Article archive

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 […]

Philosophy, feminism and universal ism Jean Grimshaw During the last ten years or so, when I have been asked what my particular ‘interests’ are, I have usually said that I have been working on ‘feminism and philosophy’, or ‘philosophy and feminism’ – or perhaps, though less often, ‘feminist philosophy’. I have become increasingly interested in […]

Philosophy and racial identity Linda Martin Alcoll In the 1993 film Map of the Human Heart an Inuit man asks a white engineer who has come to northern Canada to map the region, ‘Why are you making maps?’ Without hesitating, the white man responds ‘They will be very accurate.’ Map-making and race-making have a strong […]

The German as pariah Karl Jaspers and the question of German guilt Anson Rabinbach A great deal has been written about Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, and still more about his notorious silence about the crimes of the regime to which he lent his support and enthusiasm. Much has been and will continue to be […]

SYMPOSIUM Spectres of Derrida The limits of hauntology G hosts are not renowned for their sense of humour. As Charles Lamb (he of the undeconstructed tales from Shakespeare) put it; ‘Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?’ But the ghost ofthe theorist of farcical returns might well […]

Where Marx is closest to the spirit of deconstruction is, arguably, in these formulaic gestures towards a society that had so far transcended existing actuality that its conditions of realization could no longer be conceptualized. Marx is spectral Marx in his refusal to envision communism in his envisaging of it, in his anti-utopian utopianism. Now, […]

mind/geist of Europe by its cultural others and inferiors. Derrida’s fascination is with Hamlet-as-geist haunted by the corporeal form of the ghost, as a trope for the irreducible spectral implication of spirit and spook. However, this Vah~ryian reading of Hamlet forecloses his distinctive relation to the premodern, conscripting his melancholic Renaissance proto-modernity into a latterday […]