Revolution is ordinaryJohn Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, Pluto Press, London and Sterling, 2002. viii + 237 pp., £50.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 0 7453 1864 9 hb., 0 7453 1863 0 pb. Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London and Sterling, Pluto Press, 2002. ix + 257 […]

Rendezvous Return(s) to Marx? Institut français and Tate Modern, London, 31 May–1 June 2002 In the summer of 1977 more than 6,000 people attended the Communist Partyʼs ʻPeopleʼs Jubileeʼ at Alexandra Palace in London, at a time when the Party could boast 28,000 comrades. Twenty-five years later, ʻReturn(s) to Marx?ʼ was one of the few […]

Commentary Jews in the culture wars Lynne segal What will it take to unite the intellectual Left? After decades of internal academic strife on the Left, the moral dilemmas currently faced by Jewish academics have thrown up some unexpected alliances. The 1980s and 1990s were embattled decades in the universities, especially in North America. These […]

The political reception of Niklas Luhmann in the English-speaking world is still localized. His death in 1998 triggered a wider general interest in his work, and its susceptibility to reception in cultural theory has been clearly registered. [1] However, political debate on his writings is still largely confined to the theoretically tuned regions of legal […]

Despite recent reassurances that ʻwe have never been modernʼ, owing to a conception of the modern based on the separation of nature from the order of society that has never functioned strictly according to the rules of its ʻconstitutionʼ, it is, nevertheless, this capacity to think the modern as temporally different from its antecedents that […]

Over the past few decades, most Western democracies which contain national minorities have offered them a degree of cultural and in some cases territorial autonomy. In Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported?* the Canadian political theorist Will Kymlicka lays out principles that justify this unusually happy experience after the fact. Then he considers whether the experience […]

Born in the Ukraine in 1910, Raya Dunayesvskaya emigrated to the United States in her teens. By the age of twenty she was active on the American Left, her ability to read Russian giving her an advantage in interpreting the contradictory messages emerging from revolutionary Russia. She served as Trotskyʼs secretary when the exiled Bolshevik […]

Conference report Letdown ‘Siegfried Kracauer’, University of Birmingham 13–14 September 2002 Only the superstitious would argue that the omens should have been heeded. Was it really the power of Friday the 13th that jinxed the event, such that all four ʻbig nameʼ international speakers failed to show at this two-day conference devoted to the work […]

Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.ʼ How many times during the heyday of socialist activism in the 1970s was Marxʼs eleventh thesis on Feuerbach rolled out to put overly reflective comrades back in their place? In fact, of course, even then one would have been hard-pressed […]

Will the real Kant please stand up The challenge of Enlightenment racism to the study of the history of philosophy Robert bernasconi This article poses the question of racism in philosophy. I will be referring to the racism that we often find in the texts of some of the most eminent figures of the history […]

What is living and what is dead in Swedish social democracy? Magnus ryner Seeming to confirm that politics proceeds through contradiction, the essentials of a neoliberal project – the subordination of the social to market discipline – has been consolidated in Europe by social-democratic governments. As yet another political project which is referred to as […]

Surveillance and class in Big Brother Mike wayne The television series Big Brother, for which Channel Four has contracted the rights until 2006, is in fact rather more than a television programme. It is better understood as an evolving multimedia, multiplatform technological experiment, trailblazing free terrestrial television into the brave new world of what Dan […]

When Hermann Mörchen was accumulating materials for his massive study Adorno and Heidegger: An Investigation of a Philosophical Refusal to Communicate (1981), he asked Heidegger whether he had ever met his persistent antagonist. Heidegger recalled that he had been introduced to Adorno after Heidegger had delivered a paper on ʻPhilosophical Anthropology and Metaphysics of Daseinʼ […]

Obituary Dominique Janicaud, 1937–2002 The philosopher Dominique Janicaud died on 18 August 2002 at Eze on the Côte dʼAzur from a cardiac arrest after swimming in the Mediterranean. He was sixty-four years old. Eze is just along the coast from his beloved Nice, where Dominique had been teaching philosophy since 1966, refusing many invitations to […]

Commentary Shiny, happy people ‘Body Worlds’ and the commodification of health Megan stern Gunther von Hagenʼs touring ʻBody Worldsʼ exhibition of dissected, ʻplastinatedʼ human corpses has generated a great deal of public interest, much of it critical and even hostile. The use of animal body parts in art installations and exhibitions and documentaries exploring human […]

Oedipus as figure Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe It is probable, or at the very least plausible, that Western humanity now models itself on two figures or types – two ʻexamplesʼ, if you like. They appear to be antagonistic (or are at least supported by antagonistic discourses), but their antagonism also binds together, and founds, their kinship, as […]

If for a moment we were to imagine aesthetics as an expansive building that has been worked upon continuously for centuries, that has undergone many redecorations and acquired numerous extensions – letʼs say, as a museum that has become somewhat labyrinthine in the course of time – then we could consider which of its many […]

Bruce Robbinsʼs excellent article in RP 116 points up the paradox of cosmopolitanism – that it seems ʻperpetually torn between an empirical dimension and a normative dimensionʼ. [1] For Robbins, the paradox of cosmopolitanism is rooted in the limited empirical sense of political community. For genuine democracy people need to belong to the same ʻcommunity […]