Article archive

Contemporary, let us say ‘post-modern’, discourses on media, communication, information and so on are functioning in our society in at least two different – if interconnected – ways.* First, they describe scientifically the functioning of contemporary media and their growing role in our society. But the development of media theory during recent decades was, in […]

Media, as considered by media philosophy, are not what you expect them to be. In the first place, they have almost nothing to do with information, or transmission, or communication, or storage. They do not as such produce sense or distribute meanings. If they do so, it is as a side effect or a secondary […]

When I read the expression ‘The map is not the territory’ for the first time, it occurred to me that it contained the quintessence of Anglo-American philosophy of common sense. The defiant insistence on a logic of representation, a common-sense belief in the evidence of an objective ‘reality’ that is prior to all mental representations […]

Robinson in Ruins New materialism and the archaeological imagination Paul dave Robinson in Ruins (2010) is the third of Patrick Keil er’s fictionalized documentaries featuring the investigations and struggles of his character, the ‘wandering, cracked scholar’ and political visionary, Robinson. [1] The first in the trilogy, London, was released in 1994, and the second, Robinson […]

For many thinkers of the spatiality of contemporary capitalism, the production of all social space tends now to converge upon a single organizational paradigm designed to generate and service mobility, connectivity and flexibility. Networked, landscaped, borderless and reprogrammable, this is a space that functions, within the built environments of business, shopping, education or the ‘creative […]

Feminist protest against US torture practices, including outcries over the use of sex, sexuality and sexual identity in the torture of prisoners at US detention sites from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, have understandably tended to focus on what the abuse destroys – the victim and his or her community. Here, though, I ask what the […]

The critical ethos that stands behind much of the most impressive and important work on modern forms of power seems to have constructed its own prison. A free and open concept of power – the concept that has guided so many enlightening histories of the present – has revealed itself as yet another technology of […]

Irigaray anxiety Luce Irigaray and her ethics for improper selves Penelope Deutscher The essays Luce Irigaray has published in the recent works le, tu, nous, Thinking the Difference and I Love To You are usually described as her more simplified work. Questions are raised concerning the extent to which Irigaray’s writing, and her concerns, have […]

Waiter Benjamin and surrealism The story of a revolutionary spell Michael Lowy ‘Fascination’ is the only term that does justice to the intensity of the feelings Waiter Benjamin experienced when he discovered surrealism in 1926-27. His very efforts to escape the spell of the movement founded by Andre Breton and his friends are an expression […]

Nietz5che reception today Pauline Johnson I want no ‘believers’. I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses. – I have a terrible fear that one day I shall be pronounced biological’ revolution was enticingly projected in contrast to the ‘superficial’, ‘external’ social revolution. 2 holy. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce […]

Friend or enemy? Reading Schmitt politically Mark Neocleous The debates concerning a ‘crisis’ in social theory in recent years have been partly generated by those socialists for whom old certainties now appear naive and the theoretical foundations of a socialist approach to history and society obliterated. In this context some have looked to new approaches […]

Psychoanalysis as anti·hermeneutics Jean Laplanche For Serge Leclaire 1. With Freud The title of this paper may seem to the majority of readers to bear a paradoxical, even provocative, character. How can psychoanalysis – if only on the basis of its foundational work, The Interpretation of Dreams – not be directly connected to the hermeneutic […]

Translation, philosophy, materialism Lawrence Venuti Philosophy does not escape the embarrassment that faces contemporary academic disciplines when confronted with the problem of translation. In philosophical research, widespread dependence on translated texts coincides with neglect of their translated status, a general failure to take into account the differences introduced by the fact of translation. The problem […]

In 1977 Luce Irigaray published a passionately written article in the journal Critique, entitled ‘The Poverty of Psychoanalysis’. The text is a richly woven tapestry of diverse references and poetic resonances, and merits a close reading. However, rather than using Irigaray’s essay as an exercise in textual analysis, I will use it here as a […]

Virtual sexes and feminist futures The philosophy of ‘cyberfeminism’ Jill Marsden It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’. Donna Haraway Whilst the majority of her work has received little critical attention, Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’l has rapidly attained cult status in many branches of contemporary theory. With this […]

The art of allusion Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical interventions under National Socialism Theresa Orozco On 11 February 1995 Gadamer reached the age of ninety-five. The tributes that were paid to him were justifiably numerous; in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he was celebrated as ‘the most successful philosopher of the Federal Republic’, placed even before Jurgen Habermas, […]

Histories of cultural populism Martin Ryle It is more than a decade since the perspectives of the Frankfurt School lost their dominance within left-wing cultural theory. In 1983 Fredric Jameson, while noting sardonically that poststructuralist celebrations of the consumer’s ‘desire’ simply ‘change the valences on the old descriptions of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse’, registered his […]

Wrapping the Reichstag Re-visioning German history Esther Leslie Whoever emerges victorious participates, to this day, in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. As is always the case, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures. The historical materialist views them with […]

Is class a difference that makes a difference? Diana eoole The title of my paper surely sounds strange.’ Statistics abound to reveal the intransigence and even enhancement of class differences across the industrialized world. There are few, if any, distinctions whose differential effects have been better recorded or empirically verified. So, at first sight, it […]

It is time to think again. An older phase of capitalism has ended. A received culture of class has declined with it, disarticulated by new forms of industrial organization, a transformed information economy, and changed patterns of consumption and recreation. The right has thematized these developments and prospered from them, as successive Conservative electoral victories […]

The death of sensuous particulars Adorno and abstract expressionism Jay Bernstein ‘Hell is the denial of the ordinary.’ John Ciardi, The Gift 1. This essay will engage in three distinct tasks simultaneously. first, it will form a light introduction to the philosophical aesthetics of T.W. Adorno. Second, it will reconnoitre a reading of abstract expressionism […]