Article archive

What’s material about materialist feminism? A Marxist Feminist critique Martha E. Gimenez In the heady days of the Womenʼs Liberation Movement, it was possible to identify four main currents within feminist thought: Liberal (concerned with attaining economic and political equality within the context of capitalism); Radical (focused on men and patriarchy as the main causes […]

What, then, should the new relationship between society and individual consist of? First, it involves a new concept of citizenship, in which rights and responsibilities go together.… As is so clear the more you examine the rise in crime and social disorder in Britain, the problem has been that the Left has tended to undervalue […]

Nous sommes tous néokantiens.Michel Foucault1In the 1980s and early 1990s, when poststructuralism set the agenda in cultural theory and shaped the way in which theorists from other traditions were received, the work of the Bakhtin Circle was often seen as anticipating contemporary concerns to a quite uncanny extent. While some adopted Bakhtin as a poststructuralist […]

All of those working in the broad field of environmental studies (and I here include, among others, philosophers, geographers, political ecologists, sociologists, cultural historians and critics) are likely to agree on two points: first that the term ʻnatureʼ, which has been so central to their various debates, has lost its all-purpose conceptual status, and can […]

In his otherwise sympathetic survey of Badiouʼs ethics in RP 100,1 Simon Critchley advances three significant arguments against Badiouʼs rather unusual position. They are likely to be fairly typical of the sort of objections we should expect from those committed, after Levinas and Derrida, to an ethics oriented around the category of the other. All […]

Philosophy is popular in Britain at the moment, if the media be the measure; albeit mainly in the guise of a ʻguide to happinessʼ – a television guide and a happiness of a rather minimal sort. [1] Radicalism is not so popular, Ken Livingstoneʼs victory in the London mayoral contest notwithstanding (although we may be […]

ʻWell, Iʼll think about women thenʼ, Juliet Mitchell proposed in 1963, suggesting a topic to research as she sat, the lone woman, on the editorial board of New Left Review – alongside her husband, Perry Anderson, the freshly minted editor of the journal. The inevitable response greeted Mitchellʼs startling proposal in such circles at that […]

Across the last two or three decades identity and desire have been ʻtheorizedʼ relentlessly. Influences have been diverse: I remember especially the impact, for gay writing, of Barthesʼ dream, or plea, in 1975, for a radical sexual diversity wherein there would no longer be homosexuality (singular) but homosexualities, a plural so radical it ʻwill baffle […]

But if this position rightly demolishes the opposition between art and technological mediation enshrined in late modernist theory1 it nevertheless suffers from its own kind of blindness: the identification of technological mediation with the democratization of form. By subsuming art under technology, this kind of thinking renders the connection between form and ethics harmless or […]

With the publication of Empire,* the oeuvre of the Italian political philosopher and critic Antonio Negri – until recently an intellectual presence confined to the margins of Anglo-American libertarian Marxist thought – has been transported into what is fast becoming an established and influential domain of transnational cultural theory and criticism. Michael Hardtʼs mediating role, […]

Levinas’s political judgement The Esprit articles 1934–1983 Howard caygill Lebanon, Levinas revealed a capacity for political judgement that at first glance seems remote from the prevailing picture of Levinasian ethics. While refusing the synthesis of realpolitik and mysticism that to some extent characterized the Likud era in Israeli politics, Levinas was nevertheless forthright in making […]

Actually existing postcolonialism Bill schwarz From the start, there has always been an ambiguity in the academic literature on the postcolonial. Does the term ʻpostcolonialʼ refer to a historical process that has already occurred, such that we are currently living in a historical epoch ʻafter colonialismʼ? Or does the idea of the postcolonial refer not […]

, > ` ˆ V >  Ê * … ˆ  œ à œ « … Þ Ê £ ä { Ê ­ œ Û i “ L i À É i V i “ L i À Ê Ó ä ä ä ®ʻ‘But clearly something of socialism and modernism has died, in both […]

Whilst the distinction between French and AngloAmerican feminism was always rather dubious (failing to be accurate, consistent or inclusive at the level of either national origin, language of choice or theoretical commitment; seeming to parcel feminist theory – or at least the feminist theory that mattered – out into two Western blocks from which the […]

Augusto Pinochetʼs defenders are not entirely wrong. They realized what was at stake in the judicial battle over the ex-dictatorʼs extradition to Spain, and as such they have been often less distracted than his accusers. At stake was not so much the guilt or innocence of one individual as, rather, the very constitution of Chilean […]

The work of Gillian Rose (1947–1995) displays a prodigious range equal to that of any British intellectual of her generation. Her output consists of eight books produced over a seventeen-year period between 1978 and her early death in 1995. The authorship falls into two distinct periods: a first phase, from 1978 to 1984, which includes […]

…we read [in Herderʼs text]: ʻIt would be an easy principle, but an evil one, to maintain in the philosophy of human history than man is an animal who needs a master, and who expects from this master, or from his association with him, the happiness of his ultimate destiny.ʼ … [We read further that] […]

Although texts dating from antiquity, particularly those of Aristotle, see the issue of sexual difference as one of a set of themes relating to sovereignty – domination of the other or self-control – it is generally recognized today that these domains are relatively separate. Questions concerning the differences between men and women have been left, […]

It is no doubt pointless to try to give a definition of the ‘world’ other than one that is tautological in form, like the one Heidegger attempted with the celebrated formula, Die Welt weltet, ‘the world worlds’, the world is nothing other than its own becoming-world. However, as soon as there is a question of […]

The broad rediscovery of space in social, cultural and political discourse in the last three decades owes to many sources, but in terms of intellectual inspirations the work of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre has had an extraordinary effect, the depth and breadth of which we are only now beginning to appreciate. Lefebvre, steeped in […]

To speak is to do something – something other than to express what one thinks, to translate what one knows, and something other than to play with the structure of language. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of KnowledgeFor a critical history of philosophy, the relationship between philosophy and politics has been foreclosed by a strategy apparent […]