Whatever happened to martial law? Detainees and the logic of emergency Mark neocleous Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated. Guantánamo guard diary entry, 20 December 2002What is a detainee? The term has been given a […]

The promise of justice Howard caygill Breaking the promise of justice is an act peculiarly repugnant to reason. It implies a double betrayal: not only of the promised justice but also of the justice of the promise. Nevertheless, how is it possible to do justice to the promise of justice? Especially when this very promise […]

Interview jean oury The hospital is ill The name of Jean Oury is synonymous with La Borde Clinic, which he founded in 1953 when he was twenty-nine, in an old chateau in the picturesque region of Cour-Cheverny, as a home for ʻinstitutional psychotherapyʼ. In the Englishspeaking world, La Borde and the practice of institutional psychotherapy […]

The reception of Adorno in Britain and America has largely focused on Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, late works which accepted the tragedy of an ongoing betrayal of Marxism in the Soviet Union and an ongoing capitalism in the West. Hence those Adornoites who emphasize optimism of the will rather than pessimism of the intellect […]

Commentary A fundamental agreement The French presidential elections Colin falconer After twelve years of a relatively weak right-wing presidency under Jacques Chirac which saw several waves of mass struggle (beginning with the publicsector strikes of December 1995), a five-year period of cohabitation with Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 2002 and, more recently, […]

Diderot’s egg Divorcing materialism from eliminativism Isabelle stengers I have taken the invitation to speak about materials and materialisms* as an opportunity to re-examine the position I adopted nearly thirty years ago now, when writing La Nouvelle Alliance (translated as Order Out of Chaos) with Ilya Prigogine. [1] In that book, I proposed a definition […]

Going into the mould Materials and process in the architectural specification Katie lloyd thomas To know the true hylomorphic relation it is not enough to go into the workshop and work with the artisan: one must go into the mould itself to follow the operation of form-taking at different levels and scales of physical reality. […]

Clouds of architecture Mark dorrian According to the newspapers, the recent unveiling of Frank Gehryʼs design for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation – to be built in the Jardin dʼAcclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne – left observers struggling for a suitable metaphor. However, as the Guardian reported it, the architect himself seemed in […]

The inorganic open Nanotechnology and physical being Nathan brown But what is an object? Bernard Stiegler, Technics and TimeWhat is the status of the object in contemporary philosophy? How is the question of the object sutured to particular determinations of the concept of ʻlifeʼ – a concept that, according to Giorgio Agamben, ʻmust constitute the […]

Reviews Post-genomic interventionsEugene Thacker, Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2006. 464 pp., £25.95 hb., £12.95 pb., 0 2622 0155 0 hb., 0 2627 0116 2 pb. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed., Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005. 384 pp., £24.95 hb., £12.95 pb., 0 2620 […]

Obituaries Jean Baudrillard, 1929–2007 Jean Baudrillard, who died on 6 March 2007, had been writing an obituary for quite some time. The subject was ʻthe realʼ, its death long, drawn-out and agonizing. In his incisive analyses of the hyperreal state of being that, he claimed, replaced the real in our time, Baudrillard mapped out with […]

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 1940–2007 Recent commemorative events in Paris and New York have given some measure of the immense esteem, even devotion, accorded to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe from a host of individuals from the arts and various intellectual communities. It has far surpassed what might be surmised from any record of the events and accomplishments that marked […]

Commentary The sacralization of secularism in Turkey meyda yeg˘enog˘lu Religion is back in Turkey! This is the prevalent secular fear, anxiety and apprehension that finds various expressions in the social, cultural and political context of today’s Turkey. But where has religion been all this time, to warrant the allegation that it is ‘coming back’? Why […]

that, unlike the secularism of the 1920s, which was imposed top-down, these demonstrations signified the reclaiming of the principles and ideology of secularism by the people themselves. This diagnosis is mistaken. First, it is dubious to regard these demonstrations as popular. Second, if Turkey’s political and social conjuncture reveals a significant transformation of the modernizing […]

materials and materialisms 2 The pig in the bath New materialisms and cultural studies Michelle henning On 24 July 1945 the Austrian logical positivist Otto Neurath, who had been closely involved in the economic and social projects of Red Vienna in the 1920s, visited the borough of Bilston near Wolverhampton, to advise councillors on their […]

The incomplete materialism of French materialist feminism Alison stone According to one important and influential line of feminist interrogation of the category of sex, we only believe that there are two biological sexes because our thought and perception are constrained by the two-gender social system under which we currently live. [1] The French materialist feminists […]

Sexmat, revisited Stella sandford As a genre of intellectual production, ‘feminist theory’ emerged in the 1980s, hot on the heels of the criticisms of the white Eurocentrism and heterosexism of classic second-wave writing. The conjunction of these criticisms and the growing influence of various philosophical and psychoanalytic theoretical elements developed, in one strand of feminist […]

Reviews Analogical nostalgiasAntonio Negri, The Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, trans. Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano, Verso, London and New York, 2007. 344 pp., £6.99 pb., 1 84667 582 3. Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes presents two thinkers at pains to make nostalgia productive. First there is Descartes, who, following an explosion of […]

News A Haitian boat disaster Every now and then something happens which serves to illuminate with particular clarity the way our newspapers distinguish between what counts as news and what does not. Consider the way the British press handled two very different disappearances, on the nights of 3 and 4 May 2007. In early May […]