If the intellectual horizon of these formidable books is constituted by the concept of modernity, what they offer is not merely the usual accounts of ʻthe experience of modernity in…ʼ (Bengal or Japan, in these cases), but a set of complex and detailed reflections on the politics and culture of historical spatio-temporalization. The issue of […]

News Lenin in Essen Towards a Politics of Truth: The Retrieval of Lenin Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, 2–4 February 2001 Essen, home of Krupps and other behemoths of German industry, is where Slavoj Ziek has spent the past year at an interdisciplinary research college sponsoring his million-mark research prize for a project on ʻThe Antinomies of […]

Obituary W.V.O. Quine, 1908–2000 Over Christmas, Quine died: the sad but proper occasion to revisit his huge contribution to philosophy – in particular its relation to those currents of thought which most preoccupy RPʼs readers and contributors. ʻNot much of a relationʼ will say those who only acknowledge Quine as the doyen of the ʻAnalyticʼ […]

Out of Japan The New Associationist Movement Harry harootunian If the news from Japan during the last decade has concentrated on the depressing symptoms of decline of what once had been hailed as a miracle model of capitalist development, the announcement last year of the establishment of the New Associationist Movement in Osaka and Tokyo […]

It’s the political economy, stupid! On `´Zi`´zek’s Marxism Sean homer I have a very traditional Marxist belief that the new liberal-democratic order cannot go on indefinitely, that there will be a moment of explosion, probably caused by some kind of ecological crisis or whatever – and that we must prepare ourselves for that moment. [1] […]

Merleau-Pontyʼs fertile and provocative approach to philosophy was abruptly terminated by his death in 1961. Paul Ricoeurʼs judgement that he was the greatest of the French phenomenologists1 has frequently been cited since then, yet a second demise occurred during the 1960s: this time at the hands of phenomenologyʼs structuralist and poststructuralist critics. Although their targets […]

Whatever happened to the idea of the body politic? For those interested in social and political thought this is a pertinent question, since these fields have in recent years become saturated with discussions of the body. The loss of confidence in previously established categories has provoked a widespread return to the body as the basis […]

Reviews Universalism’s struggleMartha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. xxi + 312 pp., £20.00 hb., 0 521 66086 6. Nussbaumʼs is a moral project, couched in ethical arguments that stipulate and champion a list of ʻcapabilitiesʼ. These are the capabilities which allow women, the traditionally disadvantaged group […]

News Hegemony or Socialism? 15 Years: Hegemony and Socialist StrategyTate Modern, London, 3 June 2001 The historical claims of the conference celebrating the fifteenth (actually, the sixteenth) anniversary and second edition of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffeʼs Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, were ambivalent. Sitting in the Tate Modernʼs ʻRed Roomʼ […]

Commentary Tate Modern A year of sweet success Esther leslie One room in Tate Modern is often passed through very quickly. An installation by Zurich artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss re-creates a room where redecorators are at work. Each item – buckets, brushes, a can of fizzy drink, a video cassette, palettes, a saucer […]

A central preoccupation of German aesthetic theorists over the last thirty years has been with the social and political truth-potential of works of art. Drawing on the distinctively Idealist and post-Idealist tradition of German philosophy since Hegel and the early romantics up to Heidegger, Gadamer and Adorno, several theorists have argued that works of art […]

Niklas Luhmann, who died in 1998 (see Obituary in RP 94), is not widely discussed by social and cultural theorists outside Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Scandinavia and Italy. Yet in Germany his influence rivals and even exceeds that of Habermas in certain reaches of social theory, extending also to philosophers and logicians. More surprisingly, perhaps, he […]

The emergency that was and is the AIDS epidemic produced a radical, almost geological reconstruction of the terrain of (homo)sexual politics, a reconstruction that we are only hesitantly coming to terms with. The social trajectory described by the emergent sexual communities in the West, from dubious toleration to the threat of imminent annihilation, was already […]

The resurgence of interest in Sartre in the last year or so has come as a welcome development in todayʼs neoliberal and supposedly post-ideological political and intellectual climate. Sartreʼs trajectory, developing as it does from the existentialist quasi-idealism of Being and Nothingness to the Hegelian and Marxian derived preoccupations of Critique of Dialectical Reason and […]

Reviews The tale of TedTed Honderich, Philosopher: A Kind of Life, Routledge, London, 2001. x + 441 pp., £20.00 hb., 0 415 23697 5. There has been a surprisingly close relationship between philosophy and autobiography ever since Augustine. Indeed, it could plausibly be argued that modern European philosophy begins with Descartesʼ first-hand account of how […]

Commentary No to Kyoto Chris wilbert Much has been made of the Bush administrationʼs withdrawal from negotiations on, and refusal to complete ratification of, the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change. Yet more bile has been raised by the subsequent announcement of new energy policies to address Americaʼs supposed ʻenergy crisisʼ, policies which involve further […]

power, or by the view that market mechanisms and profit are the solutions to environmental problems, to gather together, to reject Kyoto, to tell the world why this system is no good, and to force real changes based on social justice, leading to wider economic transformation. Sources World Bank carbon website: www.prototypecarbonfund.org/. [archive]Equity Watch, Centre […]

In search of community Mouffe, Wittgenstein and Cavell Alessandra tanesini Recent discussions of political community are, so I argue in this article, haunted by the spectre of scepticism about other minds. I do not intend to suggest that these discussions address directly the philosophical version of the sceptical problem. Rather, I believe they find their […]