Article archive

Notes on nuance Rethinking a philosophy of modern music David cunningham this encounter can often seem to fit all too easily into a standard model of ʻOrientalistʼ practice – though this is hardly the whole story – such a model should not in itself be taken as an excuse for prejudging the role that a […]

Music and philosophy follow the same principle of working, that of construction and deconstruction. They are both systems for arriving at a poetical structure. Massimo Cacciari1Luigi Nono (1924–1990) occupies a key place in the development of contemporary music. Conventional accounts identify him as the composer who in the 1950s most coherently confronted the implications of […]

Ruptured formalism The challenge of bioethics and the limits of moral formalism Konstantinos kavoulakos When one of the most famous living philosophers takes a stand on certain moral dilemmas that arise from the current boom in developments in the biosciences, it is natural that it should provoke great interest – all the more so as […]

The sublime from Lyotard to Schiller Two readings of Kant and their political significance Jacques rancière I will here offer a few reflections on a paradoxical object that Jean-François Lyotard puts at the centre of aesthetic theory: the aesthetic of the sublime. Two closely interconnected questions will be raised: What makes this theoretical construction possible? […]

What is feminist phenomenology? Thinking birth philosophically Johanna oksala In one curious and exceptional fragment from 1933 Husserl discusses sexuality phenomenologically. Even if his taciturnity and his heterosexual prejudices concerning sexuality hardly make him a very original thinker on the topic, this fragment is interesting in relation to the question of the phenomenological importance of […]

Surplus consciousness Houellebecq’s novels of ideas Martin ryle Michel Houellebecqʼs fiction is said to be selling better outside France than that of any French novelist since Camus. Atomised (1999) and Platform (2001), his two more recent novels, appeared in English within a year of their publication. [1] The comparison some reviews have drawn with Camus […]

Demanding Deleuze Keith ansell pearson The Shortest Shadow and The Puppet and the Dwarf are the first two books in a new series edited by Slavoj Žižek entitled ʻShort Circuitsʼ.* In his seriesʼ foreword Žižek proposes that the shock of short-circuiting provides one of the best metaphors for a critical reading. His proposal is that […]

Agonized liberalism The liberal theory of William E. Connolly Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo ʻDemocracyʼ in the discourse of the ʻFree Westʼ does not carry the same meaning as it does when we speak of ʻpopular-democraticʼ struggle or of deepening the democratic content of political life. We cannot allow the term to be wholly expropriated.… Instead, we […]

The reproach of abstraction Peter osborne This is a paper about abstraction, in particular, but by no means exclusively – and this ʻby no means exclusivelyʼ is a large part of its point – philosophical abstraction.* It is concerned at the outset with what might be called the reproach of abstraction: the commonly held view, […]

One of the rarely noticed historical ironies of the twentieth century was the effort of societies located on the capitalist periphery – outside of Euro-America – to resort to a philosophy which had no place for them in order to explain their entry into and experience of capitalist modernization. Japan led the way in this […]

‘The madness of Islam’ Foucault’s Occident and the Revolution in Iran Ian almond Indeed, if a philosophy of the future exists, it will have to be born outside Europe, or as a consequence of the encounters and frictions between Europe and non-Europe. Michel Foucault in interview, 19781In looking through the half-dozen articles Foucault published on […]

Let the dead bury their dead Marxism and the politics of redemption Mark neocleous Early in the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx makes the following comment: the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition […]

Playing the code Allegories of control in Civilization Alexander R. Galloway With the progressive arrival of new media over the last century or so there appears a sort of lag time, call it the ʻthirty-year ruleʼ, starting from the invention of a medium and ending at its ascent to proper and widespread functioning in culture […]

The cyborg mother Jaimie Smith-Windsor31 January 2003. The birth of my daughter, Aleah Quinn Smith-Windsor. A few days after Quinn was born this quotation appeared, written beside her incubator: ʻEvery blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers: grow, grow.ʼ It was a near-fatal birth. Quinn was born at 24½ weeksʼ […]

In the preface to the English edition of Cinema 2, Deleuze claims that cinema is a repetition, in speededup form, of an experience that has already occurred in the history of philosophy. [1] This notion of repetition recalls the biological notion of the ‘recapitulation’ of phylogeny in ontogeny: individual development recapitulates, or replays in speeded-up […]

Democratic materialism and the materialist dialectic Alain badiou Franceʼs agony was not born of the flagging reasons to believe in her: defeat, demography, industry, etc., but of the incapacity to believe in anything at all. André MalrauxWhat do we all think, today?* What do I myself think when I donʼt monitor myself? Or, rather, what […]

The last two decades have seen a revival of interest in the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), in large part because of its role in the writings of Gilles Deleuze. However, it has been a noteworthy characteristic of the new Bergsonism (or Deleuze-Bergsonism) that it has proceeded more or less as if earlier criticisms of […]

‘Joining tracks with the world’ The impossibility of politics in China Rebecca E. Karl Shortly before the October Revolution, Lenin challenged his comrades: ʻI donʼt know how radical you are or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.ʼ [1] […]

Refiguring the multitude From exodus to the production of norms Timothy rayner The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in antithetical values. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §2Hardt and Negri describe Multitude (2004) as a ʻsequelʼ to Empire (2000). But for many this book will seem a strange successor. Empire, for all […]

Philosophy’s malaise Philosophy and its history Pierre macherey For as long as philosophy has existed it has been intimately concerned with and profoundly perturbed by its history – a history from which it would very much like to unburden itself, without really knowing how. * In order to specify the character of this discomfiture we […]

W.G. Sebald and the modern art of memory Stewart martin been repressed within cultural consciousness, but with what has been repressed by the dominant scenes and institutions of memory, with what the memory of the repressed itself represses. This is controversial but also timely, as the recent commemorations of the bombing of Dresden indicate. It […]