Psychoanalysis as anti·hermeneutics Jean Laplanche For Serge Leclaire 1. With Freud The title of this paper may seem to the majority of readers to bear a paradoxical, even provocative, character. How can psychoanalysis – if only on the basis of its foundational work, The Interpretation of Dreams – not be directly connected to the hermeneutic […]

Translation, philosophy, materialism Lawrence Venuti Philosophy does not escape the embarrassment that faces contemporary academic disciplines when confronted with the problem of translation. In philosophical research, widespread dependence on translated texts coincides with neglect of their translated status, a general failure to take into account the differences introduced by the fact of translation. The problem […]

In 1977 Luce Irigaray published a passionately written article in the journal Critique, entitled ‘The Poverty of Psychoanalysis’. The text is a richly woven tapestry of diverse references and poetic resonances, and merits a close reading. However, rather than using Irigaray’s essay as an exercise in textual analysis, I will use it here as a […]

REVIEWS Wakey wakey John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, Routledge, London and New York, 1995. x + 203 pp., £19.99 hb., 0 415 12475 1. Why should the collapse of the Berlin Wall have come to stand as the symbol of the revolutions which swept away historical […]

A popular computing magazine recently counterpoised two potential internet futures. The first suggested that unequal access would polarize society in the next century, as Marx predicted polarization as a result of the capitalist mode of production in the last. The second saw the internet as little more than the CB radio of the late twentieth […]

COMMENTARY Bertrand Russell’s brainchild Analytical philosophy: its conception and birth Ray Monk ‘Just arrived from Germany, a Fine Consignment of Assorted Weltanschauungen.’ s o ran an announcement on the back of a spoof edition of Mind edited by F.C.S. Schiller in 1901. Below it was a message from a satisfied customer: ‘Your latest “Immoralist” Weltanschauung […]

Virtual sexes and feminist futures The philosophy of ‘cyberfeminism’ Jill Marsden It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’. Donna Haraway Whilst the majority of her work has received little critical attention, Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’l has rapidly attained cult status in many branches of contemporary theory. With this […]

The art of allusion Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical interventions under National Socialism Theresa Orozco On 11 February 1995 Gadamer reached the age of ninety-five. The tributes that were paid to him were justifiably numerous; in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he was celebrated as ‘the most successful philosopher of the Federal Republic’, placed even before Jurgen Habermas, […]

Histories of cultural populism Martin Ryle It is more than a decade since the perspectives of the Frankfurt School lost their dominance within left-wing cultural theory. In 1983 Fredric Jameson, while noting sardonically that poststructuralist celebrations of the consumer’s ‘desire’ simply ‘change the valences on the old descriptions of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse’, registered his […]

REVIEWS Bodies in transition Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994. xvi + 250 pp., £32.50 hb., £12.99 pb., 0 253 32686 9 hb., 0 253 20862 9 pb. Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference, Routledge, London and New York, 1994. xi […]

NEWS Emmanuel Levinas, 1906-1995 mmanuel Levinas, who died in Paris on 25 December 1995, was born on 12 January 1906 in Kovno (Kaunas) in Lithuania. His parents were practising Jews and part of an important Jewish community. Most members of his family were killed by the Nazis. Levinas grew up reading the Bible in Hebrew, […]

COMMENTARY Scarlet and black The Italian revisionist controversy Tobias Abse T he consequences of the gradual loss of a collective historical memory in those parts of the European continent most closely integrated into the circuits of global capital and most subject to cultural Americanization grow increasingly threatening. As those of us opposed to postmodernism have […]

Wrapping the Reichstag Re-visioning German history Esther Leslie Whoever emerges victorious participates, to this day, in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. As is always the case, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures. The historical materialist views them with […]

Is class a difference that makes a difference? Diana eoole The title of my paper surely sounds strange.’ Statistics abound to reveal the intransigence and even enhancement of class differences across the industrialized world. There are few, if any, distinctions whose differential effects have been better recorded or empirically verified. So, at first sight, it […]

It is time to think again. An older phase of capitalism has ended. A received culture of class has declined with it, disarticulated by new forms of industrial organization, a transformed information economy, and changed patterns of consumption and recreation. The right has thematized these developments and prospered from them, as successive Conservative electoral victories […]

REVIEWS Where is capitalism going? Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, London, 1994. xii + 627 pp., £19.95 hb., 07181 33072. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, Verso, London, 1994. 416 pp., £39.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 1 85984915 6 hb., 1 […]

NEWS Gillian Rose, 1947-1995 Gillian Rose died on the evening of 9 December 1995 after a long and courageous struggle with cancer. The hour of her death coincided with the closing moments of a conference dedicated to her work at Warwick University. Although her rapidly deteriorating health prevented her from attending as planned, the conference […]

SYMPOSIUM Gilles Deleuze, 1925-1995 One of the saints D eleuze was a singular combination of philosophical and scientific culture, aesthetic inspiration and enormous generosity of spirit. If, as he and Guattari suggested, Spinoza was the Christ of philosophers, then Deleuze was surely one of the saints. Nietzsche suggests that what distinguished the saints was their […]