Obituary Alternative ideals Iris Marion Young, 1949–2006 She entered the room with a smile, putting me at ease at once. I had emailed to request an interview for the Womenʼs Philosophy Review. She had agreed, and we set up the meeting while she was visiting the University of Bath in 1999. All was recorded, all […]

Commentary Shack dwellers on the move in Durban Richard pithouse Shack settlements began to be constructed in the South African port city of Durban following the loss of land and the imposition of various taxes after the destruction of the Zulu kingdom by English colonialism in 1883 and the simultaneous movement into the city of […]

Commentary Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness Reading Lolita in Tehran in Connecticut Simon hay Azar Nafisiʼs bestselling Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003) has become a popular choice for required summer reading for incoming students at many colleges and universities across the USA, including my own. It has […]

An immanent transcendental Foucault, Kant and critical philosophy keith robinson Every philosophy conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilThe relation of Foucaultʼs work to philosophy remains an unsettled issue. Indeed, Foucault sometimes preferred to present himself as ʻthe masked philosopherʼ. Much like […]

In his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, Adorno maintained that ʻthe form in which metaphysics impinges on us urgently todayʼ is ʻthe question whether it is still possible to liveʼ. [1] Such a question is speculative, since the possibility of life is taken to have migrated to the margins of human experience. For Adorno, life in […]

Dossier documenta 12 magazines project What is to be done? (education)This dossier is Radical Philosophyʼs contribution to the documenta 12 magazines project. Documenta is an international exhibition of modern and contemporary art that has been held in Kassel, Germany, since 1955 and currently takes place once every five years. For many years now, it has […]

Answering the question: What is to be done? (education) David cunningham The question ʻWhat is to be done?ʼ, Adorno remarked, frequently ʻsabotages the logical progress of knowledge that alone allows for changeʼ . However, despite being always-already-inscribed within the imperatives of instrumental rationality, it is, he acknowledged, nonetheless ʻunavoidableʼ. [1] This is especially so for […]

An aesthetic education against aesthetic education Stewart martin Documenta 12ʼs commitment to the question of what is to be done in education is to be welcomed from an institution that has sought to sustain itself as an autonomous cultural realm, a public sphere, in the face of its fabulous state sponsorship and relations to the […]

Doing something and doing nothing Esther leslie Culture is put busily to work these days. In Europe, certainly, culture is made the bearer of promises – the promise of a better quality of life, of a more educated public, of a more efficient and value-added cultural sphere, and, not least, the promise of regenerated economies. […]

Reviews Bluffer’s guideTimothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005. 360 pp., £19.00 hb., 0 231 13730 3. Itʼs the evening of 8 August 1974, and Iʼm watching Richard Nixon resign from the US presidency with the lack of grace that distinguished his entire political […]

Commentary Mexico’s long transition to democracy Pilar villela mascaro Mexico was not only the first country to have a revolution in the twentieth century; it also built its most long-lasting one-party government. When Vicente Fox of the PAN (National Action Party) was elected in 2000, he was the first president not to belong to the […]

Writing in 1970, the French philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre proposed a ʻtheoretical hypothesisʼ: by ʻurban revolution I refer to the transformations that affect contemporary society, ranging from the period when questions of growth and industrialization predominate … to the period when the urban problematic becomes predominant, when the search for solutions and modalities […]

Neo-classic Alain Badiou’s Being and Event Peter osborne If anyone was in doubt about the continuing grip of French philosophy on the theoretical imagination of the anglophone humanities, the reception of the writings of Alain Badiou must surely have put paid to such reservations. The translation of his magnum opus, Being and Event, in spring […]

Deleuze and cosmopolitanism John sellars The status of the political within the work of Gilles Deleuze has recently become a topic of contention. [1] Two recent books argue the case for two extremes among a range of possible interpretations. At one end of the spectrum, Peter Hallward has argued that Deleuzeʼs personal ethic of deterritorialization […]

Reviews Althusser after AlthusserLouis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, ed. François Matheron and Olivier Corpet, trans. and introduced by G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London and New York, 2006. 300 pp. £50.00 hb., £16.99 pb., 1 84467 069 4 hb., 1 84467 553 X pb. ʻI am looking, in the history of philosophy, for […]

News Headed west on the A30International Conference on Contemporary Capitalism Studies, Changshu, November 2006The A30 in question runs west of Shanghai Pudong Airport through what can only be described as ʻanother Canary Wharf every 5 milesʼ. The occasion for the road trip was the ʻInternational Conference on Contemporary Capitalism Studiesʼ, organized by Nanjing University and […]

Commentary The day after tomorrow Making progress on climate change Mark hoffman In November 2006 over six thousand officials from 180 countries, along with representatives from international business and labour movements, NGOs and faith groups, schoolchildren and a host of other observers, gathered in Kenya for two weeks of discussion. They were there to attend […]

The upper hand The eviction at the Youth House in Copenhagen Mikkel bolt rasmussen Around seven oʼclock in the morning on 1 March, Danish police stormed the Youth House at Jagtvej 69 in Copenhagen. Helicopters dropped police onto the roof of the building while others were lifted in small containers to the top windows, gaining […]