Philosophy, feminism and universalism

Philosophy, feminism and universal ism Jean Grimshaw During the last ten years or so, when I have been asked what my particular ‘interests’ are, I have usually said that I have been working on ‘feminism and philosophy’, or ‘philosophy and feminism’ – or perhaps, though less often, ‘feminist philosophy’. I have become increasingly interested in […]

76 Reviews

REVIEWS Biographemes Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography, translated by Sarah Wykes, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994. xiv + 291 pp., £25.00 hb., 0 7456 1017 X. In 1968, Roland Barthes solemnly announced the death of the author in a short article that echoed the obituary for man penned by Foucault in the final lines of […]

Ernest Gellner, 1925-1995

NEWS Ernest Gellner, 1925-1995 E rnest Gellner was born in Prague and came to England in 1939, where he attended school in St Albans before winning a scholarship to Ballio!’ He fought in the Czech brigade in France in 1944-45, and, in a rare biographical note, describes himself sloping off to the bookshops there and […]

Philosophy and racial identity

Philosophy and racial identity Linda Martin Alcoll In the 1993 film Map of the Human Heart an Inuit man asks a white engineer who has come to northern Canada to map the region, ‘Why are you making maps?’ Without hesitating, the white man responds ‘They will be very accurate.’ Map-making and race-making have a strong […]

Marx the uncanny? Ghosts and their relation to the mode of production: Spectres of Derrida Symposium

Where Marx is closest to the spirit of deconstruction is, arguably, in these formulaic gestures towards a society that had so far transcended existing actuality that its conditions of realization could no longer be conceptualized. Marx is spectral Marx in his refusal to envision communism in his envisaging of it, in his anti-utopian utopianism. Now, […]

Messianic ruminations: Derrida, Stirner and Marx: Spectres of Derrida Symposium

mind/geist of Europe by its cultural others and inferiors. Derrida’s fascination is with Hamlet-as-geist haunted by the corporeal form of the ghost, as a trope for the irreducible spectral implication of spirit and spook. However, this Vah~ryian reading of Hamlet forecloses his distinctive relation to the premodern, conscripting his melancholic Renaissance proto-modernity into a latterday […]

75 Reviews

REVIEWS The Story of K Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, Routledge, London and New York, 1994.200 pp., £37.50 hb., £11.99 pb., 0415 101990 hb., 0415 101204 pb. Peter Fenves, ‘Chatter’: Language and History in Kierkegaard, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993. 312pp., £30.00 hb., £11.95 pb., 0 8047 1107 1 hb., 0 […]

Georges Canguilhem, 1904-1995

NEWS Georges Canguilhem, 1904-1995 Georges Canguilhem, who died on 11 September 1995 at the age of ninety-one, was France’s pre-eminent historian and philosopher of the sciences. A figure of immense authority and prestige, he was regarded with great affection by his many disciples. Born into a very modest family living in the southwest, Canguilhem was […]

Red alert in cyberspace!

COMMENTARY Red alert in cyberspace! Paul Virilio One of the major problems now facing political as well as military strategists is the phenomenon of immediacy, of instantaneity. For ‘real time’ now takes precedence over real space, now dominates the planet. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over space is an accomplished fact, and it […]

The future of post-socialism

The future of post-socialism Michael Rustin This article discusses three contributions to new thinking on the Left. * Two of these, Anthony Giddens’ s Beyond Left and Right: The Future ofRadical Politics and David Miliband’s collection Reinventing the Left (to which Giddens contributes the first chapter), set out to provide the new thinking which the […]

74 Reviews

REVIEWS The hidden Goldmann Mitchell Cohen, The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics, and a Hidden God, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994, xi + 351 pp., £26.50 hb. 0691 034206. In her autobiographical roman Cl clef, Les Samourais, Julia Kristeva describes one ‘Fabien Edelman’: ‘Graying, pot-bellied, smiling, his shirt open and, of course, no tie, […]

Chinese Women and Feminist Thought, Beijing,22-24 June 1995

NEWS Chinese women and feminist thought: an international symposium An international symposium on Chinese Women and Feminist Thought was held in Beijing on 22-24 June 1995, hosted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, funded by the Ford Foundation, and originating in the annual Philosophy Summer School organized jointly by academics from China, Britain and […]