SYMPOSIUM Karl Popper, 1902-1994 Learning from negative instances n 17 September 1994, Karl Popper died at the age of 92. He was described as the official .opposition of the Vienna Circle, the philosophical club which in the interwar penod espoused the then popular doctrine of ‘logical positivism’. His relations with that club were ‘friendly-hostile’, to […]

‘The world spirit on the fins of a rocket’ Adorno’s critique of progress Michael Lowy and Eleni Varikas The ideology of progress, born (in its modern guise) during the Enlightenment, finds its culminating philosophical expression in Hegel’s conception of history. Here, everything that happens marks a further step in mankind’s march towards freedom: watching Napoleon […]

Tactics, ethics, or temporal ity? Heidegger’s politics reviewed Peter Osborne There are moments in the reception of particular thinkers – especially in translation – when the literature about them, building up a critical mass, explodes, giving rise to whole new subdivisions of the academic industry. It happened to Hegel and Marx in the 1970s and […]

Literary into cultural studies A reply to Martin Ryle Antony Easthope To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it. Roland Barthes In ‘Long Live Literature?’ (RP 67) Martin Ryle explores the implications ofthe outcome ofthe crisis in […]

REVIEWS The spectre of communitarianism Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and its Critics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993. 256 pp., £30.00 hb., 0 19 8278772. Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1993. xvi + 330 pp., £23.95 hb., 0 674 03180 6. Communitarianism has become a fashionable topic. Where, not […]

NEWS Deconstruction and the Political (or how not to speak, while still speaking, of deconstruction and politics) More than two decades ago, in one of Jacques Derrida’s first Derrida’s concepts of hegemony. Aletta Norval investigated interviews, Jean-Louis Houdebine advanced the ‘first sketch the ‘hybridity’ of subjective identity in relation to post- of a question: what […]

COMMENTARY The value of community Sean Savers W hether the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan years brought any overall economic benefits is doubtful; that they have had high social costs is now quite evident. The unfettered pursuit of self-interest has weakened social bonds and led to social decay and disintegration on a scale which […]

‘When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say?’ Sue Bridehead’s question – or rather exclamation – in Jude the Obscure – is, of course, rhetorical; and Hardy has surely been vindicated in this appeal to […]

Black Socrates? Questioning the philosophical tradition Simon Critchley Inconsiderateness in the face of tradition is reverence for the past. Martin Heidegger, Sophistes Funk not only moves, it can remove. George Clinton, P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up) Philosophy tells itself stories. l One might go further and claim that the life of philosophy, the […]

INTERVIEW: Hans-Georg Gadamer ‘Without poets there is no philosophy’ RP: Poetry has always been very important to you, and you once wrote that philosophy needs to be written rather like poetry. Do you find it easy to write? Is it a pleasure for you? Gadamer: No. It is violence. It is a torture. Dialogue is […]

I; REVIEWS The power of negative thinking Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London, Verso, 1993. xvi + 406 pp., £39.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 86091 3686 hb., 0 86091 583 2 pb. Roy Bhaskar’s previous writings have belonged to definite regions of philosophy – for the most part the philosophy of science and […]

NEWS Uneasy Excitement ‘Technology and Subjectivity’, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy Middlesex University, 29 October 1994 A few days before the ‘Technology and Subjectivity’ conference there was an item on MTV about ‘surfing on the cyberspace’ followed by a report on a surfers’ convention organised to raise awareness of the problem of sea […]

Hiding Out or Moving On? Feminism in Psychoanalysis ‘Why are we all here?’, Juliet Mitchell asks her audience, rhetorically. She is opening a conference in London held in May to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism. ‘Why are we all here, and not there – as feminists, that […]

The Politics of Time Peter Osborne The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise … is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token, its logic. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there is depressingly little belief at […]

Fashion in Ruins History after the Cold War Susan Buck-Morss On Pariser Platz at the Gate’s east side, vendors sell souvenirs of the fallen Wall and mementos of the fallen regime. To the north, above the tree-line, the German flag flies over the ruins of the Reichstag that was burned in 1933 and bombed during […]

Charles Taylor, Strong Hermeneutics and the Politics of Difference Nick Smith In The Ethics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor sketches a defence of three highly ambitious claims. 1 The first and most general one is that ideals and the practices which are meant to conform to them are answerable to reason. An ideal is made answerable […]

The Deconstruction of Actuality An Interview with Jacques Derrida This interview was conducted in Paris in August 1993, to mark the publication ofDerrida’ s Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilee, 1993), and was published in the monthly review Passages in September. This English translation appears in Radical Philosophy with permission. Passages: From Bogota to Santiago, from […]

Jon Elster, Political Psychology Marcus Roberts Lin Chun, The British New Left Gregory Elliott Ross Harrison, Democracy Anne Phillips, Democracy and Difference David Copp, Jean Hampton and John E. Roemer, eds., The Idea of Democracy David Archard A. Phillips Griffiths, ed., A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, eds., A Companion to […]