Article archive

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 […]

Family values Butler, Lacan and the rise of Antigone Cecilia sjöholm * Judith Butler, Antigoneʼs Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Columbia University Press, New York, 2000. x + 103 pp., £14.50 hb., 0 231 11894 5. One may wonder, with George Steiner, what would have happened if psychoanalysis had chosen Antigone, rather than Oedipus, […]

Uncategorical imperatives Adorno, Badiou and the ethical turn Peter dews ethics have now generated a crossover among these various disciplines that sees and does ethics ʻotherwiseʼ. The decentering of the subject has brought about a recentering of the ethical. But the disparate contents of the volume, from John Guillory on the ethics of reading, via […]

The poor against the poor? Race, class and anti-fascism Nick moss and mark neocleous The British Left has for years bought itself a quiet life by ignoring the link between the resurgence of far-Right groups across Europe and the steady growth in support for the British National Party (BNP) in the UK. Occasionally this attitude […]

In ʻWhat is a Nation?ʼ (1882), Ernest Renan provides an exemplary definition of the nation as an organic community: The nation, like an individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion.… A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in […]

An end can be a goal or a terminus. The end in question here is both, as a matter of logic if not intention or accomplished fact. [1] The historical form I have in mind, in so far as it mediates expressly political claims, is paradoxical, implying the dissolution of politics in its central modern […]

The truism that history is written by (or, rather, on behalf of) conquerors is more respectable now than ever before among Sunday supplement intellectuals. The reason, where it goes beyond a simple resentful wish to damn historical analysis as ʻirrelevantʼ, seems to be that victorsʼ history is easily opposed to that of victims, that ill-defined […]

One of the few terminological constants in Deleuzeʼs philosophical work is the word ʻimmanenceʼ, and it has therefore become a foothold for those wishing to understand exactly what ʻDeleuzean philosophyʼ is. That this ancient and well-travelled notion is held to have been given new life and meaning by a Deleuzean approach is evidenced in much […]

Sexing the state Familial and political form in Irigaray and Hegel Alison stone In her political writings since the mid-1980s, Luce Irigaray has developed a highly original and provocative conception of the good society, according to which every aspect of social life should be so arranged as to promote the expression, cultivation and accentuation of […]

Writing towards the end of his life, the outlook for phenomenology seemed bleak even to Husserl: ʻPhilosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science – the dream is over.ʼ [1] This apparently gloomy assessment was echoed, some three decades later, by Heidegger, who observed, also towards the end of his life, that the […]

Foucaultʼs early approach to the question of bodies and power is perhaps best known in his analysis of the body of the prisoner in Discipline and Punish. [1] Many of us have read and reread this analysis, and tried to understand how power acts upon a body, but also how power comes to craft and […]

Christian Kerslake is perfectly right to characterize Deleuzeʼs project as ʻa philosophy of the absoluteʼ, and in particular as one conceived in more or less direct competition with that of Hegel (ʻThe Vertigo of Philosophyʼ, RP 113). He is wrong, however, to emphasize the fundamentally discontinuous evolution of this philosophy, from an early period supposedly […]

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905, is undoubtedly one of Freudʼs most important texts and, in many respects, the most contemporary. It is a summa in which Freud summarizes and articulates his insights into the meaning of sexuality for human existence in general, and for psychopathology in particular. As can […]

The twenty-first meditation in Alain Badiouʼs LʼEtre et lʼévénement, which is devoted to Pascal, opens with the following quotation from the Pensées: ʻThe history of the Church should properly be called the history of truth.ʼ [1] The pensée in question is numbered 858 by Brunschwicg, and 776 by Lafuma. Although it is not my intention […]

The central tenet of Charles Fourierʼs theory was the promise of universal happiness and social unity through a radical revision of manʼs relationship to labour. Vehemently opposed to both the violence of mass insurrection and the hypocrisies and corruption of burgeoning industrial capitalism, he dreamed of a pacific cultural revolution that would emerge from the […]