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 […]

What future for utopia? Or, rather, what future for the utopian after the critique of utopia? What future for possibility after the critique of its depiction as actual?* Utopias have a notoriously contradictory structure: they evoke possibilities by depicting them as actual, yet thereby, in themselves partaking of the actual – as depictions – they […]

Some spasm of the Zeitgeist (or was it an astrological conjunction?) in the 1990s gave birth to an extraordinary rash of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies and assorted mutants, as though a whole culture had fallen in love with the undead, those monstrous, liminal figures which hover between life and death as surely as the […]

Commentary Voting for hope Elections in Haiti Peter hallward Late in the night of 29 February 2004, after weeks of confusion and uncertainty, the enemies of Haitiʼs president Jean-Bertrand Aristide forced him into exile for the second time. There was plenty of ground for confusion. Although twice elected with landslide majorities, by 2004 Aristide was […]

Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, Alain de Libera Introduction by Peter Osborne.

Reviews October’s tombHal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004. 704 pp., 637 illustrations, 413 in colour, £45.00 hb., 0 500 23818 9. ^ For nearly thirty years the journal October has provided the most significant platform for addressing twentieth-century art. Art Since […]

News The World Social Forum in Chávez’s Venezuela Earlier this year I was appointed delegate from the Stop the War Coalition to the World Social Forum (WSF) in Caracas. This was a not just a chance to get a feel for the Bolivarian revolution, but also to see what would happen when the ʻmovement for […]

Commentary Profit, plague and poultry The intra-active worlds of highly pathogenic avian flu Chris wilbert In 2006 we awoke, in Europe at least, to the odd situation in which twitchers – obsessive birdwatchers who spend much of their leisure time on the far-flung edges of countries – are being reinvented as the eyes and ears […]

Mirrors without images Mimesis and recognition in Lacan and Adorno Vladimir safatle Mène-moi vers la vieAu-delà de la grille basseQui me sépare de moi même Qui divise tout sauf mes cendresSauf la terreur que jʼai de moi.Paul ÉluardIn the history of the relations between philosophy and psychoanalysis, there have been two major developments: one in […]

Introduction Gegenstand/Objekt Dominique Pradelle Object Olivier Boulnois Res Jean-François Courtine

Reviews Critique of loveWendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2005. x + 159 pp., £35.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 691 12360 8 hb., 0 691 12361 6 pb. At the beginning of a new millennium this is a book full of melancholy. Written between 1998 and […]

News War Machine‘Undercover Surrealism: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the Vision of Georges Bataille’, Hayward Gallery, London, 11 May–30 July 2006 Undercover Surrealism is misleadingly titled. It is actually dedicated to the journal Documents, which published fifteen issues between 1929 and 1931 under the de facto editorship of Georges Bataille. For Batailleʼs friend Michel Leiris Documents […]

Commentary A Mediterranean way for peace in Israel–Palestine? Étienne Balibar and Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond A stateʼs origins do not determine its destiny, which always opens on to various possible histories even though some of them – depending on the circumstances – seem after the event to have been more likely than others. And yet the way […]

Commentary Datamigrants Biometrics and the global security complex James C. Ross Immigration politics has historically involved talk about whom to include in the body politic, and how to keep the rest out. Modern states, whose sovereign rights assume a monopoly over the legitimate movement of people across borders, have long sought ways to ʻnormalizeʼ the […]

Europe, thatʼs the Bible and the Greeks. It has come closer to the Bible and to its true fate. Everything else in the world must be included in this. I donʼt have any nostalgia for the exotic. For me Europe is central. Emmanuel Levinas, 1986 [1] Those who have sought resources in Levinas for a […]

[We] do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of oneʼs gender and hence […]

Inside out Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Papers Daniel W. Smith Félix Guattari met Gilles Deleuze in Paris shortly after the events of May 1968, through a mutual friend. Over the next twenty-five years, he would co-author five books with Deleuze, including, most famously, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia – AntiOedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus […]

Reviews The liberal internationalDavid Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005. 256 pp., £14.99 hb., 0 19 928326 5. ^ 1917–21. 1944–48. 1968–72. Any accounting of the twentieth century worth its salt will hinge around the events – and ultimate defeats – of these pivotal years. No easy task, and one […]