Commentary Fear of heights Bolivia’s constituent process Jon Beasley-murray La Paz is the world’s highest capital city, at 3,636 metres above sea level. So it is all the more surprising that to get there, you have to descend: it is located in what the locals call a hueco, a hole or a hollow. When I […]

No doubt we all like to think that we think, and many of us would like to know how it is that we think as we do.* It appears that the question has ceased to be a purely theoretical one. It now seems that more and more of the powers that be [plus en plus […]

Beyond Barthes Rethinking the phenomenology of photography Andrew fisher This article attempts to outline a phenomenology of photography, oriented by the situation of photography in contemporary media culture. Various recent photographic art practices have come to emphasize what may be seen as specifically phenomenological issues of appearance, perception and form. The widespread use of photography […]

Grounding Deleuze Christian kerslake Last year an early series of lectures by the 32-year-old Gilles Deleuze surfaced on Richard Pinhas’s internet archive of Deleuze’s seminars, Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze.* The 42-page document is entitled Qu’est-ce que fonder?, which I shall translate as What is Grounding?, for reasons explained in a moment. It consists of […]

Reviews BioaestheticsGerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. A. Derieg, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2007. 320 pp. £11.95 pb., 978 158435 046 0. This book offers a clear yet complex analysis of the conditions under which art (and indeed politics) could be understood as revolutionary. Yet it posits a distinction […]

Obituary The writer’s malady André Gorz, 1923–2007 When André Gorz committed suicide with his wife last September, even President Sarkozy felt obliged to pay tribute to ‘a major intellectual figure of the French and European Left’. Gorz never courted fame or celebrity, but the dramatic manner of his death created a storm of publicity and […]

COMMENTARY Looking Back on ’68 Managing the present Kristin Ross The problem with the past is that it is unpredictable. This may be one reason why French president Nicolas Sarkozy has recently generated a series of bizarre decrees – the precise legal status and implementation of which are uncertain, if not unimaginable – that attempt to manage the memory […]

‘This is what you should think’, ‘This is what you shouldn’t think’, ‘This is what’s possible or impossible, old or new, relevant or irrelevant.’It is within this murky inverted present and swamp of bad memory that the various social movements that make up the slow reassertion of the radical Left in France have had to […]

It is hardly news that history has its blind spots, hidden even from those attentive to its most neglected byways. These are often within emancipatory struggles that are swiftly disregarded once their fervour fades. When disputed legacies originate in confrontational, often anarchic challenges to the prevailing order of just about everything, systematic accounting tends to […]

Dossier Art and immaterial labour ‘Art and immaterial labour’… the conjunction is at once innocent and presumptuous. As Adorno suggested, if the general problem with using the word ‘and’ in titles is that it ‘permits everything to be connected with everything else and is thus incapable of hitting the mark’, in some instances it nonetheless […]

Metamorphoses Antonio Negri To begin with, let us try, from a materialist standpoint, to situate historically the concept of plastic and figurative art – in other words, the definition of its historically determinate link, if there is one, to the development and structure of modes of production. Can this be done? Obviously, once we’re obliged to […]

Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of security Maurizio Lazzarato According to Michel Foucault, for some time we have been leaving disciplinary societies in order to enter into societies of security that, unlike the former, ‘tolerate a whole host of behaviours that are different, varied, or even deviant and antagonistic toward one another’. […]

The materiality of the immaterial Foucault, against the return of idealisms and new vitalisms Judith Revel For some years, philosophical thinking has seemed to revolve around themes and terms whose centrality merits consideration – so much more so, probably, in that this debate has been formulated from positions and questions that are moreover very heterogeneous. I […]

(T)error and poetry Franco Berardi1. The century of the future Ninety-nine years ago Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the first Manifesto of Futurism; the same year, Henry Ford opened his first automobile factory in Detroit. It was the beginning of the century that believed in the future. The Manifesto asserted the aesthetic value of the machine – that is, the ‘external machine’, […]

Reviews The Maoist march through the institutionsJulian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May ’68 and Contemporary French Thought, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal and London, 2007. 488 pp., £19.99 hb., 978 0 77353 199 4. ^ Julian Bourg’s rich study of the fallout from May ’68 in French political and intellectual life seeks to move beyond […]

Editorial One hundred and fifty, not out Anniversaries can be anxious times, as the past piles high – and not only in the form of wreckage. As the revisitings of May ’68 running up to its fortieth birthday last month showed, the recent past retains its currency as a weapon in the present, constantly in […]

Commentary Beware electocrats Naomi Klein on South Africa Ronald suresh roberts With the Karl Marx epigraph at the front of his Orientalism (‘They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented’) Edward Said meant to caution not only against callow imperialists but also against benignly orientalist protectors who trample upon native political agency in the most […]

‘The rush to the intimate’ Counterinsurgency and the cultural turn Derek gregory In the years following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the New Yorker published a series of critical reports by its investigative journalists, notably Seymour Hersh and Jane Meyer, on the conduct of the ‘war on terror’ and the invasion and occupation […]

‘All human beings are pregnant’ The bisexual imaginary in Plato’s Symposium Stella sandford ‘All human beings, Socrates, are pregnant both in body and in soul, and when we come to be of the right age, we naturally desire to give birth.’ Symposium, 206c1–2In recent years the question of the status of sex – that is, […]