‘On the Idea of Communism’, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, 13–15 March 2009

Conference report Celebrity Come Communism‘On the Idea of Communism’, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, 13–15 March 2009 This conference’s political conditions had been staked out in advance, on behalf of all the speakers, by Alain Badiou’s essay ‘The Communist Hypothesis’. These were the collapse of the Old Left of the Communist Party and state, […]

Notes on the photographic image

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

Notes on the photographic image Jacques rancière In the relation between art and image, photography has played a symptomatic and often paradoxical role. Baudelaire made of it the sinister instrument of the triumph of technical reproduction over artistic imagination. And yet we also know of the long struggle of photographers (pictorialistes) to affirm that photography […]

Undoing the aesthetic image: Dossier: Undoing the Aesthetic Image (introduction)

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

Dossier Undoing the aesthetic image The displacement of critical energies from politics into aesthetics has a history as long as that of aesthetics itself. Indeed, a case can be made that in its immediately post-Kantian formation ‘aesthetics’ simply is the name for the displacement of political desire into a philosophical discourse about the structure of […]

People exposed, people as extras

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

People exposed, people as extras Georges Didi-Huberman The title of the first film shown in history is La Sortie des usines Lumière – in English, ‘Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory’. On 22 March 1895, in the rue de Rennes in Paris, in front of about two hundred spectators, Auguste and Louis Lumière showed for the […]

Body without image: Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan: Dossier: Undoing the Aesthetic Image

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

Body without image Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan Éric alliez [T]he great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. Herman Melvil e, Moby-DickThe IMAGE-grip is dislocated and a more fundamental element emerges … in short, IMAGE is not the work’s supreme motive or unifying end. Hélio Oiticica, Block Experiments […]

This is not my body

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

This is not my body Elisabeth lebovici Indeed there are not two genders, there is only one, the feminine, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general. [1] These two sentences, written by Monique Wittig in 1983, pronounce a regime of visibility and invisibility for the feminine […]

156 Reviews

Reviews An omelette of men Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008, viii + 231 pp., £21.50 hb., 978 0 231 14526 8. What forms can collective political action take today? As it works through its long, hesitant goodbye to the working class and grapples with […]

J.G. Ballard, 1930–2009

Obituary J.G. Ballard, 1930–2009 I always suspected that eternity would look like Milton Keynes. J.G. Bal ard (1993) With the recent outpouring of tributes to the late J.G. Ballard on the part of mainstream literary culture, it is easy to forget that he was in the 1970s the recipient of a reader’s report that read […]

Lash out and cover up: Austerity nostalgia and ironic authoritarianism in recession Britain

Commentary Lash out and cover up Austerity nostalgia and ironic authoritarianism in recession Britain Owen hatherley Britain has reacted strangely to the crisis of neoliberalism. The country’s seemingly endemic nostalgia, particularly for the Second World War, has long been exploited by Thatcherites and Blairites; but its recent political use shows, in an especially acute form, […]

William James: An ethics of thought?

William James An ethics of thought? Isabelle stengers William James’s pragmatism, and in particular the thesis according to which the sole truth of ideas is the difference that they make, and therefore also the interest that they create, has often been felt to be an offence by those who consider themselves to be engaged ‘for’ […]

Theatre and the public: Badiou, Rancière, Virno

Theatre and the public Badiou, Rancière, Virno Simon bayly and ‘relational’ turn in contemporary art practice. The claim restaged here is that the theatrical is still what makes a political problem of something like ‘the public’, which in many contemporary philosophical understandings no longer appears at all. Making public The lack of the appearance of […]

The involution of photography

The involution of photography Andrew fisher As we settle further into the era of digital media and globalized visual culture, it might be tempting to think that photography holds no more than historical interest. Yet it continues to feature in debates with considerable significance for the present. [1] The terms by which it was negotiated […]

157 Reviews

Reviews Disposable timeIstván Mészáros, The Chal enge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2008. 479 pp., £16.95 pb., 978 1 58367 169 6. In recent years there has been a surprisingly steady growth of interest in the status of time and temporality and the role accorded […]

157 News: Iran and the Left, Academic freedom in California?, Immigration raid on SOAS

News Iran and the Left Iran’s current rulers are the latest in a long line coming from the peasantry. The small clique of village elders headed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei enjoy control over all state activity thanks to a politics of strategic marriages between philosopher kings, a model now reflected throughout Iranian society. With a […]

Rhizome: (With no return)

Dossier: From Structure to Rhizome: Transdisciplinarity in French Thought (2)

In the invitation to speakers for the conference From Structure to Rhizome, we suggested that talks might set out by re-examining (and hence ‘re-founding’) texts that we qualified – in far too rapid and expeditious a fashion – as ‘founding’. But we did not make this suggestion without being conscious of the difficulty involved in […]

History: (Problem with)

Dossier: From Structure to Rhizome: Transdisciplinarity in French Thought (2)

If the philosopher’s role is to forge concepts, the historian’s function is to provide proof of their pertinence. However, this presupposes that the historian uses the concept correctly, taking into consideration the conditions that formed it. A truly transdisciplinary approach makes this possible, thanks to its rigorous method, whereas an interdisciplinary approach is merely a […]

Theory: (Madness of)

Dossier: From Structure to Rhizome: Transdisciplinarity in French Thought (2)

Forty years or so after it initially rose as a rather new name for a rather new thing, theory is still an obtruse signifier, troubling and floating, requiring we go back to basics. Theory as we most often understand it today is the name given by the English-speaking intellectual community to a certain type of […]