Across much of the world there is a growing distance, both physically and cognitively, between people and the animals they consume; at the same time the scale of this consumption marches steadily upwards. Put simply, it is increasingly difficult for people to know much about where and how the animals they consume actually live. So […]

In her 1984 article ‘Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation’, Iris Marion Young contended that ‘pregnancy does not belong to the woman herself’ within patriarchal Western institutions of modern medicine. ‘It is a state of the developing fetus, for which the woman is a container; or it is an objective, observable process coming under scientific scrutiny; […]

Among the concepts proposed by Althusser in the course of his famous symptomatic reading of Marx’s Capital, structural causality plays a central role. Extrapolated from Marx’s writings via a detour through the philosophy of Spinoza, it came to represent the concept in which Althusser summed up ‘Marx’s immense theoretical revolution’. [1] As is well known, […]

At strategic points in Reading Capital, Louis Althusser introduces Spinoza’s idea of an immanent cause as the decisive concept that is absent from Marx’s discourse. [1] For the Althusser of 1965, Spinoza’s model of causality is the great missing link in Marx’s thought, a philosophical omission and lacuna of symptomatic force. It explains the whole […]

Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement, not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where […]

The reversal of authority Alexandre Kojève, The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation), trans. Hager Weslati, Verso, London and New York, 2014. xxxiv + 107 pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 78168 095 7. Since the publication of Arendt’s essays on authority, the debate around authority has been mostly dominated by her diagnoses of its crisis. […]

Alexandre Kojève, The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation), trans. Hager Weslati, Verso, London and New York, 2014. xxxiv + 107 pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 78168 095 7. Since the publication of Arendt’s essays on authority, the debate around authority has been mostly dominated by her diagnoses of its crisis. A different but recurrent […]

The organizers’ opening address to this conference laid out an ambitious aim: to weigh up the Aktualität of Adorno’s critical theory in its capacity as a heuristic, pedagogical tool for the analysis of current political crises in Turkey and beyond; to go ‘with Adorno, beyond Adorno’ by applying the precepts of his negative dialectic to […]

Radical philosophy 200 (November/December 2016) will be the final issue of the current print edition of the journal. Plans are under way to relaunch Radical Philosophy in a new form in 2017. Please keep an eye out for announcements on our website in the new year. All subscribers whose subscriptions end with RP 199 will […]

For more than a decade much of the anglophone literature on Simone de Beauvoir has been preoccupied with the question of her intellectual status, attacking the still prevailing presumptions that her work is not philosophical or that it is philosophically wholly indebted to Sartre. The publication of this volume – the first in the Beauvoir […]