Interview jeff wall Art after photography, after conceptual art Peter osborne Let’s start with a question about theory. Do you consider theory to play a formative role in your art practice as well as your critical writing? And, if so, what is the difference between the two cases? Jeff wall It’s changed. In the early […]

Reviews Future presentGiovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, Verso, London and New York, 2007. xiii + 418 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 1 84467 104 5. The concept of development in history has been mainly understood in two ways. In the historicist philosophical tradition, it refers to the concrete spatio-temporal shapes […]

News Walking into wallsAcademic freedom, the Israeli Left and the occupation within In March 2006, Radical Philosophy published a piece by the Israeli architect and writer Eyal Weizman, now director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Entitled ‘Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict’ (RP 136, March/April […]

Conference report Critical pivot The Substance of Thought, Cornell University, NY, 10–12 April 2008The stated goal of The Substance of Thought was to assess and intervene in the present theoretical conjuncture by zeroing in on the conflict between post-Kantian ‘critical’ philosophy and the speculative bent of recent philosophies displaying an allegiance to ‘pre-critical’ or ‘classical’ […]

Commentary The hungry of the earth Raj patel The price of food is soaring. The ability of the world’s poorest to pay for it isn’t. The results are predictably catastrophic. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has explained that the people starving and taking to the streets in countries like India and […]

Aporias of free trade The nature of biodiversity Diana reese and lecia rosenthal Primitive accumulation is not produced just once at the dawn of capitalism, but is continually reproducing itself. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus1In a climate rife with threats of species extinction, we propose a genealogy of the discourse of the late twentieth century in […]

Orientalism in reverse Gilbert achcar The years 1978–79 constitute a watershed in Oriental and Islamic Studies, for they witnessed three outstanding events. I am referring here to events that occurred on two utterly different and therefore incomparable levels, but all three have powerfully impacted the academic field nonetheless. The first two events took place on […]

Counterterrorism legislation and the US state form Authoritarian statism, phase 3 Christos boukalas The counterterrorism legislation introduced in the USA after 11 September 2001 (hereafter S11) has been mainly conceptualized – by both critics and supporters – as an ‘internal’ legal development. Seen as an ‘encroachment on liberty’, as part of a ‘state of emergency’, […]

Reviews The zero of real conflictMonique David-Ménard, Deleuze et la psychanalyse: L’altercation, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2005. 186 pp., €22.00 pb., 2 13 055081 9. As its subtitle indicates, this book stages an ‘altercation’ between Deleuze and psychoanalysis. The psychoanalysis in question is that of Freud and Lacan. Monique David-Ménard’s first book, L’hystérique entre […]

Commentary Between imperial client and useful enemy Pakistan’s permanent crisis Justin podur Pakistani scholar–activist Eqbal Ahmed, who died in 1999, had a canny ability to predict events. In a 1974 article for the Journal of Contemporary Asia, he suggested that Pakistan was headed towards a police state structure because of the class and ideological composition […]

Entsetzen Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part One Irving wohlfarth * The present essay, to be published in three instalments, is a slightly revised version of one that appeared in the first of two col ective volumes (Der RAF und der linke Terrorismus, Hamburg, 2006) edited by Wolfgang Kraushaar under the auspices of […]

Flux and flurry Stillness and hypermovement in animated worlds Esther leslie Animation, as any Wikipedia reader knows, is ‘the optical illusion of movement’, whether achieved through photographing drawings, moving clay models and recording the tweaks frame by frame, drawing directly on film or devising models digitally. But the definition is a weak one, or only […]

Non-traduttore, traditore? Notes on postwar European Marxisms in translation Gregory elliott Certainly in the English-speaking world, probably elsewhere, we lack the most rudimentary map of European Marxism since the 1970s. Over the last two decades, there has been nothing comparable to several titles which, whatever their other differences, featured roughly the same dramatis personae – […]

Introduction to Rozitchner León Rozitchner is one of the generation of Argentine intellectuals who emerged in the 1950s around the journal Contorno. As a psychoanalyst and Marxist – and massively influenced, as were all his confrères, by Sartre and the phenomenological tradition – he undertook a lengthy theoretical project that attempted to engage psychoanalytical categories […]

Reviews Anything is possibleQuentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, preface by Alain Badiou, trans. Ray Brassier, Continuum, London and New York, 2008. viii + 148 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 0 826 49674 4. ^ Philosophical speculation can regain determinate knowledge of absolute reality. We can think the nature of things […]

Letters Critical views of South AfricaIn ‘Beware Electocrats: Naomi Klein on South Africa’ (the Commentary in RP 150, July–August 2008), Ronald Suresh Roberts plays sophist with your readers. First, Klein’s Shock Doctrine chapter can and should be read directly. Second, Roberts makes repeated interpretive mistakes. If, as he claims, the African National Congress (ANC) government […]

On 30 October 2007, Giovanna Reggiani, a 47-year-old Italian woman, was robbed and murdered in a deserted area of northern Rome. The man accused of murdering her was a Romanian Roma, Nicolai Romulus Mailat, who had been living in one of the ‘unauthorized’ settlements in Rome. The media immediately reported horrific stories of torture and […]