Starting again from Marx

Let us start again from Marx. 1 Why? Is it because we are communists? No, this answer is not convincing. We could start again from somewhere else, from Lenin, or Mao; or, we could believe that current feminist or anti-racist struggles have no need for Marx; we could even think that Marx’s Eurocentrism makes him […]

The deportation power

Dossier: Economies and Times of Deportation

When we contemplate deportation, 1 it is revealing, in the spirit of Michel Foucault, to excavate a genealogy of the actual practices. ‘We have to analyse [power]’, as Foucault remarks concisely, ‘by beginning with the techniques and tactics of domination.’ 2 Elsewhere, Foucault credits Marx with having provided him with ‘the fundamental elements of an […]

Deportation, nation state, capital: Between legitimisation and violence

Dossier: Economies and Times of Deportation

As Abdelmalek Sayad has written: ‘To think about immigration (or emigration) is to think about the state.’ 1 Attempting to question both the political structure of the state and its resonances for the individual, he adds that the risk of expulsion is what weighs on the mind of every immigrant and leads to a life […]

Not German enough?

Reivew of Tom Bunyard, Guy Debord, Time and Spectacle
Tom Bunyard, Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018). 430pp., £123.00 hb., 978 9 00435 602 3 Amid the copious notes taken by Guy Debord on the philosophy of Hegel, the following extract from the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit appears repeatedly: ‘By the little which satisfies […]

Terror of the social

Reivew of Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me
Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2018). 236pp., £11.99 pb., 978 1 68237 220 4 In his most recent book, apparently meant for a general audience and made up of essays previously appearing in non-scholarly publications, Galen Strawson has provided a nice recap […]

Expulsion, power, Mobilisation

Dossier: Economies and Times of Deportation

Questions of sovereign power, socioeconomic precarity, racialisation, citizenship and exclusion converge and clash around deportation. 1 In this short intervention I propose to reflect on certain aspects of the power of deportation in three areas. The first is citizenship and belonging, and more specifically what we can learn about the instability of citizenship under liberal […]

Stolen time

Dossier: Economies and Times of Deportation

The most remarkable reason for deportation I have seen is from 1914, when a Russian Jew was deported from Sweden after six years. A short sentence in the police report, explaining why he should be deported, reads: ‘He was a bad shoemaker.’ It was not enough to be a labourer; one had to be a […]

Paul Virilio, 1932–2018

The disappearance of Paul Virilio is my concern. It provides an opportune moment for a ‘spontaneous declaration’, as well as for some clarification with respect to a series of apodictic interventions. 1. The personal facts. Memory – transformed recollections and changed expectations – delivers to me a Virilio who was, alongside Michel de Certeau, Louis […]

Fallen angel: Guy Lardreau's later voluntarism

The French philosopher and erstwhile Maoist militant Guy Lardreau (1947-2008) was the first to admit that much of his work was haunted by a single problem, one posed by the revolutionary political history of the twentieth century. 1 The great revolutions in Russia and China, and several other places inspired by their example, pursued radical […]

Without further ado

Reivew of Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetics
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetics, ed. Eberhard Ortland, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). 376pp., £55.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 978 0 74567 939 6 hb., 978 0 74567 940 2 pb. Amongst the writings of canonised thinkers, there often exist ambiguous yet generative gaps between those works published during their lifetime and those made posthumously […]

Inside families

Reivew of Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics
Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 304 pp., £24.95 hb., £20.00 pb., 978 0 52028 191 2 hb., 978 0 52029 994 8 pb. The shift to neoliberalism is rarely narrated from the vantage point of the household, but it […]

Interview: Forgetting Vietnam

Trinh T. Minh-ha teaches in the University of California, Berkeley’s departments of Rhetoric, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Born in Hanoi in 1952, Trinh emigrated to the United States in 1970 where she studied musical composition, ethnomusicology and French literature, completing her PhD dissertation in 1977 under the title: Un Art sans Oeuvre: l’Anonymat dans […]

Stanley Cavell, 1926-2018

Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, was one of the most prominent philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, who developed over the course of five decades an impressive oeuvre characterised by two main quests that define the singularity of his […]

Who is the subject of violence?

Reivew of François Cusset, Le déchaînement du monde ; Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre
François Cusset, Le déchaînement du monde. Logique nouvelle de la violence (Paris: La Découverte, 2018). 240pp., 20.00 euro pb., 978 2 70719 815 0 Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre. Une philosophie de la violence (Paris: Zones, 2017). 200pp., 18.00 euro pb., 978 2 35522 1103 Just over two years ago, on 19 July 2016, Adama Traoré […]

Agustin García Calvo in our time

The Spanish philosopher and writer Agustín García Calvo, who died in 2012, was a thinker who tried to provoke people into thinking about the problems posed by neoliberal globalisation. He thought that this global ideology was made to appear self-imposed, a kind of hyper ouranos topos (or ideal realm) pervading everything and from which everything […]

The Palestinian Museum

How are we to think about a museum that represents a people who not only do not exist on conventional maps but who are also in the process of resisting obliteration by one of the most brutal military complexes in the world? What is, and what can be, the role of a museum in a […]

Symbolic glue

Reivew of Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, eds, Anti-Gender Campaigns
Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, eds., Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilising Against Equality (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 302pp., £85.00 hb., £27.95 pb., 978 1 78348 999 2 hb., 978 1 78660 000 4 pb. What fuels the success of authoritarian populism around the globe and how does the extreme right manage to hijack public […]

The politics of miscarriage

In 2015, Purvi Patel became the first person in the US to be charged, convicted and sentenced for ‘feticide’ in relation to her own pregnancy. In 2013, she had been admitted to an emergency room in Indiana after turning up with heavy bleeding and a severed umbilical cord. She claimed to have suffered a miscarriage […]

Strategies of debilitation

Reivew of Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim
Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 296pp., £76.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 0 82236 892 2 hb., 978 0 82236 918 9 pb. On March 30th 2018, Palestinian activists in Gaza began what they called The Great March of Return. Throughout a period beginning on […]

Rebellious admiration

Reivew of Clare Hemmings, Considering Emma Goldman
Clare Hemmings, Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 304pp., £80.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 0 82236 998 1 hb., 978 0 82237 003 1 pb. Clare Hemmings is one of the most innovative and original voices in contemporary feminist theory. Her work cuts across disciplinary […]