COMMENTARy Boycotting israel Academia, activism and the futures of American Studies Mandy merck On 4 December of last year, the annual conference of the American Studies Association resolved that ‘whereas the United States plays a significant role in enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine … whereas there is no effective or substantive academic freedom for Palestinian […]

Rhetorics of populism Ernesto Laclau, 1935–2014 John kraniauskas The publication of Ernesto Laclau’s The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, only weeks after his death in April 2014, confirms his status as one of the foremost contemporary political theorists of the Left.* Since the 1980s, his influence has been extraordinary, particularly in the UK and Latin America: […]

Most branches of philosophy and many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences studied in the anglophone academy draw on texts written in languages other than English and therefore rely on the products of translation, especially translations of historical, European philosophy. However, surprisingly little philosophical attention has been paid to the role of individual […]

Bankocracy Greek money and the ‘new idea’ of Europe Marie cuillerai and Maria KakogianniJuly Monarchy–november democracy On the contrary, the faction of the bourgeoisie that ruled and legislated through the Chambers had a direct interest in the indebtedness of the state. The state deficit was really the main object of its speculation and the chief source […]

Many reviews of books on or by Walter Benjamin begin with a capsule description of the key events in his life. It goes something like this. Born in 1892 into a well-off assimilated German Jewish family in Berlin, Walter Benjamin failed to gain an academic career, just about getting by, instead, through journalism and handouts […]

Standing before a firing squad, in Margarethe von Trotta’s 1986 biopic Rosa Luxemburg, Luxemburg is taken in flashback to an image of herself as a child refusing to go to bed, intent on seeing the petals of a rose unfurl before her. A gun cracks, but no bullets are fired. It is when death is […]

ExHiBiTiON Institutional dissonance Tate Britain, BP and Socialist–Feminist HistoryDave Beech’s review of Tate Liverpool’s exhibition Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013 (‘A Blockbuster for the Left’, RP 184) assessed the usefulness of the exhibition form for presenting the complex histories of left-wing politics and their intersections within art practice. Two concurrent exhibitions at […]