From Abstraction to Wunsch The Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies Howard caygill DICTIONARY Say of it: ʻItʼs only for ignoramuses!ʼ . . ʻIʼd rather die than use one!ʼ Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received IdeasThe Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies* deserves a warm welcome from everyone interested in philosophy and its history. While connoisseurs of philosophical lexicography will […]

COMMENTARy ‘people not of our concern’ Rejected refugees in Tunisia Martina tazzioli ‘We stay here and we don’t move.’ This is the refrain in the Choucha refugee camp among those who have been stranded there, in the desert, since 2011. ‘Rejected’ and ‘non-resettled refugees’ are the categories through which these migrant stories have been sorted. […]

Kojève’s letter to stalin hager weslati The philosophical œuvre of Alexandre Kojève is often considered to consist of an eclectic and distorted Marxist–Heideggerian interpretation of Hegel. More recent biographical studies claim that his attempt to write a book that would define his ‘system of knowledge’ (interrupted by his sudden death in 1968) was an impossible […]

The postconceptual condition Or, the cultural logic of high capitalism today Peter osborne Those with long enough memories will no doubt recognize the crossed syntax of my title.* It mimics, first, that of a text which, while in historical terms still recent, is nonetheless already antiquated, even if not yet sufficiently so to have acquired […]

introduction to horkheimer, ‘sketch for a novel’ In autumn 1942, while working with T.W. Adorno on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer began to write a novel. Its lead character was the English prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940), who, in September 1938, after several meetings with Hitler and along with France’s Edouard Daladier, agreed not to […]

COMMENT Dissonances of the arab left hisham bustani To talk of the secular democratic leftist project in the Arab world is to talk of crisis – a crisis that is manifest in two ways. First, there is the fundamental question of whether such a project even exists in a coherent and comprehensive form, rather than […]

REViEWS The cunning of capital explained? Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2012, xxi + 812 pp., £22.99 pb., 978 1 60846 067 0. In ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’ (1976) Perry Anderson wrote: ‘Among the concepts traditionally associated with historical materialism, few have been so problematic and contested as that […]

EXHiBiTiON REViEW A blockbuster for the Left Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013, Tate Liverpool, 8 November 2013–2 February 2014. Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013 is a thematic exhibition curated by Eleanor Clayton and Francesco Manacorda of Tate Liverpool in collaboration with Lynn Wray, whose doctoral research provides the rationale […]

REViEWS The cunning of capital explained? Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2012, xxi + 812 pp., £22.99 pb., 978 1 60846 067 0. In ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’ (1976) Perry Anderson wrote: ‘Among the concepts traditionally associated with historical materialism, few have been so problematic and contested as that […]

RE V IE WSRed carnationPeter Hallward and Knox Peden, eds, Concept and Form, Volume 1: Key Texts from the ‘Cahiers pour l’analyse’, Verso, London and New York, 2012. 272 pp., £16.99 pb., 978 1 84467 872 3. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, eds, Concept and Form, Volume 2: Interviews and Essays on the ‘Cahiers pour […]