Article archive

The institutionalization and codification of Cultural Studies continue apace. This is evident, for example, in the recurring debates and anxieties about disciplinary boundaries, artistic and ethical values, and the de-radicalization of Cultural Studies itself. Meanwhile, an apparently endless stream of publications – readers, textbooks and collections of (more or less) concrete analyses – feeds the […]

ʻWe do not publish our own drafts, that is, our own mistakes, but we do sometimes publish other peopleʼs.ʼLouis Althusser, 1963ʻWhat use is Althusser?ʼ The question rhetorically posed on the Left Bank in 1968, as structures took to the streets, invites reactions other than the blunt rien of (some of) those who recently marked the […]

Time and the working mother Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’ revisited Carol watts why it should be women, and indeed certain women, who come to the fore in a part-time, low-wage economy, and why their acceptance of ʻflexibleʼ working conditions makes them a model for the future. The possibility thus arises for a renewal of a feminist […]

It was a matter of analyzing … the problemizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily thought – and the practices on the basis of which these problemizations are formed. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure1Michel Foucault is well known for having periodically redescribed his previous studies in light of his current project. [2] […]

Left Rawlsianism and social philosophy A response to ‘Philosophy in Germany’ Alessandro ferrara Reading ʻPhilosophy in Germanyʼ, the exchange between Simon Critchley and Axel Honneth in Radical Philosophy 89, I found myself perplexed by a basic assumption the participants appear to share: namely, that so-called ʻLeft Rawlsianismʼ and ʻsocial philosophyʼ are alternative paths for the […]

In his defence of Richard Rorty against various ʻsalt-of-the-earth socialist internationalistsʼ such as Norman Geras, Roy Bhaskar and Terry Eagleton (ʻRortyʼs Nationʼ, Radical Philosophy 87) Jonathan Rée confesses himself puzzled by Rorty on one point. He ʻcannot quite understandʼ Rortyʼs ʻaffectionʼ for the bureaucratic collectivist utopia of the nineteenthcentury American socialist and novelist Edward Bellamy. […]

This article is intended to raise a number of connected issues. It concludes by suggesting that certain theories of self-organization, in particular the theory of autopoiesis developed by Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and, latterly, Fritjof Capra, might help us to reassess how we view the relationship between discipline, subjectivity and freedom. However, the first half […]

Nazis as an event that had spelled out ʻwith unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our timeʼ. [4] And yet, as early as 1951, Arendt had explicitly stated what was at stake in her work, notably in the preface to the 1951 English edition, which was entitled The Burden of Our Time. That title is, […]

I wasnʼt clear enough in my book, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric, if Lorraine Code thinks that it meant to include pragmatist philosophy in the ʻunrelievedly masculine and androcentered traditionʼ that feminists need radically to criticize. [1] Quite the contrary! Not only is William Jamesʼs and John Deweyʼs pragmatist critique of the tradition […]

Recognition and resistance Axel Honneth’s critical social theory Roger foster beginning. Yet, as we shall see, the shortcomings of his own project are also largely due to a continued adherence to the critical framework opened by the ʻKantian turnʼ, of which Habermas remains the chief expositor. Culture and criticism In an early essay, entitled ʻCommunication […]

Now I say that mind and anima are held in union with the other, and form of themselves a single nature, but that the head, as it were, and lord in the whole body is the reason which we call mind or understanding, and it is firmly seated in the middle region of the breast. […]

Fanon, phenomenology, race David macey ʻThe black man is not. Nor the white.ʼ [1] Thus Fanon in the concluding section of Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), in my translation. It is quite impossible to work with the existing versions, the most obvious index of that impossibility being the unfortunate decision to translate the title of […]

When one realizes the indeterminacy of racial categories, their fluid borders and cultural variety, it is often tempting to adopt a nominalism about race: that race is no more real than phlogiston or witchcraft. In this essay, I resist this conclusion primarily on phenomenological grounds. Race is real, certainly more real than phlogiston, though like […]

Political theory and the multicultural society Bhikhu parekh Cultural diversity in modern societies takes many forms, of which three are most common. First, although members of society share a broadly common culture, they also entertain different beliefs and practices concerning certain significant areas of human life. This is the case with gays and lesbians, youth […]

It has been long forgotten, since Japanʼs defeat and the loss of its empire, that during the Asia–Pacific war (1931–45) a large number of scholars, journalists and bureaucrats were eagerly engaged in academic and public discussions of racism and colonialism. In contrast to the overall poverty of the critique of racism and ethnic nationalism in […]

In the decade following the publication of The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir had been both devastated by political events – her experience of the Algerian war, McCarthyism and racism in America – and profoundly affected by her intense involvement with Claude Lanzmann. Curiously though, in 1963, de Beauvoir described the fact that she […]

Many people are so struck by the distinctive enormity of what the Nazis, their supporters and their collaborators did to the Jews that they describe the Holocaust as unique: the systematic attempt to eradicate Jewry and its culture, there, then, was not just qualitatively different from other genocides but is also the limiting case of […]

From Plato until today, there is one word which can sum up the concern of the philosopher with respect to politics. This word is ʻjusticeʼ. The philosopherʼs question to politics is the following: can there be a just political orientation? An orientation which does justice to thought? What we have to begin with is this: […]