Reviews Revenge or revival? Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, London and New York, 2002. xvii + 392 pp., £20.00 hb., 1 85984 712 9. ^ The translation of Marx for Our Times presents to an Anglophone readership one of the more ambitious and, in […]

Obituary Norman O. Brown, 1913–2002Norman O. Brown was born in New Mexico in 1913 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at the University of Wisconsin. His tutor at Oxford was Isaiah Berlin. A product of the 1930s, Brown was active in left-wing politics – for example, in the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign – […]

Conference report As if‘Philosophy As…’ Philosophy Programme of the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, and the Centre for Theoretical Studies, University of Essex, Senate House, University of London, 28–30 November 2002With five plenary speakers – Simon Critchley, Manuel DeLanda, Michael Friedman, Hilary Lawson and Christoph Menke – and a somewhat daunting fifty-four professionals […]

Commentary Anti-Americanism and realignment in the two Koreas Hyun ok park For all their differences, the expressions of anti-Americanism that erupted this winter in South Korea and North Korea convey a common desire. They were distinctly post-Cold War events, not just because Koreans are pursuing national sovereignty independently of the USA, but more importantly because […]

The exemplary exception Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Andrew norris rights. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political aberration, least of all a unique event, but instead the place where politics as the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself: ʻtoday it is not the city but […]

The current discussion of a future juridical structure for the European Union is turning into a quest for a new European political culture. [1] Along with the discussion of the juridical structure an image of ʻEuropean valuesʼ is emerging, according to which the European continent comprises tolerant, democratic and peace-loving citizens. As well as being […]

While the need for the renovation of critical social theory has been evident for decades, radical critique has disappeared among leading philosophical schools. Mainstream social criticism, having silently accepted the rules of the game, has turned itself to the other side of the same, to a ʻcritical allyʼ of capitalism. As one modern critic puts […]

Robert Bernasconi’s article in RP 117 has harsh and important things to say about some philosophical heroes of the Enlightenment, especially Kant, and it deserves serious critical attention. [1] This response is not directly concerned with the central claims of the article but with a marginal, though still significant, aspect: its treatment of Hegel. It […]

Kristin Rossʼs lucidly written book on the ʻsurvivals of May ʼ68ʼ tackles the ʻmemorial management of Mayʼ, those games of memory and forgetting that make the event a prisoner of its successive representations. This book has the great merit of dismantling, with the utmost clarity, the laborious exercise of ideological mine-clearing which in thirty years […]

News Strategies for language? Being a modern linguist is a pretty rotten business. Applications to study modern languages in UK universities have fallen by over a third in the last decade. Whilst Spanish and to a lesser extent Italian have fared reasonably well, other languages are in rapid decline. University applications have directly reflected falling […]

Obituary Ian Craib, 1945–2002 Oan Craib, who has died at the age of fifty-seven, had a long association with Radical Philosophy. He wrote extensively for the journal in the early years, especially through his reviews, and was a member of the editorial group in those days. He was appointed as a lecturer in sociology at […]

Commentary War and democracy Kate soper Whether they welcomed the prospect of the ʻnewʼ world order it would supposedly inaugurate, or were appalled by its imperial ambitions and the disasters it would unleash, few can have doubted the historic import of the decision to go to war with Iraq. Those who have committed the globe […]

Consumers or citizens? Re-regulating communications Julian petley At a seminar on the recent Communications Bill in Britain, the UK Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, began her speech by asking, ʻWhat is the point of government?ʼ A reasonable question. The answer, however, was less so – at least to those who gasped in audible surprise on hearing […]

Going Back Heidegger, East Asia and ‘the West’ Stella sandford Heideggerʼs influence on some important strands of modern East Asian, and particularly Japanese, philosophy is well known. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a number of scholars who would become major figures in Japanese philosophy (such as Miki Kiyoshi and Nishitani Keiji) visited Heidegger and attended […]

Empire and the multitude A dialogue on the new order of globalization Antonio negri and danilo zolo danilo zolo For a long time I resisted the calls, from many quarters, to publicly debate Empire, the book you co-authored with Michael Hardt, which has prompted a debate of exceptional scope and intensity on both sides of […]

In Friedrich Schlegelʼs famous fragment, the philosophical radicalism of Fichteʼs system is compared to both the artistic experimentalism of Goetheʼs Wilhelm Meister and the politically emancipatory force of the French Revolution. The Romantic project as a whole was prototypical for Benjamin in its willingness to align just such political, historical and aesthetic phenomena with the […]

Obituaries Radical inventions Monique Wittig, 1935–2003ʻBut remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.ʼ Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères Monique Wittig, who has died aged 67, was one of the most provocative and innovative of lesbian feminist thinkers of the twentieth century. Wittig was born in Dannemarie, on the Upper Rhine in France on […]

Infinite conversation Maurice Blanchot, 1907–2003 Maurice Blanchot considered writing unimportant. It is not important to write, he said. He was – but ʻWhatʼs the word?ʼ Beckett would ask. ʻWhatʼs the wrong word?ʼ He was an unimportant writer. Now he has made his exit. His books always did and still do leave us alone, with nothing […]