Speculation at the crossroads

REVIEWS Speculation at the crossroads Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, trans. Mark Al an Ohm and Jon Cogburn, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2014. 488 pp., £85.00 hb., £24.99 pb., 978 0 74868 149 5 hb., 978 0 74868 150 1 pb. In 2011, the publication of The Speculative Turn drew together […]

Legal terror and the police dog

In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 2001 an off-duty police officer spotted Antonio Chatman, who was known by this officer as having a warrant for a misdemeanour. Soon other officers, including a K-9 unit, arrived on the scene. Chatman attempted to flee but a police dog pursued and apprehended him, which is to say the trained dog […]

‘Use-value’: Ontology and semiotics

The only objective forms of commodities are their use forms, their natural forms. — Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (1867) Does Marx’s discourse have something to say to the current problematization of the foundations of a new practice of politics?* Certainly not, if Marx’s dispute with political economy, which forms the central part of his […]

Freud against Oedipus?

Freud against oedipus? philippe van haute There is a popular story, even among scholars, that tells us that Freudian psychoanalysis was founded at the very moment that Freud wrote to Fliess (in 1897) that he no longer believed in his Neurotica: ‘Ich glaube an meine Neurotica nicht mehr.’ [1] This story reads this declaration as […]

188 Reviews

REVIEWS Speculation at the crossroads Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, trans. Mark Al an Ohm and Jon Cogburn, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2014. 488 pp., £85.00 hb., £24.99 pb., 978 0 74868 149 5 hb., 978 0 74868 150 1 pb. In 2011, the publication of The Speculative Turn drew together […]

Harun Farocki, 1944–2014: The image scout

OBITUARY The image scout Harun Farocki, 1944–2014often accompanied by texts. [1] From his first militant films, his first creations for television, and his first critical writings onwards, a theoretical and materialist concern sustained his intentions, had always addressed themselves to the medium that received them. And so he studied the way people saw the Vietnam […]

Cultural Commons: The occupation of Teatro Valle

The impact of the economic crisis on the cultural scene in Italy has laid bare the complex question of arts funding, as insufficient public and private models meet – and at points clash with – a third alternative for cultural management: the ‘commons’ or bene comune (‘common good’). The institutional inspiration for this last option […]

The pig’s head

epigenesis’ may actually be better considered a theory of preformation. This raises the unsettling suspicion that, for all Mensch’s admirable archaeological investigation into the roots of ‘epigenesis’ in sixteenthand seventeenth-century biology, we are left little the wiser as to Kant’s own understanding of the term. Kant appears to be one of the first of the […]