News The unmaking of a treaty The convention on biological diversity The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), formulated in 1992, was a toughly negotiated international treaty. Although negotiated in the global political ambience of the new unipolar world order and the first, unopposed Western victory in Iraq, the Southern negotiators displayed unusual unity and negotiation […]

Commentary After Iraq Vulnerable imperial stasis Neil smith I dread our being too much dreaded. Edmund Burke At the end of the twentieth century the American ascendancy appeared almost inexorable. Despite personal scandal and impeachment hearings, a seemingly unassailable Bill Clinton led a global neoliberalism that was methodically sweeping all other contenders aside. At home […]

Agonized liberalism The liberal theory of William E. Connolly Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo ʻDemocracyʼ in the discourse of the ʻFree Westʼ does not carry the same meaning as it does when we speak of ʻpopular-democraticʼ struggle or of deepening the democratic content of political life. We cannot allow the term to be wholly expropriated.… Instead, we […]

The reproach of abstraction Peter osborne This is a paper about abstraction, in particular, but by no means exclusively – and this ʻby no means exclusivelyʼ is a large part of its point – philosophical abstraction.* It is concerned at the outset with what might be called the reproach of abstraction: the commonly held view, […]

One of the rarely noticed historical ironies of the twentieth century was the effort of societies located on the capitalist periphery – outside of Euro-America – to resort to a philosophy which had no place for them in order to explain their entry into and experience of capitalist modernization. Japan led the way in this […]

Reviews Let’s talk about sexLuciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, Continuum, London/New York, 2004. x + 227 pp., £60.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 0 8264 6989 2 hb., 0 8264 6990 6 pb. Mario Perniola, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World, trans. Massimo Verdicchio, […]

News It could have been worse Walter Benjamin as operaBrian Ferneyhough/Charles Bernstein, Shadowtime, Prinzregententheater, Munich, 25 May 2004. Something about Walter Benjamin − the life, his theory − makes him an obvious candidate for representation or fictionalization. He has been the subject of one novel and has played a walk-on part in a couple more. […]

Conference report Il profeta? Politics, Subjectivity, Event: A Workshop with Antonio Negri on his book Time for Revolution, Birkbeck Col ege, University of London, 25 June. Antonio Negri in Conversation, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 26 June. Antonio Negri visited London this summer for the first time since 1978. His recent release from prison and […]

Letter Where does meaning get its fix? A response to Rachel Malik’s ‘Fixing meaning’ The questions of pragmatic and intertextual accounts of communication raised in Malikʼs ʻFixing meaningʼ (RP 124) are not answered by suggesting a kind of complementarity between them or their complexification via the ʻhorizon of publishingʼ. This is arguably because, as the […]

Commentary Fast train coming The political pedagogy of Fahrenheit 9/11 Mandy merck This August, when Fahrenheit 9/11 had long since surpassed all records to become the most commercially successful documentary ever made, the New Yorker ran an article anxiously attempting to establish it within a generic tradition stretching from Grierson and Flaherty to Fredric Wiseman […]

Making another world possible? The European Social Forum Les levidow The European Social Forum (ESF) has been inspired by the global slogan ʻAnother world is possibleʼ, expressing the need to create alternatives from out of the resistance to neoliberalism. Since its inception in 2002, the ESF has provided an opportunity to debate methods and strategies […]

‘The madness of Islam’ Foucault’s Occident and the Revolution in Iran Ian almond Indeed, if a philosophy of the future exists, it will have to be born outside Europe, or as a consequence of the encounters and frictions between Europe and non-Europe. Michel Foucault in interview, 19781In looking through the half-dozen articles Foucault published on […]

Let the dead bury their dead Marxism and the politics of redemption Mark neocleous Early in the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx makes the following comment: the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition […]

Playing the code Allegories of control in Civilization Alexander R. Galloway With the progressive arrival of new media over the last century or so there appears a sort of lag time, call it the ʻthirty-year ruleʼ, starting from the invention of a medium and ending at its ascent to proper and widespread functioning in culture […]

Reviews ‘To be matter’Claudine Frank, ed., The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2003. 416 pp., £17.95 pb., 0 82233 068 7. ^ In 1934 two men in Paris contemplated something new and wonderful. They had obtained a pair of Mexican jumping beans. The younger of the two wanted […]

Conference report Strangers in the city Philosophy of Architecture/Architecture of Philosophy Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH) Congress, National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, 9–11 July 2004 The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television – now the most visited museum in the UK outside of London – has, on its […]

The cyborg mother Jaimie Smith-Windsor31 January 2003. The birth of my daughter, Aleah Quinn Smith-Windsor. A few days after Quinn was born this quotation appeared, written beside her incubator: ʻEvery blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers: grow, grow.ʼ It was a near-fatal birth. Quinn was born at 24½ weeksʼ […]

Commentary It’s not the culture, stupid Interpreting the US election Ken hirschkop Elections first and foremost decide governments, but they are also conjunctures when political forces are organized and realigned. The very act of mobilizing activists or energizing groups within the franchise can have long-term effects, and in the course of a campaign ideologies that […]