of being both black and poor. However, anyone with even a little experience of boats knows that when you tow an unstable and heavily laden vessel through heavy seas it is virtually guaranteed to sink. The British MAIB investigators more or less admitted as much in their initial report. There may thus be some grounds […]

Commentary Who’s afraid of gay parents? Sylvie duvergersymbolic order (dated): see Sexual difference (will never go out of fashion). … Sexual difference , cultural, natural, in a word anthropological. Republican value. Universal. Intellectual buffer, impossible to go beyond, like day and night. Not to be gone beyond in any event, or at least not in […]

Commentary Many enemies, much honour The founding of The Left Party in Germany Albrecht von lucke The foundation of The Left Party in June this year produced a forceful reaction in the German media. In the main, the leading journalistic organs of the Republic dismissed it as an insolent populist gesture. In the words of […]

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity Stewart martin Art’s relation to commodification is an unavoidable and entrenched condition for much of the theory, history and practice of art today; so entrenched, in fact, as to have become implicit and assumed for many. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, considerations of this relation have […]

Recent cultural histories have gone to considerable lengths to define an ‘alternative modernity’ for China, going back to the commercial developments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. [1] As delineated via the complex relationship between dominant Western and ‘other’ versions of modernity, its general form has been indicated by, for example, Dorothy Hodgson, […]

Dossier documenta 12 magazines projectDebaclethe magazines – such as consultation about their presentation at the exhibition, and their modes of participation in the accompanying series of talks – Documenta simply broke the agreement. It had nothing to gain from realizing the project, rather than merely staging its idea. Indeed, the Magazines Project team seemed genuinely […]

The sublime whiff of criticality Radical culture research collective Documenta has always had a political agenda. The first Documenta, organized by Arnold Bode in 1955, was intended to signal to the international art world that the dark days of Nazi philistinism were definitively over: Germany’s demonstrative openness to ‘avant-garde’ art could be taken as a […]

Magazines field, or, the next Documenta should be curated by magazines Patricia Canetti with Leandro de Paula Canal Contemporâneo I attended Documenta 12 on two different occasions: in June, for the show’s opening, and in July, in order to participate with Canal Contemporâneo in the Magazines Project’s Lunch Lectures. Each visit was marked by an […]

The big lie Dario Corbeira and irene montero, Brumaria When Brumaria was invited to take part in the Documenta 12 Magazines Project, in February 2006, we were filled with enthusiasm. We drew up an ambitious project, ‘Art: The Radical Political Imagination’, which, based on post-1968 experiences and recent experiments in counter-hegemonic practices, tried to set […]

Reviews There is no science of languageJean-Jacques Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, trans. Gregory Elliott, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2006. vii + 240 pp., €113.00 hb., 9 00414 751 9. ^ Marxism, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle concedes in this clever, incisive and witty book, has made few sustained contributions to the philosophy of language. Despite […]

Obituaries No single vision Richard Rorty, 1931–2007Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the […]

Joseph McCarney, 1941–2007 Joe McCarney, who has died in a tragic road accident at the age of sixty-six, was a unique voice in the resurgence of Marxist theory and philosophy that took place in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. He joined the Radical Philosophy group in 1976, and he was prominent thereafter as a […]

Commentary Nasrallah’s reasons Hizbullah and the conflict in Lebanon Nicholas noe‘t errorist organizations like Hizbullah … cannot be deterred’, wrote prominent right-winger and former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens in a recent piece for Haaretz. ‘There is only one option here: these organizations must be defeated.’ Unfortunately, Arens’s logic now appears to be the dominant […]

government and body politic are not only unacceptable as a matter of principle, but would entail harsh, targeted sanctions by the USA. Instead, although President Bush recently signed an Orwellian executive order broadly sanctioning anyone who threatens the ‘stability’ of the current pro-Western Lebanese government, administration officials regularly meet with Israelis, such as cabinet minister […]

Marx and the philosophy of time Peter osborne What is Marx’s contribution to the philosophy of time? Or, to put it another way, what has a temporal reading of Marx’s writings to contribute to the understanding of the philosophical aspects of his thought? How, for example, might it reconfigure the relationship between the historical, analytical […]

Fetal culture Ultrasound imaging and the formation of the human Mahmut mutman and ersan ocak If the medicalization of pregnancy is a defining aspect of modernity, it has reached a new stage with the invention of ultrasound imaging of the human fetus in the womb. The use of ultrasound imaging has become a routine aspect […]

The idea of a ‘politics of sympathy’ has its roots in the classical liberalism of the eighteenth century, represented quintessentially by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. A best-seller in its time, Smith’s treatise can be read as preparing the ideological ground for the Wealth of Nations, furnishing the economic logic of capital with the […]

One of Bruce Robbins’s epigraphs is from Irving Howe, lamenting that ‘the welfare state does not seem able to arouse strong loyalties’ and can draw on ‘no encompassing mystique’. Certainly it would be daunting, not to say quixotic, to look back at the literary record of the liberal democracies Robbins focuses on (France, Britain and […]