Life is mine: Feminism, self-determination and basic income

In this intervention I investigate the relationships between feminist practices, basic income and the notion of ‘self-determination income’, focusing on the Italian feminist movement Non Una di Meno. The piece contends that self-determination income might foster a society of care and help to address the social and economic transformations occurring over the past three decades, […]

Of what is Bolsonaro the name?

Dossier: Grammars of Bolsonarismo

[O]ne might refer to the fascist movements as the wounds, the scars, of a democracy that, to this day, has not lived up to its own concept. Theodor Adorno What’s in a name? First things first: to speak of ‘Bolsonarismo’ is not the same as speaking of Bolsonaro voters. Evidently, whatever we can call ‘Bolsonarismo’ […]

Neoliberal antiracism and the British university

Dossier: Decolonising the University

While debates over race and higher education in the UK have long focused on questions of access, in recent years a host of campaigns have drawn attention to the alienation of students and staff of colour who succeed in entering white-dominated institutions. Their claims, often articulated on social media with the pithiness that hashtags require, […]

Bodies in space: On the ends of vulnerability

Weaker now, we mistakenly identify ourselves as our bodies. Ilona Sagar, ‘Correspondence O’, digital video, 2017 I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854 The last […]

Pandemic suspension

The Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 was the most devastating natural disaster of the eighteenth century, and probably the first disaster on such a scale in modernity. It was an event that profoundly disturbed many Enlightenment philosophers. 1 Kant wrote three scientific studies that attempted to explain it from the standpoint of natural history, and […]

Beware: Medical Police

Cops forcibly removing someone from a bus for not wearing a face mask, arresting people for failure to socially distance on a crowded subway platform, moving people on if they look like they are socialising in excessive numbers, determining who can attend a public event. This is the new reality of policing the virus. The […]

Critique without ontology: Genealogy, collective subjects and the deadlocks of evidence

In the past few years, the number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea has dramatically increased due to the strengthening of border controls and a deliberate politics of migration containment put into place by the EU in cooperation with third countries. In 2018, according to UN Refugee Agency [UNHCR] estimations, an average of six […]

Masses, class and the power of suggestion

1. I will attempt here to reflect on three major themes, ‘masses, class, suggestion’, with the hope that, by doing so, I will also indirectly bring to light the relevance of Gabriel Tarde’s thought today. One may wonder why my title does not include – perhaps in place of the term ‘class’, which is not […]

Hegel’s natural assumption: The first sentence of the Phenomenology of Spirit

The ‘Introduction’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit has enjoyed a long and rich critical reception in the history of Hegel scholarship. 1 Distinguished from the famous ‘Preface’ in that it introduces the particular ambitions of the Phenomenology as opposed to Hegel’s philosophical enterprise as a whole, the opening section of the 1807 work has been […]

The philosophical disability of reason: Evald Ilyenkov’s critique of machinic intelligence

Present theories of computation and artificial intelligence often claim that philosophy should either discard its principal modes of gnoseology (that is, its theories of knowledge and cognition) and anthropomorphic genesis, or declare philosophical speculation obsolete altogether, since it fails to provide any precise knowledge regarding the most significant contemporary scientific and technological concerns. If post-structuralism […]

Chilean revolts and the crisis of neoliberal governance

On Friday 18 October 2019, a long series of mass demonstrations began in Chile against the right-wing government led by president Sebastián Piñera. 1 Despite brutal and continuous police repression, these demonstrations persisted, day after day, with remarkable stamina and inventiveness, right through to 13 March 2020, when the risks posed by Covid-19 led Piñera […]

From one Arab Spring to another

The crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism has been unfolding spectacularly under our eyes in recent months, provoking ever greater social upheavals in an ever greater number of places. 1 Events in the Arab region fit into this general global crisis, to be sure, but there is also something specific about the region. There, […]

The revival of Hegelian Marxism: On Martin Hägglund’s This Life

When a notable philosopher, having established a reputation for rigorous argumentation and scholarship, directs a major new book toward a popular audience, a certain skepticism may be forgiven among those familiar with the earlier work. However welcome an accessible style may be, popular address too often gives way to the popularisation of philosophical concepts and […]

The inorganic body in the early Marx: A limit-concept of anthropocentrism

The effort to revive and recover critical theory and its intellectual precedents has become more difficult at a time in which ‘critique’ is regularly denounced as negative, skeptical and anthropocentric. Bruno Latour, for instance, imagines that when we speak about what is ‘critical’, we have in mind a fully negative project, a practice of debunking […]

The racial regime of aesthetics: On David Lloyd’s Under Representation

One of the persistent difficulties of attending to race in the history of philosophy is the equivocal nature of this object. Long ignored by philosophers, ‘race’ has no clear status or obvious place in the history of philosophy, cutting across different areas of philosophical inquiry. Although in recent years historians of philosophy have been increasingly […]