Micropolitics Leo Bersani and conflicts in contemporary feminism Rafeeq hasan …as if the molecular were in the realm of the imagination and applied only to the individual. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ʻMicropolitics and Segmentarityʼ [1] There is something taking shape in Western feminist theory, something so drastic – and, to speak from an intellectualist […]

In 1784 Kant published an essay for a journal that represented the public face of an Enlightenment secret society of senior officials in the administration of Frederick II. In the forty-fourth year of Frederickʼs reign it was necessary to plan for the succession and to ensure as far as possible the irreversibility of the achievements […]

I imagine that for Western Marxists (such as myself) History and Class Consciousness will have meant ideological analysis rather than what Lukács called ʻorganizational problemsʼ. This book will, in other words, have meant a breakthrough in the study of ʻthe antinomies of bourgeois consciousnessʼ (subtitle of one of its most famous chapters) rather than those […]

News Whose war? George Bush called it an act of war. He has rarely been good with words, but this time he was quite right. And an astonishingly brutal and vicious act of war it was. Nevertheless, the stunning violence of the attacks of 11 September does not by itself signal the beginning of a […]

Commentary A global public sphere? Susan Buck-Morss When the multitude ceases to fear, it becomes fearful. Benedict Spinoza* This is the text of a talk to the Radical Philosophy Conference, Look No Hands! Political Forms of Global Modernity, Birkbeck College, London, 27 October 2001. September 11 has ruptured irrevocably the context in which we as […]

Ten challenges for ‘anti-war’ politics Martin shaw It is said that generals always fight yesterdayʼs war, but this is even truer of antiwar movements. Although the ʻwar against terrorismʼ is billed as a ʻnew kind of warʼ, the anti-war rhetoric has seemed even more familiar than the military practice. In this piece I bring my […]

Emergent fronts of the global anti-war movement Mike marqusee It has been widely observed that the US-led global alliance against terrorism is a motley assemblage, bound together by expedience rather than principle. Some would say the same about the global anti-war alliance now being constructed to oppose it. Diversity is certainly the hallmark of this […]

Family values Butler, Lacan and the rise of Antigone Cecilia sjöholm * Judith Butler, Antigoneʼs Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Columbia University Press, New York, 2000. x + 103 pp., £14.50 hb., 0 231 11894 5. One may wonder, with George Steiner, what would have happened if psychoanalysis had chosen Antigone, rather than Oedipus, […]

Uncategorical imperatives Adorno, Badiou and the ethical turn Peter dews ethics have now generated a crossover among these various disciplines that sees and does ethics ʻotherwiseʼ. The decentering of the subject has brought about a recentering of the ethical. But the disparate contents of the volume, from John Guillory on the ethics of reading, via […]

Reviews Uncle Joe Slavoj Ziek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Four Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion, Verso, London and New York, 2000. 160 pp., £16.00 hb., 1 85984 792 7. A well-known Slovenian philosopher and a British Army officer walk into a bar. One says to the other, ʻYou are just a product of […]

Conference report Rearguard actionImmanent Choreographies: Deleuze and Neo-aesthetics,Tate Modern, 21–22 September 2001 This conference, organized by Tate Modern and Staffordshire University, brought together an impressive array of speakers from the UK (Alexander García Düttmann and Peter Hallward), Europe (Robert Fleck and Pascale Criton), the USA (Dorothea Olkowski and John Rajchman), and Australia (Ian Buchanan), including […]

Obituary John Fauvel, 1947–2001 Radical Philosophy is still too young to have published many obituaries of members of its Editorial Collective. But, at fifty-three, John Fauvel, who died suddenly on 12 May, was too young to die. I knew him first and foremost as a friend, who between 1982 and 1990 was also on the […]

Letter Institutional critique-by-numbers A reply to Esther Leslie What would count as an effective ʻinstitutional critiqueʼ of Tate Modern? If it is, as one says, a new kind of art museum, we need to ask what new strategies it uses to organize knowledge and experience, and what forces shape those strategies. So far these questions […]

Commentary Blair’s jihad, Blunkett’s crusade The battle for the hearts and minds of Britain’s Muslims Gita sahgal As the city blazes, the watchman Sleeps happily, thinkingMy house is secure. Let the town burn, as long as my thingsAre saved. During the air strikes in Afghanistan, I was reminded of these words of the fifteenth-century poet […]

The poor against the poor? Race, class and anti-fascism Nick moss and mark neocleous The British Left has for years bought itself a quiet life by ignoring the link between the resurgence of far-Right groups across Europe and the steady growth in support for the British National Party (BNP) in the UK. Occasionally this attitude […]

In ʻWhat is a Nation?ʼ (1882), Ernest Renan provides an exemplary definition of the nation as an organic community: The nation, like an individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion.… A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in […]

An end can be a goal or a terminus. The end in question here is both, as a matter of logic if not intention or accomplished fact. [1] The historical form I have in mind, in so far as it mediates expressly political claims, is paradoxical, implying the dissolution of politics in its central modern […]

The truism that history is written by (or, rather, on behalf of) conquerors is more respectable now than ever before among Sunday supplement intellectuals. The reason, where it goes beyond a simple resentful wish to damn historical analysis as ʻirrelevantʼ, seems to be that victorsʼ history is easily opposed to that of victims, that ill-defined […]

The ethical dimension of Adornoʼs work is elusive and gestural, but it is an ineliminable part of his philosophy. Jay Bernstein attempts to do justice to what he terms the ʻethical intensityʼ of Adornoʼs writing by reconstructing the ethical content and premisses of his philosophical output. However, this book is not only a mining of […]