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, > ` 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 […]

The Ethics of Ambiguity is well known as de Beauvoirʼs attempt to formulate an existentialist ethics; that is to say, an ethics premissed on the account of the lack at the heart of any human existence (ʻthe being whose being is not to beʼ) given by Sartre in Being and Nothingness. [1] The ʻambiguityʼ of […]

There is a void at the heart of capitalism. It arises because of the nature of commodity exchange, which abstracts from, or absents, the entire substance of use value. What is constituted therewith is a form of unity of commodities that does not rest on any pre-given common content – which does not exist, it […]

It’s the political economy, stupid! On `´Zi`´zek’s Marxism Sean homer I have a very traditional Marxist belief that the new liberal-democratic order cannot go on indefinitely, that there will be a moment of explosion, probably caused by some kind of ecological crisis or whatever – and that we must prepare ourselves for that moment. [1] […]

Merleau-Pontyʼs fertile and provocative approach to philosophy was abruptly terminated by his death in 1961. Paul Ricoeurʼs judgement that he was the greatest of the French phenomenologists1 has frequently been cited since then, yet a second demise occurred during the 1960s: this time at the hands of phenomenologyʼs structuralist and poststructuralist critics. Although their targets […]

Whatever happened to the idea of the body politic? For those interested in social and political thought this is a pertinent question, since these fields have in recent years become saturated with discussions of the body. The loss of confidence in previously established categories has provoked a widespread return to the body as the basis […]

A central preoccupation of German aesthetic theorists over the last thirty years has been with the social and political truth-potential of works of art. Drawing on the distinctively Idealist and post-Idealist tradition of German philosophy since Hegel and the early romantics up to Heidegger, Gadamer and Adorno, several theorists have argued that works of art […]

Niklas Luhmann, who died in 1998 (see Obituary in RP 94), is not widely discussed by social and cultural theorists outside Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Scandinavia and Italy. Yet in Germany his influence rivals and even exceeds that of Habermas in certain reaches of social theory, extending also to philosophers and logicians. More surprisingly, perhaps, he […]

The emergency that was and is the AIDS epidemic produced a radical, almost geological reconstruction of the terrain of (homo)sexual politics, a reconstruction that we are only hesitantly coming to terms with. The social trajectory described by the emergent sexual communities in the West, from dubious toleration to the threat of imminent annihilation, was already […]

The resurgence of interest in Sartre in the last year or so has come as a welcome development in todayʼs neoliberal and supposedly post-ideological political and intellectual climate. Sartreʼs trajectory, developing as it does from the existentialist quasi-idealism of Being and Nothingness to the Hegelian and Marxian derived preoccupations of Critique of Dialectical Reason and […]

In search of community Mouffe, Wittgenstein and Cavell Alessandra tanesini Recent discussions of political community are, so I argue in this article, haunted by the spectre of scepticism about other minds. I do not intend to suggest that these discussions address directly the philosophical version of the sceptical problem. Rather, I believe they find their […]

Micropolitics Leo Bersani and conflicts in contemporary feminism Rafeeq hasan …as if the molecular were in the realm of the imagination and applied only to the individual. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ʻMicropolitics and Segmentarityʼ [1] There is something taking shape in Western feminist theory, something so drastic – and, to speak from an intellectualist […]

In 1784 Kant published an essay for a journal that represented the public face of an Enlightenment secret society of senior officials in the administration of Frederick II. In the forty-fourth year of Frederickʼs reign it was necessary to plan for the succession and to ensure as far as possible the irreversibility of the achievements […]