Article archive

The theme I shall address today has all the trappings of an academic exercise.* Still, I would like to attempt to show how it intersects with several major historical, epistemological and ultimately political questions. As a basis for the discussion, I will posit that Lenin and Gandhi are the two greatest figures among revolutionary theorist–practitioners […]

Isn’t it an affront to Goethe to make a film of Faust, and isn’t there a world of difference between the poem Faust and the film Faust? Yes, certainly. But, again, isn’t there a whole world of difference between a bad film of Faust and a good one? Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project (N1a, 4)Whilst the […]

Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw his adversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance. Clausewitz, On War, 1832Receive our truth in your dancing heart. Zapata lives, also and for always in these lands. Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee ZNLA, ‘Votan-Zapata or Five […]

Political theology, religious fundamentalism and modern politics Marilena chauí In order to define a single and indivisible sovereign political power, Western modernity needed to separate itself from the ecclesiastical power that impeded this unity and indivisibility. Consequently, public expressions of religion were placed under the control of rulers and intimate expressions were relegated to the […]

Dossier Thealthusser–Rancière Controversy Introduction to Althusser’s ‘Student Problems’ Warren montag For those familiar with Louis Althusser’s published work, reading his relatively early essay entitled ‘Student Problems’ may be a surprising and even disconcerting experience. Part of the surprise lies in the fact that the essay exists at all. Although it was published in Nouvelle Critique […]

Red years Althusser’s lesson, Rancière’s error and the real movement of history Nathan brown The dissolution of the organizational forms which are created by the movement, and which disappear when the movement ends, does not reflect the weak‑ness of the movement, but rather its strength. The time of false battles is over. The only conflict […]

Reviewing Rancière Or, the persistence of discrepancies Bruno bosteels In the nearly four decades since its original publication, Althusser’s Lesson has acquired a certain mythical aura as the dark precursor of things to come. Even with the wealth of translations of Jacques Rancière’s work that have been published at an increasingly feverish pace over the […]

The patient cannot last long Stéphane douailler The presence on our bookshelves of such texts as Louis Althusser’s Reply to John Lewis and Jacques Rancière’s Althusser’s Lesson immediately invites the readers who pick them up to ask themselves what might be at play between titles that so readily mix, miss or specify the genres – […]

Philosophy for children Matthew charles A well‑orchestrated public relations campaign led pri‑marily by educational charity The Philosophy Shop has helped raise the profile of the philosophy for children movement in the UK significantly over the last few years. Whilst The Philosophy Shop has been promoting its ‘Four Rs’ campaign to make ‘Reason‑ing’ a central feature […]

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 […]