that Kristeva cannot escape the confusion that surrounds the entire French debate about citizenship and nationality. All too often, it is forgotten by politicians, journalists and cultural critics alike that in many cases the offensive ʻMuslim woman in a headscarfʼ is, and has from birth been, a French citizen. Very few of the defenders of […]

On the evening of 16 May 1973, around halfway through the Aladdin Sane tour, I watched David Bowie play his second sold-out show at the Aberdeen Music Hall. I could not have imagined that one day I would be listening to him – or, rather, listening to Kate Moss speaking on his behalf – intervene […]

RE V IE WSA new quarrel of universals Étienne Balibar, Saeculum. Culture, religion, idéologie, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 2012. 118 pp., €22.00, 978 2 71860 874 7. The new millennium has not been kind to the partisans of a radical Enlightenment. The sundering of temporal and spiritual authority, the suspicion of piety, the virtues of profanation, […]

On 25 February 2002, Rafael Perez, a former oicer of the LAPD’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit (CRASH), appeared in court accused of various crimes: covering up a bank robbery, shooting and framing an innocent citizen, stealing and selling cocaine from evidence lockers, being a member of the Los Angeles gang called the Bloods, […]

Dossier BL ANQUI’ S E TERNAL GAP The radical gap A preface to Auguste Blanqui, Eternity by the Stars Jacques rancière I leaf through the programme and learn that the very stars themselves – which, I am irmly convinced, should be but rarely disturbed, and even then only for high reasons of meditative gravity … […]

Auguste Blanqui, heretical communistdaniel Bensaïd and Michael Löwy Within the history of French socialism there is an invisible, heretical, marginalized and suppressed current. It constitutes an orientation obscured by the dominant tendencies on the left from the end of the nineteenth century until today – tendencies represented by the rival and complementary pairings of Jaurès and […]

Blanqui’s bifurcationspeter hallward Auguste Blanqui’s Eternity by the Stars (1872) is perhaps the only text, across the scattered fragments of his œuvre, that poses a genuine problem of interpretation.1 How could this ultra-voluntarist revolutionary come to embrace a vision of the cosmos based on endless repetition and the eternal recycling of monotonous variation? Blanqui committed […]

RE V IE WSA new quarrel of universals Étienne Balibar, Saeculum. Culture, religion, idéologie, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 2012. 118 pp., €22.00, 978 2 71860 874 7. The new millennium has not been kind to the partisans of a radical Enlightenment. The sundering of temporal and spiritual authority, the suspicion of piety, the virtues of profanation, […]

Edward W. Said died in 2003. Jacques Derrida died in 2004. Kofi Awoonor was killed in Westgate Mall last year. Now Stuart Hall is gone. A generation of intellectuals and activists, and intellectual–activists, is disappearing. Academics worldwide could not think ‘Black Britain’ before Stuart Hall. And in Britain the impact of Cultural Studies went beyond […]