Thereʼs no denying the images are dreadful: a naked child hanging from his motherʼs empty breast, large eyes under attack from flies, screams of pain and hunger. We have seen a lot of them since the end of July when the Western media woke up to the hunger crisis in Niger. It made a change […]

Commentary The awfulness of the actual Counter-consumerism in a new age of war Kate soper It is more than four years since the September 11th attack; there is turmoil, daily death and anguish in Iraq, and no sign of a resolution to the ramifying problems created by the invasion and the subsequent ignominious actions of […]

In the last few years, two separate debates on academic freedom have emerged in the United States, and both of them have Israel/Palestine at their centre. The first has to do with arguments against the academic boycott of Israeli institutions on grounds of academic freedom, and the second has to do with the new Academic […]

Thus much of this, will make black white; foul, fair…This line from Shakespeare figures in a longer quotation in Marxʼs Capital, in the chapter on hoarding. The sentence to which the footnote with the Shakespeare quotation is attached, reads: ʻJust as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too, for its part, […]

Orientalisms in the interpretation of Islamic philosophy Muhammad ali khalidi The recent death of Edward Said has reignited the debate as to whether his landmark work Orientalism still has something to teach us about the study of Arab-Islamic civilization. In this article, I will argue that Saidʼs central thesis in Orientalism has a direct explanatory […]

Reviews MathematiquerieEllie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic, eds, Lacan: Topologically Speaking, The Other Press, New York, 2004. 350 pp., £19.50 pb., 1 892746 76 X. Late in her biography of Lacan, Elisabeth Roudinesco gives us the quietly moving image of Lacan in his dotage, playing with pieces of string and seemingly drifting further into some private […]

News Women’s Philosophy Review, 1997–2005 In August 2005 the editors and editorial board of the Womenʼs Philosophy Review (WPR), the journal of the UK Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), decided to cease publication, at least for the foreseeable future. WPR grew out of the Women in Philosophy Newsletter that had been circulated to members […]

Commentary Why did the banlieues burn? Colin falconer The violence on French housing estates in November 2005, which saw thousands of cars burnt, attacks on public buildings, occasional Belfast-style confrontations between police and young rioters and police helicopters overflying residential suburbs, sent shock waves through French society. The scale of the violence and repression was […]

This article is based around several interviews I conducted with both Israeli military personnel and Palestinian activists following the 2002 Israeli incursion into Palestinian areas as part of operation ʻDefensive Shieldʼ. [1] Using these interviews I will try, in what follows, to reflect upon an emergent relationship between armed conflicts and the built environment. Contemporary […]

Since the collapse of actually existing socialism and the abrupt ending of the Cold War that had polarized the world along the lines of contending theories of modernization, there has been a steady attempt to recover historical intensities that had been displaced by the reduction of political differences to a dyadic struggle between ʻtotalitarianismʼ and […]

Interview paolo virno Reading Gilbert Simondon Transindividuality, technical activity and reification Jun fujita hirose At the end of the 1980s, the thought of Gilbert Simondon – a French philosopher (1924–1989) almost entirely ignored until then – was given a new lease of life on the French philosophical scene. The year of his death, 1989, saw […]

When, in 1973, the Bulgarian-born Julia Kristeva published her vast Revolution in Poetic Language, she had already been a highly significant figure on the Parisian scene for some years. Her earliest work had helped to make Bakhtinʼs dialogism and theory of the carnivalesque familiar to a French audience, whilst the closely related concept of intertextuality […]

News In for the longue durée The graduate labour struggle at NYU On 9 November 2005, the majority of New York Universityʼs 1,000 graduate student employees went on strike in order to force NYU to bargain a second contract with our graduate student employees union – the Graduate Student Organizing Committee of the United Auto […]

Commentary ‘The journalists of JyllandsPosten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs’ The Danish cartoon controversy and the self-image of Europe Heiko henkel As the controversy over the Danish ʻMuhammad cartoonsʼ gathered momentum, the apparent ease with which the cartoons – or rumours about them – were able to mobilize ʻcivilization-speakʼ, and occasional violence, around the […]

Commentary From stillness to movement and back Cartoon theory today Esther leslie Just as in recent months caricatures have thrust themselves forcefully into public awareness, in the reaction to Danish newspaper cartoons of Muslim religious icons, their moving cousins, animated cartoons, are likewise more present in the world than ever before.* Cartoons have infiltrated cinema […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]