anti-globalization protests? At a recent London meeting of the World Development Movement, a group campaigning for reform of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the state of things a year after the ʻanti-globalizationʼ protests in Seattle was summarized for the packed audience by Naomi […]

If ontology, then politics: The sophist effect

To speak is to do something – something other than to express what one thinks, to translate what one knows, and something other than to play with the structure of language. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of KnowledgeFor a critical history of philosophy, the relationship between philosophy and politics has been foreclosed by a strategy apparent […]

The spectral ontology of value

There is a void at the heart of capitalism. It arises because of the nature of commodity exchange, which abstracts from, or absents, the entire substance of use value. What is constituted therewith is a form of unity of commodities that does not rest on any pre-given common content – which does not exist, it […]