Article archive

Writing the Revolution The Politics of Truth in Genet’s Prisoner of Love Simon Critchley , … Saintliness cannot be placed in question. Emmanuel Levinas 1 The last thing Jean Genet’s work needs is another philosopher’s commentary. After Sartre’ s monumental Saint Genet and Derrida’ s equally monumental-although anti-Sartrean -Glas, it might seem prudent, indeed respectful, […]

The Situationist International: A Case of Spectacular Neglect Sadie Plant The recent exhibitions of Situationist art and paraphernalia in London, Paris, and Boston, have given the Situationist International (SI) an unprecedented academic and cultural profile. Even during the movement’s most active period, when many of its ideas and practices were realised in the events in […]

Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism Kate Soper I shall not begin, as I probably should, by offering to define my terms. Instead, I shall acknowledge that I have brought together three concepts admitted on all sides to be well-nigh indefinable. Or, if they are definable, they are so only by reference to a particular thinker’s usage […]

Reification, Class and ‘New Social Movements’ Paul Browne All significant social movements of the last thirty years have started outside the organised class interests and institutions. The peace movement, the ecology movement, the women’s movement, solidarity with the third world, human rights agencies, campaigns against poverty and homelessness, campaigns against cultural poverty and distortion: all […]

Marxism and Psychoanalysis An Exchange Joe/ Kovef and fan Craib foel Kovel has become increasingly well known to a British public over recent years, firstly with the publication in 1977 of A Complete Guide to Therapy (Harvester) and then with the publication by Free Association Books in 1988 of four titles: The Radical Spirit; White […]

Timely Meditations Jonathan Ree Review Essay on Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 201pp. £25 hb, £7.95 pb, 0521353815 hb, o 521 36781 6 pb. It is now some years since Richard Rorty broke with American analytic philosophy, for reasons he spelt out in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature […]

Nietzsche: The Subject of Morality Ross Poole It is to be inferred that there exist countless dark bodies close to the sun – such as we shall never see. This is, between ourselves, a parable; and a moral psychologist reads the whole starry script only as a parable and signlanguage by means of which many […]

Nietzsche: A Radical Challenge To Political Theory? Keith Ansell-Pearson Only if mankind possessed a universally recognised goal would it be possible to propose ‘thus and thus is the right course of action’: for the present there exists no such goal. It is thus irrational and trivial to impose the demands of morality upon mankind. – […]

Searching for Ancestors Timothy O’Hagan In Rome [in the fourth century AD] senatorial families sought out an exemplum, an exemplary character in the distant past, from whom to claim descent. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippol With hindsight the transformation of Alasdair MacIntyre from gadfly into guru looks inevitable, though few members of his audience in […]

Boundaries Versus Binaries: Bakhtin in/against the History of Ideas Graham Pechey Who or what is Mikhail Bakhtin? The two monographs we have on him agree on an identity: Bakhtin is a philosopher. The compliment, however well meant, could be lethal. Bakhtin was born in Orel in 1895 and died near Moscow in 1975. This bald […]

Feminist Epistemology: An Impossible Project? Margareta Halberg This paper takes up the recent epistemological turn in feminist theory and some of the problems thereby raised. The fundamental aim of feminist theories in general is to analyze (and change) gender relations. It may be argued that the term ‘epistemology’ in feminist discourse should not be defined […]

Socialism, Feminism and Men Peter Middleton Feminism has been both welcomed and resisted by socialist men in the past twenty years. As a critique of exploitation and inequality, feminism has been easily recognisable to socialism. Women can be added on to its emancipatory project as another oppressed class to be liberated. In practice this has […]

Philosophy as Exile from Life: Lukacs’ ‘Soul And Form’ Paul Browne As ethical explorations of the world of literary and philosophical works, Georg Lukacs’s essays are so many restatements of a fundamental question: what are the relationships between such works, the lives of their individual creators, and social existence in general? In giving new expression […]

Who Made the French Revolution?: An Essay on Current Historiography Noel Parker In his most approachable work, The Coming of the French Revoiution,2 Georges Letebvre, the authoritative marxist historian of the Revolution, sub-divided it thus: an aristocratic revolution (the reform effort by the monarchy) which failed; a bourgeois revolution which succeeded, with the help of […]

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Tensions in Feminist Philosophy Jean Grimshaw The history of the reception and interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a complex and fascinating one. 1 It was praised by many of her radical contemporaries, including Tom Paine and Mary’s husband, the radical anarchist philosopher and social theorist, […]

Hegel was born in 1770 and died in 1831. Thus he lived through the most revolutionary epoch the world had yet seen: the overthrow of the old regime in France, the revolutionary wars of Napoleon, his defeat, the restorations. Even at the time of Hegel’s death everything appeared still unsettled. History has still work to […]

Labour and Labour-Power fan Hunt Marx claimed that his principal theoretical achievements were the distinctions he drew between ‘concrete labour’ and ‘abstract labour’, and between ‘labour’ and ‘labour-power’. These distinctions have been the focus of subsequent interpretation and criticism of Marx’ s theory of the capitalist mode of production. In this paper I shall argue […]

Nietzsche, Ethics & Sexual Difference Rosa/yn Diprose There are many women in Nietzsche’s texts. There is the old woman, the sceptic and the enigmatic love object, or woman as masquerade. There is The Woman, thejouissance of which is Lacan’ s God – the Truth behind the veil. There is the other as object of evaluation […]

Knowledge as a Social Phenomenon Sean Sayers The idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon is no longer either novel or unfamiliar. With the growth of the social sciences, we are accustomed to seeing ideas and beliefs in social and historical terms, and trying to understand how they arise and why they take the forms […]

Do We Need a Sex/Gender Distinction? Val Plumwood We live an embodied life; we live with those genital and reproductive organs and capacities, those hormones and chromosomes, that locate us physiologically as male or female …. We cannot know what children would make of their bodies in a nongender or non sexually organized world, what […]

Television Literacy: A Critique David Buckingham The term •television literacy’ has been increasingly widely used in recent years, both by researchers investigating the relationship between children and television and by educationalists arguingfor the formal study ofthe medium in schools. This paper discusses some of the theoretical issues which are at stake in the basic analogy […]