The Situationist International: A Case of Spectacular Neglect Sadie Plant The recent exhibitions of Situationist art and paraphernalia in London, Paris, and Boston, have given the Situationist International (SI) an unprecedented academic and cultural profile. Even during the movement’s most active period, when many of its ideas and practices were realised in the events in […]

Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism Kate Soper I shall not begin, as I probably should, by offering to define my terms. Instead, I shall acknowledge that I have brought together three concepts admitted on all sides to be well-nigh indefinable. Or, if they are definable, they are so only by reference to a particular thinker’s usage […]

Reification, Class and ‘New Social Movements’ Paul Browne All significant social movements of the last thirty years have started outside the organised class interests and institutions. The peace movement, the ecology movement, the women’s movement, solidarity with the third world, human rights agencies, campaigns against poverty and homelessness, campaigns against cultural poverty and distortion: all […]

Marxism and Psychoanalysis An Exchange Joe/ Kovef and fan Craib foel Kovel has become increasingly well known to a British public over recent years, firstly with the publication in 1977 of A Complete Guide to Therapy (Harvester) and then with the publication by Free Association Books in 1988 of four titles: The Radical Spirit; White […]

Timely Meditations Jonathan Ree Review Essay on Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 201pp. £25 hb, £7.95 pb, 0521353815 hb, o 521 36781 6 pb. It is now some years since Richard Rorty broke with American analytic philosophy, for reasons he spelt out in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature […]

COMMENT A Sweet and Sour Victory in Eastern Europe Arpad Szakolzai and Agnes Horvath Sudden and unexpected changes have an air of miracles about them. And the events that are happening right now in Eastern Europe certainly belong to this category. The pace and character of the changes are inexplicable, not only for people unfamiliar […]

REVIEWS THE SHAMEFUL FACE OF PHILOSOPHY Michele Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon, London, Athlone Press, 1989. x + 199pp., £32 hb, 0485 11352 X. Western philosophy has, by tradition, defined itself in opposition to myth, fable, the poetic, and all that inhabits the domain of the image. Whatever else either reason or […]

NEWS SAMUEL BECKETT (1906-1989) “,,:,.,.; ~ ,•. . “‘. “‘… . W ~~ ~:’~..’ .”‘~””:.’ < ~ ,.~ The last days and months of the 1980s were a time of astonishing social and political upheaval. In the midst of these events, news came from Paris, discreetly and quietly, of the death of Samuel Beckett. No […]

CULTURAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION For some years the Cultural History Group of Aberdeen University has held an annual cultural history conference in June, which brings together students and researchers from various countries around topics as widespread as the Scottish Enlightenment, the culture of revolution and the methods and import of cultural history itself. The atmosphere of […]

EDITORIAL It can be unsettling to consider how the theoretical ground we choose to stand on shifts across the different layers – intellectual, political, professional and personal – of our lives. No debate illustrates that more vividly, or more significantly, than the enquiry which surrounds the moral subject. ‘Consider this and in our time’, began […]

Nietzsche: The Subject of Morality Ross Poole It is to be inferred that there exist countless dark bodies close to the sun – such as we shall never see. This is, between ourselves, a parable; and a moral psychologist reads the whole starry script only as a parable and signlanguage by means of which many […]

Nietzsche: A Radical Challenge To Political Theory? Keith Ansell-Pearson Only if mankind possessed a universally recognised goal would it be possible to propose ‘thus and thus is the right course of action’: for the present there exists no such goal. It is thus irrational and trivial to impose the demands of morality upon mankind. – […]

Searching for Ancestors Timothy O’Hagan In Rome [in the fourth century AD] senatorial families sought out an exemplum, an exemplary character in the distant past, from whom to claim descent. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippol With hindsight the transformation of Alasdair MacIntyre from gadfly into guru looks inevitable, though few members of his audience in […]

Boundaries Versus Binaries: Bakhtin in/against the History of Ideas Graham Pechey Who or what is Mikhail Bakhtin? The two monographs we have on him agree on an identity: Bakhtin is a philosopher. The compliment, however well meant, could be lethal. Bakhtin was born in Orel in 1895 and died near Moscow in 1975. This bald […]

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak An Interview Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born in Calcutta. She now teaches English and Culture Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her translation of Derrida’ s Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), with a long and authoritative introduction, remains a controversial event in the recent history of philosophy and cultural theory, […]

REVIEWS Isidor Feinstein Stone, The Trial of Socrates, London, Cape, 1988, xi + 282pp, £12.95 hb, ISBN 022402591-0 Near the end of his life 1. F. Stone turned away from the hidden history of US politics to look at an older story, the trial of Socrates. Always a defender of democracy and freedom of speech, […]

NEWS REVOLUTION THE VIEW FROM PARIS To discover the temper of a modem culture, it often pays to look at the advertising. Those guys spend an awful lot of money trying to find out about it. So, my first story from attending the World Congress on the French Revolution and other celebrations of the Bicentenary […]

LETTERS ‘A’ LEVEL PHILOSOPHY Dear RP, Steve Brigley (RP 35) was pessimistic about the ‘A’ level Philosophy syllabus proposed by the AEB. His main concern was its failure to provide opportunities for the development of students’ own ideas and arguments, suggesting that the syllabus was likely to reproduce the elitism and obscurity which graces the […]

EDITORIAL Not the least striking feature of the term ‘postmodernism’ is the manner in which – enacting one of its own central theoretical claims – it has bridged the gap between the pretensions of the academy and the wider social and cultural world. There is the postmodernism of Beckett, but also of Ballard, of Kruger […]