Untimely Media: Subversions of obsolescence in decolonial print

‘It will keep your secrets. Operate it yourself.’ A. B. Dick Mimeograph Company advertisement in Life magazine, circa 1940. How can we decolonise technics today within, against and beyond Eurocentric teleologies that separate rational humans from savage or inert nature and technological infrastructure assumed to be a ‘standing reserve’? 1 The provocative exhibition ‘Crafting Subversion: […]
Poster of a conference at SOAS called Crafting Subversion: DIY and Decolonial Print

The Red Pill: Breaking out of The Class Matrix

Rare is the book that provokes in me both frequent agreement and teeth-clenching, head-shaking, wincing frustration. But such is Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix. 1 Chibber is his generation’s foremost advocate of analytical Marxism, a program of articulating and defending socialist politics using the tools of contemporary social science. The journal he helms, Catalyst, has […]
Paper pasted to wall which says, "Money forgives you"

Anti-abortion feminism: How is this even a thing?

On 24th June 2022, anti-abortion activists across the US celebrated as the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, among them some self-described ‘feminists’. For a long time now, the anti-abortion movement has been declaring itself ‘pro-woman’ as much as pro-foetus, presenting abortion as a harm to women that they are coerced into or ultimately […]

The myth of Aufheben: A comment on Matthieu Renault’s Hegelian myth of counter-violence

Matthieu Renault argues in a recent issue of Radical Philosophy (RP 2.10, Summer 2021) that justifications for the counter-violence of the oppressed which draw on Hegel’s master-slave relation are based on a myth originating from Kojève’s Paris lectures (1933-9). The Kojève myth is that history begins with the violence of the master over the slave […]
Graffiti which reads, 'Dissolve the illusion...'

‘Everything can be made better, except man’: On Frédéric Lordon’s Communist Realism

Over the past decade or so, Frédéric Lordon has morphed from Spinozist social philosopher and canny heterodox critic of political economy with a formation in Regulation Theory to one of the most prominent intellectual voices of the radical Left on the French scene1 – a shift crystallised by his protagonism during the Nuit Debout protests […]
Diagrams of various parliaments from around the world

Dismantling the apparatus of domination?: Left critiques of AI

In November 2021, over 140 Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers signed a letter asking the German government to oppose developments in autonomous weapons systems. With this they attempted to draw distinctions between beneficial and destructive AI: ‘Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no […]
Grid of nine hands making abstract gestures overlayed by node diagrams

Towards a juridical archaeology of primitive accumulation: A reading of Foucault's Penal Theories and Institutions

The virtual dimensions of a project The implicit diptych formed by the two successive courses delivered by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France between 1971 and 1973 – Penal Theories and Institutions and The Punitive Society – has already been the object of substantial commentary. The principal gains arising from philological or speculative soundings […]
Blue typewriter in a black box

The threshold of fire: Man the shooter and his subhuman incendiary Other

The white gunman and the ‘rioters, anarchists, arsonists and flag-burners’ On 25 August 2020, seventeen-year-old (white) Kyle Rittenhouse shot three antiracist protesters in the US state of Wisconsin, killing two and seriously injuring the third. Equally shocking was the impunity with which the shooting was carried out. 1 Rittenhouse was protected by the police from […]
Photograph of interior of Old Egyptian Fort, destroyed by English Fleet. July 1882, Alexandria, Egypt.

Human species as biopolitical concept

I submit that the current situation created by the Covid-19 pandemic and its biopolitical consequences reveals something new in the ontological status of the human species which also involves an anthropological ‘revolution’. 1 This is something more than the fact that the combined tendencies called ‘globalisation’ (which, regardless of whether we assign them a recent […]

Philosophy and the Communist Party

Dossier: Kojève on Europe and the USSR

It is well-known that the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) – the current ruling party in the USSR – is fighting not only on an economic and political front, but also on a cultural one: it is fighting against bourgeois culture in the name of proletarian culture. 1 This in particular concerns philosophy. In the view […]

Toward an assessment of modernity

Dossier: Kojève on Europe and the USSR

In order to speak about the future one must first recognise the contemporary moment, as it is the contemporary moment that indicates the future. 1 Previous eras were defined by their culture, that is, by an organically stable system of social relations finding within itself its own ideological justification. In our times, however, culture has […]

The problem is proletarianisation, not capitalism: A critique of Bernard Stiegler’s contributive economy

In the wake of the Gilets Jaunes movement, the late Bernard Stiegler proclaimed, in one of his final interviews: ‘what I’m interested in is to put down capitalism, for good. Or to do something else in the meanwhile.’ 1 Stiegler’s anti-capitalist statement signals his debt to Marx, who is frequently invoked in his writings. Indeed, […]
Stone mosaic showing a boot, hammer, pliers and the letters 'E. L.'

Kojève out of Eurasia

Dossier: Kojève on Europe and the USSR

Accusations of Stalinism have long followed the philosopher Alexandre Kojève. In his influential seminars on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, held in Paris in the 1930s, Kojève had claimed that Hegel saw Napoleon as the embodiment of the universal state, as a reflection of the completed circularity of his philosophical system of knowledge at the end […]

Universities after neoliberalism: A tale of four futures

Dossier: Unmaking the university

We’re used to one-way neoliberalism, regardless of party, in which we keep getting more of its familiar features: public budget austerity, marketisation, privatisation, selective cross-subsidies favouring business and technology, precarisation of professional labour, and structural racism. But under the pressure of international social forces, neoliberalism is increasingly breaking down. These forces include the Covid-19-induced public […]
Cartesian graph. X axis labeled Commons / publicly funded; -X axis signifies privatisation; Y signifies Democratic - rhizome-networked storefronts; -Y signifies Platform; post democratic. X/Y; 3. Equalized: -X/Y; 4. Autonomous. X/-Y: 2. Debt-free; -X/-Y: 1. Fragmented.

On the subject of roots: The ancestor as institutional foundation

Dossier: Unmaking the university

In 1983, Toni Morrison’s classic interview-turned-essay ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’ was published in Mari Evans’s anthology Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. 1 In the piece, Morrison concerns herself with the figure of the ancestor in African American literature. For her, the ancestor is a ‘distinctive element of African American writing’, and because […]
Three recycled metal figures

Who will survive the university?

Dossier: Unmaking the university

We write as organisers of #CoronaContract, a campaign we co-founded shortly after the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, demanding a two-year contract extension for all casualised university staff (academic and non-academic). In the early days of COVID-19, when previously unthinkable forms of economic rescue took place, this demand functioned as a ‘transitional demand’ […]
Black and white photo of back of man walking past a ripped handwritten sign which reads, "CHIUSO. Sotto questi condizioni non apriamo..." A photograph of riot police holding battons hangs next to it.

Authoritarian and neoliberal attacks on higher education in Hungary

Dossier: Unmaking the university

In April 2017, a law adopted by the Hungarian authorities, and promptly nicknamed ‘Lex CEU’, made the operation of the Central European University (CEU) impossible. The CEU is an English language graduate university with accreditation both in Hungary and in the USA, which was based in Budapest from 1991. Following a long process of attempted […]
Colourful graphitti wall with messages involving discounts, Free Palestine, doodles. It has a prominent pink shelf in centre that reads CHALK. On it is a green sponge, but no chalk.