Article archive

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 […]

Late Merleau-Ponty, revived Eric matthews * Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 2003. xx + 296 pp., £69.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 8101 1445 3 hb., 0 8101 1446 1 pb.; Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of […]

In what sense would a certain concept of the urban meet, as Henri Lefebvre asserted some thirty-five years ago, a ʻtheoretical needʼ? What forms of crosscultural and cross-disciplinary ʻgeneralityʼ would be at stake here? And if this is indeed, as Lefebvre always insisted, a question of a necessary ʻelaboration, a search, a conceptual formulationʼ, what […]

Recognized as a pressing issue for world heritage, Veniceʼs environmental problems are familiar to its visitors. In 1999, Oliviero Toscani – a figure famous for initiating Benettonʼs controversial advertising strategy – was commissioned by the cityʼs mayor to produce a poster campaign intended to discourage a certain kind of tourism. It was argued that the […]

Leslie Grantham: Thatʼs what the eighties are all about: nostalgia. Anita Dobson: Well… how could it be anything else?80s Mania (ITV, 12 June 2004)Most of the things one imagines in hell are there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. George OrwellOurs is a retrospective culture, in which the […]

Louis Althusser began Reading Capital with the statement, ʻWe have all certainly read and are all reading [Marxʼs] Capital.ʼ While Althusser is undoubtedly addressing here his seminar, the focus of which was precisely Marxʼs Capital, the sentence that follows elevates the act of reading this particular text to the status of the universal: the entire […]

Nihilism and faith Rose, Bernstein and the future of Critical Theory Tony gorman In a succession of books the late Gillian Rose and Jay Bernstein have sought to defend and elaborate upon the Adornian inheritance both within Critical Theory, contra Habermas, [1] and beyond Critical Theory, contra post-structuralist and postmodernist thought. [2] In these works, […]

The concept of money Christopher J. Arthur In the history of philosophy the greatest minds have been aware that the existence and power of money pose a problem. One need only mention Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Simmel. Of course, if one accepts, as I do, that Capital is a work of philosophy as much as […]

Commentary The awfulness of the actual Counter-consumerism in a new age of war Kate soper It is more than four years since the September 11th attack; there is turmoil, daily death and anguish in Iraq, and no sign of a resolution to the ramifying problems created by the invasion and the subsequent ignominious actions of […]

In the last few years, two separate debates on academic freedom have emerged in the United States, and both of them have Israel/Palestine at their centre. The first has to do with arguments against the academic boycott of Israeli institutions on grounds of academic freedom, and the second has to do with the new Academic […]

Thus much of this, will make black white; foul, fair…This line from Shakespeare figures in a longer quotation in Marxʼs Capital, in the chapter on hoarding. The sentence to which the footnote with the Shakespeare quotation is attached, reads: ʻJust as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too, for its part, […]

Orientalisms in the interpretation of Islamic philosophy Muhammad ali khalidi The recent death of Edward Said has reignited the debate as to whether his landmark work Orientalism still has something to teach us about the study of Arab-Islamic civilization. In this article, I will argue that Saidʼs central thesis in Orientalism has a direct explanatory […]

This article is based around several interviews I conducted with both Israeli military personnel and Palestinian activists following the 2002 Israeli incursion into Palestinian areas as part of operation ʻDefensive Shieldʼ. [1] Using these interviews I will try, in what follows, to reflect upon an emergent relationship between armed conflicts and the built environment. Contemporary […]