COMMENTARYPhilosophizing post-punk Ben watson Philosophers are talking more about music than they did in the past. This is partly to do with the rise of Adornoʼs star in the philosophical firmament and the fact that over half of his writings are devoted to music. But it is also because a generation that imbibed punk in […]

Philosophy’s malaise Philosophy and its history Pierre macherey For as long as philosophy has existed it has been intimately concerned with and profoundly perturbed by its history – a history from which it would very much like to unburden itself, without really knowing how. * In order to specify the character of this discomfiture we […]

W.G. Sebald and the modern art of memory Stewart martin been repressed within cultural consciousness, but with what has been repressed by the dominant scenes and institutions of memory, with what the memory of the repressed itself represses. This is controversial but also timely, as the recent commemorations of the bombing of Dresden indicate. It […]

Late Merleau-Ponty, revived Eric matthews * Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 2003. xx + 296 pp., £69.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 8101 1445 3 hb., 0 8101 1446 1 pb.; Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of […]

Reviews ‘The man hit the woman’Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley, The Force of Language, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004. vii + 186 pp., £50.00 hb., 1 4039 4248 X. Carol Sanders, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. xii + 303 pp., £45.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 0521 80051 X hb., 0521 80486 […]

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, […]

Commentary Quite the opposite The EU crisis and the Left The dominant message of the French ʻNoʼ campaign in the recent referendum on the EU was opposition to an Anglo-Saxon neoliberal Europe, and the Left played a key role in mobilizing a popular movement in towns and villages across France. The Dutch Socialist Party was […]

A salutary shock for bien pensant Europe To judge the significance of the French and Dutch rejections of the so-called EU Constitution, we need some assessment of what the nature of the current EU project actually is. Mainstream academic answers to this question take for granted two ideas about the EU: first, that there has […]

In what sense would a certain concept of the urban meet, as Henri Lefebvre asserted some thirty-five years ago, a ʻtheoretical needʼ? What forms of crosscultural and cross-disciplinary ʻgeneralityʼ would be at stake here? And if this is indeed, as Lefebvre always insisted, a question of a necessary ʻelaboration, a search, a conceptual formulationʼ, what […]

Recognized as a pressing issue for world heritage, Veniceʼs environmental problems are familiar to its visitors. In 1999, Oliviero Toscani – a figure famous for initiating Benettonʼs controversial advertising strategy – was commissioned by the cityʼs mayor to produce a poster campaign intended to discourage a certain kind of tourism. It was argued that the […]

Leslie Grantham: Thatʼs what the eighties are all about: nostalgia. Anita Dobson: Well… how could it be anything else?80s Mania (ITV, 12 June 2004)Most of the things one imagines in hell are there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. George OrwellOurs is a retrospective culture, in which the […]

For more than a decade much of the anglophone literature on Simone de Beauvoir has been preoccupied with the question of her intellectual status, attacking the still prevailing presumptions that her work is not philosophical or that it is philosophically wholly indebted to Sartre. The publication of this volume – the first in the Beauvoir […]

Obituary Paul Ricoeur, 1913–2005 Another great French philosopher has passed away. On 20 May 2005, Paul Ricoeur died in Châtenay-Malabry, Hauts-de-Seine, west of Paris. He was born ninety-two years earlier in Valence on 27 February 1913, and quickly orphaned at the slaughter of the Marne in 1915. He died of natural causes, said his son […]

News The dispute at LMU The current unprecedented polarization between lecturers and executive management at London Metropolitan University (LMU) is due to a bullying management style that culminated in the imposition of a new employment contract that is probably the worst in the HE sector. Recent action has included a weeklong strike in May, timed […]

Commentary England, whose England? Jon Beasley-Murray By their fear you shall know them. The USA responded to al-Qaedaʼs September 2001 attacks with a proliferation of flags reaffirming national pride and widespread support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmed by George W. Bushʼs 2004 re-election. Spain reacted to the Madrid train explosions of March […]

Louis Althusser began Reading Capital with the statement, ʻWe have all certainly read and are all reading [Marxʼs] Capital.ʼ While Althusser is undoubtedly addressing here his seminar, the focus of which was precisely Marxʼs Capital, the sentence that follows elevates the act of reading this particular text to the status of the universal: the entire […]

Nihilism and faith Rose, Bernstein and the future of Critical Theory Tony gorman In a succession of books the late Gillian Rose and Jay Bernstein have sought to defend and elaborate upon the Adornian inheritance both within Critical Theory, contra Habermas, [1] and beyond Critical Theory, contra post-structuralist and postmodernist thought. [2] In these works, […]

The concept of money Christopher J. Arthur In the history of philosophy the greatest minds have been aware that the existence and power of money pose a problem. One need only mention Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Simmel. Of course, if one accepts, as I do, that Capital is a work of philosophy as much as […]

Reviews God squaddyHent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 2005. 760 pp. £46.50 hb., £18.00 pb., 0 8018 8016 5 hb., 0 8018 8017 3 pb. Religion is back. This seems to be true not only in politics, where […]