Political physics

EDITORIAL Intellectual journals have their moments; if they’re lucky more than one. But to sustain themselves over decades, they have to change (or become part of an establishment), and change more than once. With this issue, Radical Philosophy marks forty-five years as a collectively edited, selfpublished and still largely self-produced print journal. It is still […]

Marx after Marx after Marx after Marx

Harry Harootunian, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism, Columbia University Press, New York, 2015. xiv + 292 pp., £20.67 hb., 978 0 231 17480 0. The study of Marx in the anglophone academy – established during the boom years of sociological theory in the 1970s, when sociology was de facto […]

200 reviews

Harry Harootunian, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism, Columbia University Press, New York, 2015. xiv + 292 pp., £20.67 hb., 978 0 231 17480 0. The study of Marx in the anglophone academy – established during the boom years of sociological theory in the 1970s, when sociology was de facto […]

Introduction

Dossier: Romantic Transdisciplinarity 1

Dossier ROMANTIC TRANSDISCIPLINARIT Y 1 Introduction Of all the genealogical sources of contemporary critical theory, in both its Germanand French-inspired variants, early German Romanticism remains the most potent, yet it is also the least explicated in relation to current theoretical trends.* The sources of modern criticism in Jena Romanticism are widely acknowledged, yet when theory […]

Futures present: Lite, dark and missing

Dossier: Future Stasis

Futures present Lite, dark and missing Peter osborne * Marc Augé, The Future, Verso, London and New York, 2015. 112 pp., £40.00 hb., £7.99 pb., 9 781 78168 567 9 hb., 978 1 78168 566 2 pb.; Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso, London and New York, 2015. 240 pp., £55.00 hb., […]

More than everything: Žižek's Badiouian Hegel

More than everything Žižek’s Badiouian Hegel Peter osborne There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although no one has actually read them page by page… a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us. Slavoj Žižek1 Allow me […]

Disguised as a dog: Cynical Occupy?

Disguised as a dog Cynical Occupy? Peter osborne I take my title and my philosophical cue from a passage in Marx’s 1839 ‘Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy’. I take my artistic cue from the early work of Valie Export. The passage from Marx reads as follows: As in the history of philosophy there are nodal points […]

80 Reviews

REVIEWS A paradigm too far? Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, translated by Joel Anderson, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995. xxi + 215 pp., £39.95 hb., 0 7456 1160 5. Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, edited by Charles W. Wright, State […]

Cornel West: American Radicalism

INTERVIEW Cornel West American radicalism RP: Perhaps we could begin by asking you about the role of religion in your intellectual and political development. How important was the Church to you in becoming an intellectual, becoming a radical? West: For me, the issues on which religious discourse has traditionally focused, such as death and dread […]

The Politics of Time

The Politics of Time Peter Osborne The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise … is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token, its logic. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there is depressingly little belief at […]

Judith Butler: Gender as Performance

Gender as Performance An Interview with Judith Butler ludithButlerteaches in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France ( J987) traced the dialectic ofpro- and anti-Hegelian currents in French theory across the writings ofa wide range ofthinkers. She is best known, however, for […]

67 Reviews

Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice Bob Brecher Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds., The Althusserian Legacy David Macey Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures Alan Duiant Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English […]

66 Reviews

REVIEWS RULING PASSION STRONG IN DEATH Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, London, Faber, 1993. 363pp, £9.99 pb, 0 571 169732. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, London, Hutchinson, 1993. 583pp, £20 hb, 0 09 1753449. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, London, Harper Collins, 1993. 491pp, £18 hb, 0 00 255267 1. ‘Alive,’ claims […]