COMMENTARY Transnational dialogue in times of war The peace movement in ex-Yugoslavia Nikolai Jetts F aced with the prospect of continuing war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the West is still fumbling for an adequate response. The choices on offer seem to be scant: withdrawal or more active intervention. It is scarcely surprising that Western pleas […]

Fatal Attraction Jean Laplanche on sexuality, subjectivity and singularity in the work of Sigmund Freud Philippe Van Haute Freud considered sexuality to be the shibboleth of psychoanalysis. With a surprising stubbornness, he repeats over and over again: ‘and yet the libido is sexual’. 1 But when we ask for his arguments for this rather audacious […]

Beyond Revisionism New Labour, socialist basics and the dynamic market economy Marcus Roberts Since his election as party leader in June 1994, Tony Blair has enthusiastically set about building a New Model Labour Party. In a sense, his prospectus represents only the final ceremony in a long and arduous process: the so-called ‘modernization’ of the […]

INTERVIEW Drucilla Cornell Feminism, deconstruction and the law RP: Perhaps you could begin by saying something about the Critical Legal Studies movement in the USA. What is its relationship to feminism? And where do you see your own work as fitting in? Cornell: Regrettably there’s very little organized presence of either Critical Legal Studies or […]

REVIEWS Marxism without Marxism Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York and London, Routledge, 1994. xx + 198 pp., £11.99 pb., 0415910455. There is no doubt that Derridean deconstruction was a political project from the outset, or that […]

NEWS Population: myth and reality The Cairo International Conference on Population and Development The Cairo International Conference on Population and The polarization of wealth and poverty in India is further Development (lCPD), held in September 1994, gave us a compounded by the religiously sanctioned graded division of misconstructed equilibrium. Now that there has been a […]

COMMENTARY Clause 4 Ted Benton , C o m e on lads – we all prefer nice things to nasty’: this desperate moral appeal, delivered above the chaotic mania of classroom rebellion, was the habitual resort of an old schoolmaster of mine. For those of us close enough to hear, it evoked peals of derisive […]

Romanticism and technology Andrew Bowie Romanticism and technology are often regarded as inherently at odds with each other, one supposedly relying upon a desire to get in touch with a nature in us and outside us which the modern ‘technologized’ world risks losing sight of altogether, the other upon the domination of external nature for […]

The tremor of reflection Slavoj Ziiek’s Lacanian dialectics Peter Dews In memory of Hinrich Fink-Eitel (1946-1995) At first glance, the work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek seems to offer an irresistible range of attractions for theorists wishing to engage with contemporary culture, without accepting the flimsy postmodernist doxa which is often the only available […]

Postcolonial melancholy A reply to Luke Gibbons Francis Mulhern Luke Gibbons (RP67) certainly has a way with words, especially those of others; his representation of my views (RP65) is something less than fastidious. l However, there is little value in dwelling much on this; an appropriately detailed self-defence would consist mainly of requotation. Interested readers […]

REVIEWS Paradise postponed David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, Cambridge and Paris, Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de I’Homme, 1993. xiii + 387 pp., £40.00 hb., 0 521 41851 8. Despite a dismal economic performance since its resurgence in the late 1970s, it is currently fashionable to be for capitalism. Throughout the […]

LETTER Dear Radical Philosophy, I am not sure how the interview with Hans-Georg Gadamer earned its presence within the pages of a journal called Radical Philosophy. I am no expert on him, and I would like to be corrected, but it appears that the interviewers allowed him to slide away from what should have been […]

COMMENTARY Post-sexual ity? The Wilde Centenary Joseph Bristow A lmost one hundred years ago to the day, Oscar Wilde found himself in the midst of the first of three trials that would eventually go against him. Although it was Wilde who initially sued for libel, the defendant rallied sufficient evidence to have him sentenced to […]

Olympus Mislaid? A Profile of Perry Anderson Gregory Elliott At the very outset of his story, Berlin seems to have mislaid Mount Olympus. Perry Anderson ‘The Pluralism of Isaiah Berlin’ (1990) In the Foreword to A Zone of Engagement Anderson notes the discontinuity between its first three chapters, classified as ‘intra-mural surveys within the intellectual […]

Ilf I Goods and life-forms Relativism in Charles Taylor’s political philosophy Hartmut Rosa John Gunnell, in a recent paper in Political Theory. I want to turn first to Taylor’s ideas about the nature of argues that a concern with the problem or threat of human agency and identity and the central relativism is a, or […]

INTERVIEW Cornel West American radicalism RP: Perhaps we could begin by asking you about the role of religion in your intellectual and political development. How important was the Church to you in becoming an intellectual, becoming a radical? West: For me, the issues on which religious discourse has traditionally focused, such as death and dread […]

REVIEWS Getting it right 10n Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds.,Constitutionalism and Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. vii + 359 pp., £ 12.95 pb., 0521 34530 8 hb., 0 521 45721 1 pb. Anthony Barnett, Caroline Ellis and Paul Hirst, eds., Debating the Constitution: New Perspectives on Constitutional Reform, Cambridge, Polity, 1993. xix + 183 […]

NEWS Guy Debord, 1931-1994 Guy Ernest Debord took his own life on the afternoon of be preceded by an address from its maker: ‘There is no film, Wednesday, 30 November 1994. He was 62 and knew that he Cinema is dead. There can be no film.’ was dying of a form of polyneuritis brought on […]