Patriotism as paranoia Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble Barry schwabsky Folklore warns that the devil can only enter your house if you invite him in. What itʼs not so clear about is that more often than not the devil poses as just the person you need when youʼre in trouble. Steve Kurtz, an […]

Obituary symposium Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004 David Cunningham In an interview with Le Monde published a couple of months before his death at the age of 74 from pancreatic cancer on Friday 9 October 2004, Jacques Derrida confirmed what many already knew, that he was ʻdangerously illʼ, ʻat war against myselfʼ. If questions of ʻsurvivalʼ had […]

Reviews The hesitation waltzIan H. Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism, Berghahn, New York and London, 2004. xiii + 242 pp., £47.00 hb., £14.95 pb., 1 57181 621 6 hb., 1 57181 542 2 pb. As the adolescentʼs entrée into the world of ideas, existentialism has probably diminished a little since the Cureʼs 1978 ʻKilling an Arabʼ, […]

Conference report Time, memory and history7th International Conference on Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, University of Heidelberg, 23–26 September 2004 Jointly organised by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg, the Society for Philosophy and the Science of the Psyche, and the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry, this conference was an opportunity for […]

Commentary Unborn mothers The old rhetoric of new reproductive technologies Lisa guenther If nothing else, the new reproductive technologies produce fabulous headlines. One of the most impressive comes from the Guardian: ʻProspect of babies from unborn mothers.ʼ [1] A team of researchers in Israel led by Dr Tal Biron-Shental have been attempting to grow viable […]

In the preface to the English edition of Cinema 2, Deleuze claims that cinema is a repetition, in speededup form, of an experience that has already occurred in the history of philosophy. [1] This notion of repetition recalls the biological notion of the ‘recapitulation’ of phylogeny in ontogeny: individual development recapitulates, or replays in speeded-up […]

Democratic materialism and the materialist dialectic Alain badiou Franceʼs agony was not born of the flagging reasons to believe in her: defeat, demography, industry, etc., but of the incapacity to believe in anything at all. André MalrauxWhat do we all think, today?* What do I myself think when I donʼt monitor myself? Or, rather, what […]

Interview kostas axelos Mondialisation without the world stuart elden when you left greece in 1945, why did you choose paris?kostas axelos Having a trilingual education – Greek, French, German – when I had to leave Greece, dominated by the Right, at the end of 1945, there was no choice. To undertake advanced studies in philosophy […]

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life John Kraniauskas Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice Françoise Vergès Alessandra […]

News Persian Empire Antonio Negri in Iran, 4–6 January 2005, House of Artists and Centre for Dialogue Among Civilizations, Tehran; 7 January 2005, Isfahan What exactly does Antonio Negri have to say to Iran? Politically and economically distanced from the standpoint of the US and its allies, Iran has produced its own quite singular, yet […]

Commentary You let her into the house? Reflections on the politics of aid in Africa Lara pawson There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. […]

The last two decades have seen a revival of interest in the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), in large part because of its role in the writings of Gilles Deleuze. However, it has been a noteworthy characteristic of the new Bergsonism (or Deleuze-Bergsonism) that it has proceeded more or less as if earlier criticisms of […]

‘Joining tracks with the world’ The impossibility of politics in China Rebecca E. Karl Shortly before the October Revolution, Lenin challenged his comrades: ʻI donʼt know how radical you are or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.ʼ [1] […]

Refiguring the multitude From exodus to the production of norms Timothy rayner The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in antithetical values. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §2Hardt and Negri describe Multitude (2004) as a ʻsequelʼ to Empire (2000). But for many this book will seem a strange successor. Empire, for all […]

Reviews Culs-de-sacJacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum Press, London and New York, 2005. x + 116 pp., £14.99 hb., 0 8264 7067 X. Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005. xi + 148 pp., £29.95 hb., £12.50 pb., 0 80474408 […]

Obituary Counter-traditionalist Susan Sontag, 1933–2004 In the prefatory note to her first collection of critical writings, Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag reflected that ʻin the end, what I have been writing is not criticism at all, strictly speaking, but case studies for an aesthetic, a theory of my own sensibilityʼ. The statement holds true for […]

Obituary Editor of the JBSPWolfe Mays, 1912–2005 Wolfe Mays had not one but two distinguished academic careers, bringing new meaning to the phrase ʻUniversity of the Third Ageʼ. His first degree was from Oxford, his doctorate from Cambridge, and he then served first as lecturer and finally as reader at the University of Manchester, from […]

News Art in the age of its political reproductionPopulism, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 8 April–4 June 2005; National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, 15 April–2 September 2005; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 29 April–28 August 2005; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, 10 May–4 September 2005, www.poppulism2005.com [archive] START KAPITAL, STANDARD (OSLO), 14 April–22 May 2005, […]