Commentary The pink Viagra story We have the drug, but what’s the disease? Leonore tiefer Ever since Viagra put a spring in the step of millions of impotent men after coming onto the market in March, attention has been focused on the more mysterious key to sexual gratification among women. Sunday Times, 19 July 1998 […]

The parliamentary incantation of the ʻnewʼ is now neatly matched by both popular and academic fascination with the ʻoldʼ. ʻThe pastʼ, as Andreas Huyssen quips, is simply ʻselling better than the futureʼ. [1] In the personal arena, it evokes a comforting nostalgia, when not calling up the sorrows of what might have been, as time […]

There are at least two ways of evaluating philosophical originality. The most obvious is in terms of what a philosopher thinks. As well as proposing novel philosophical theses concerning the nature of being or truth or knowledge, a philosopher may produce new sorts of claim bearing on history, art, morality, politics, and so on. Another […]

If the ʻturn to ethicsʼ has shaped much recent continental philosophy, the ʻturn to religionʼ has not been far behind. The reappearance of various religious categories and concepts in recent political philosophy and philosophical ethics is unmistakable. Moreover, given that much of this writing emerges from the vicinity of Marx, if not directly from Marxism […]

Reviews Dead in AmericaJacques Derrida, Without Alibi, edited, translated and with an introduction by Peggy Kamuf, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2002. 304 pp., £37.95 hb., £17.95 pb., 0 8047 4400 6 hb., 0 8047 4411 4 pb. There is a mordant untimeliness to this new collection of translations of Derridaʼs occasional pieces. The dateline of […]

Locality, locality, locality[Anti-]Globalica: Conceptual and Artistic Tensions in the New Global Disorder, Wroclaw, Poland, 1 May 2003. Organized by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa from the Institute of Digital Art and Technology at the University of Plymouth, this symposium was part of ʻGlobalicaʼ, WRO3, 10th International Media Art Biennale. It undertook to ʻinvestigate the local […]

Commentary Heads of cabbage and mouths full of water On corporate slaughter Mark neocleous In 1998 Simon Jones, a student at the University of Sussex, signed up with Personnel Selection to earn some extra cash. Sent to work for Euromin at Shoreham dockyard, he was given the job of unloading bags of stones by attaching […]

Documenta 11 was one of the most radically conceived events in the history of postcolonial art practice. It is exemplary of the influence of postcolonial discourses on critical art practice over the last twenty years in breaking profoundly with the colonial presuppositions of the nineteenth-century tradition of ethnographic or anthropological exhibitions of non-Western art as […]

In The Racial Contract, Charles Mills argues that contemporary structures of white domination in the West operate by means of an epistemology of ignorance for white people. [1] White people suffer from cognitive dysfunctions such that they cannot understand the racially (and racistly) structured world in which they live and, indeed, helped create. For Mills, […]

Kristeva and The Idiots Cecilia sjöholm The thematic obsessions of filmmaker Lars von Trier are as dubious as they are relevant to contemporary thought: unconditional love, feminine sacrifice, childish gestural provocations and victimization are contrasted with the neurotic fears of normality and authoritarian abuses of power. It has been said by various film critics that […]

in Vaneigemʼs expressionist polemic. Here, you suffer jolt after jolt, as intriguing commentaries on particular rights finish, and another right is bannered in capitals across the page (in this, it recalls the experience of Hegelʼs Logic, where the expositions in smaller type – oral improvisations transcribed by his students – are more accessible than the […]

Conference report Quoi? ‘Questioning Religion’, British Society for Phenomenology, University of Greenwich, 11–13 July 2003n some of the hottest days of the summer, amidst the designs of Wren and Hawksmoor at the University of Greenwichʼs Maritime Campus, around forty speakers and many more participants attended the BSPʼs ʻQuestioning Religionʼ conference. Perhaps the surroundings gave a […]

Two hundred years ago this month (January 2004), the French colony of SaintDomingue on the island of Hispaniola became the independent nation of Haiti. Few transformations in world history have been more momentous, few required more sacrifice or promised more hope. And few have been more thoroughly forgotten by those who would have us believe […]

ʻSpot the differenceʼ is the game, whenever the subject of gender crops up. I play it myself, usually trying to combat the clichés to which it gives rise. This is the danger that stalks feminism: the threat of banality – its impact fading with repetition, its complexities and nuances submerged by anxious attachments to sexual […]

Deleuze’s Bacon Art & Language and Tom Baldwin I Francis Baconʼs public career as a painter began in the 1940s and was more or less established by the 1950s. But it received its first guiding impulse from a convulsion in the British art establishment of the late 1930s. This convulsion was provoked by the increasing […]

In his introduction to Latin American Philosophy, Eduardo Mendieta complains that ʻone of the most amazing things about the bibliographical work on philosophy in English over the last decade or so is its utter silence about Latin American philosophy and philosophersʼ. Surveying the encyclopaedias and dictionaries of the discipline, he suggests that ʻas if by […]

Obituary Edward Said, 1935–2003 The erudition, range and élan of Edward Saidʼs work as a literary scholar, cultural critic and politically engaged public intellectual have produced a mountain of commentary, within and beyond academic communities and across continents. With his death, friends, colleagues, collaborators, former students and acquaintances all over the world have been offering […]

Commentary Debating Ground Zero Architects, planners, ideas Anthony vidler The story of architectureʼs role following the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) in September 2001 is on the one hand long and extremely complex, and on the other brief and simple. The long version involves numerous groups including architects, engineers, planners, developers, public officials […]