Article archive

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 […]

Olympus Mislaid? A Profile of Perry Anderson Gregory Elliott At the very outset of his story, Berlin seems to have mislaid Mount Olympus. Perry Anderson ‘The Pluralism of Isaiah Berlin’ (1990) In the Foreword to A Zone of Engagement Anderson notes the discontinuity between its first three chapters, classified as ‘intra-mural surveys within the intellectual […]

Ilf I Goods and life-forms Relativism in Charles Taylor’s political philosophy Hartmut Rosa John Gunnell, in a recent paper in Political Theory. I want to turn first to Taylor’s ideas about the nature of argues that a concern with the problem or threat of human agency and identity and the central relativism is a, or […]

‘The world spirit on the fins of a rocket’ Adorno’s critique of progress Michael Lowy and Eleni Varikas The ideology of progress, born (in its modern guise) during the Enlightenment, finds its culminating philosophical expression in Hegel’s conception of history. Here, everything that happens marks a further step in mankind’s march towards freedom: watching Napoleon […]

Tactics, ethics, or temporal ity? Heidegger’s politics reviewed Peter Osborne There are moments in the reception of particular thinkers – especially in translation – when the literature about them, building up a critical mass, explodes, giving rise to whole new subdivisions of the academic industry. It happened to Hegel and Marx in the 1970s and […]

Literary into cultural studies A reply to Martin Ryle Antony Easthope To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it. Roland Barthes In ‘Long Live Literature?’ (RP 67) Martin Ryle explores the implications ofthe outcome ofthe crisis in […]

‘When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say?’ Sue Bridehead’s question – or rather exclamation – in Jude the Obscure – is, of course, rhetorical; and Hardy has surely been vindicated in this appeal to […]

Black Socrates? Questioning the philosophical tradition Simon Critchley Inconsiderateness in the face of tradition is reverence for the past. Martin Heidegger, Sophistes Funk not only moves, it can remove. George Clinton, P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up) Philosophy tells itself stories. l One might go further and claim that the life of philosophy, the […]

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 […]

Fashion in Ruins History after the Cold War Susan Buck-Morss On Pariser Platz at the Gate’s east side, vendors sell souvenirs of the fallen Wall and mementos of the fallen regime. To the north, above the tree-line, the German flag flies over the ruins of the Reichstag that was burned in 1933 and bombed during […]

Charles Taylor, Strong Hermeneutics and the Politics of Difference Nick Smith In The Ethics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor sketches a defence of three highly ambitious claims. 1 The first and most general one is that ideals and the practices which are meant to conform to them are answerable to reason. An ideal is made answerable […]

Incomplete Modernity: Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society Michae/ Rustin There has been good reason to fear that ‘post-modem’ and ‘post-industrial’ currents of thought have been sweeping away the foundations of radical critiques without offering to put anything very substantial in their place. It is all very well criticising the limitations of social democracy, the welfare state, […]

Ecologism and the Relegitimation of Socialism Andrew Dobson Ever since 1974 – at least – and the publication of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘A Critique of Political Ecology’, I the relationship between socialism and ecologism has been a source of contention. Sometimes this relationship has been one of outright hostility as the differences between the analyses […]

Long Live Literature? Englit, Radical Criticism and Cultural Studies Martin Ry/e Has the time come for ‘English’ as an academic discipline to disappear? A crisis can only last so long, after all, before it becomes terminal (or terminally boring). And ‘English’ has been in a self-proclaimed state of crisis for the last fifteen years, in […]

Val ue, Rationality and the Environment Andrew Collier Today most people on the Left are aware that ecological damage, and the threat of ecological disaster, are among the foremost contradictions of capitalism, second only to the impoverishment of the Third World. In addition to ecology in the strict sense, the damage done to the material […]

The Meaning of Political Ecology Tim Hayward ‘Political ecology’ is an expression which has become quite familiar in recent years, but does not appear to have acquired a clear and settled meaning. * Evidently it is used to point up some kind of connection between politics, or the political, and ecology, yet the project of […]

Humanism and Nature John O’Neill Those who aim to construct links between Marxism and the green movement often look to Marx’ s early work on alienation as a source for a green Marxism. I There is an immediate apparent problem with any such attempt to marry the early Marx and the greens, viz. that Marx’s […]

Studying Child Sexual Abuse: Morality or Science? Sue Clegg Child abuse has become a major topic of public polemic and academic research. I Modem feminists, like their nineteenthcentury sisters, have singled out sexual abuse for special attention. 2 After decades in which sexual abuse was the concern of a limited number of professionals who dealt […]

English Philosophy in the Fifties Jonathan Ree If you asked me when was the best time for philosophy in England in the twentieth century-for professional, academic philosophy, that is – I would answer: the fifties, without a doubt. And: the fifties, alas. * Under the leadership of Gilbert Ryle and f.L. Austin, the career philosophers […]

A Nation, Yet Again The Field Day Anthology Francis Mulhern Anthologies are strategic weapons in literary politics. Authored texts of all kinds – poems, novels, plays, reviews, analyses – play more or less telling parts in a theatre of shifting alliances and antagonisms, but anthologies deploy a special type of rhetorical force: the simulation of […]

The Cards of Confusion Reflections on Historical Communism and the ‘End of History’ Gregory Elliott For Tom and Martha, divisibly … it is well known that History is not a good bourgeois. Roland Barthes (1957) An anti-Communist is a cur. I couldn’t see any way out of that one, and I never will. Jean-Paul Sartre […]