Pieces by Peter Dews

The tremor of reflection Slavoj Ziiek’s Lacanian dialectics Peter Dews In memory of Hinrich Fink-Eitel (1946-1995) At first glance, the work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek seems to offer an irresistible range of attractions for theorists wishing to engage with contemporary culture, without accepting the flimsy postmodernist doxa which is often the only available […]

Lacan in Slovenia An Interview with Slavoj Zizek and Renata Salecl One notable result of the recent politicalferment in Central and Eastern Europe has been the emergence of new theoretical currents, often combining strands of thought which – to West European eyes – appear as starkly incompatible . Nowadays, one can meet young Soviet philosophers […]

Cornelius Castoriadis An Interview The following interview with Cornelius Castoriadis took place at the University of Essex, in late Feburary 1990. Castoriadis is a leading figure in the thought and politics of the postwar period in France. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s he was a member of the now almost legendary political organization, Socialisme […]

EDITORIAL Not the least striking feature of the term ‘postmodernism’ is the manner in which – enacting one of its own central theoretical claims – it has bridged the gap between the pretensions of the academy and the wider social and cultural world. There is the postmodernism of Beckett, but also of Ballard, of Kruger […]

The Return of the Subject in late Foucault Peter Dews The following essay is an initial attempt to extend the comparison of the thought of Michel Foucault with that of the Frankfurt School, begun in my Logics of Disintegration (Verso, 1987), to cover the work ofFoucault’s last phase. It does not claim to be a […]

The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Critique: A Reply to McCarney Peter Dews and Peter Osborne The question of the possibility, form, and validity of a ‘critical’ social science, of its relation to Marxism and to the ideas of dialectic and contradiction, received considerable attention on the pages of Radical Philosophy in the late […]

REVIEWS Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Basil Blackwell, 1982 .Bryan Wilson’s anthology of essays on ‘Rationality’, first published in 1970, has become something of a minor classic in recent analytical philosophy, bringing together the main contributions to a lively and accessible debate, and providing the starting-point for a host of subsequent […]

the worker tries to gain mastery over the labour process). The contradictions arising directly from this type of work are arguably near-maximal for free labour: labour allows negligible mastery of skills; the efficacy of labour is felt to be external to the labour process and is located in the spheres of circulation and exchange. It […]

THI ‘NIW PHILOSOPHIRS’ AND THI IND or LlrTISM Peter Dews Introduction Fashion moves fast in Parisian salons, and the taste for intellectual scandal demands the constant breaking of fresh taboos. Three years ago, in the spring of 1977, a group of young authors styling themselves the ‘New Philosophers’ moved rapidly to the centre of attention, […]

Misadvenlures of Ihe Dialeclic Peter Dews I would like to offer some kind of critical response to the ideas on dialectic and social science which have been developed by Roy Edgley in articles published in Radical Philosophy (‘Reason as Dialectic’ RP15) and, more recently. in Critique (‘Dialectic: The Contradiction of Colletti’, Critique 7). As Edgley’s […]

53 News A funny thing happened…The Forum for European Philosophy The last few years have seen some signs of a significant historical shift in the intellectual posture and self-understanding of analytical philosophy in Britain. One such indication has been the recent spate of publications and conferences concerned with the origins of analytical philosophy as a […]

News Thesociety for european philosophy Following an appeal published in Radical Philosophy, and widely distributed to academic departments in the UK, a meeting was held at Birkbeck College in London on 28 June this year to found a new philosophical society. Its aim is to bring together all those in Britain who are working in […]

Uncategorical imperatives Adorno, Badiou and the ethical turn Peter dews ethics have now generated a crossover among these various disciplines that sees and does ethics ʻotherwiseʼ. The decentering of the subject has brought about a recentering of the ethical. But the disparate contents of the volume, from John Guillory on the ethics of reading, via […]