Article archive

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 […]

Since the collapse of actually existing socialism and the abrupt ending of the Cold War that had polarized the world along the lines of contending theories of modernization, there has been a steady attempt to recover historical intensities that had been displaced by the reduction of political differences to a dyadic struggle between ʻtotalitarianismʼ and […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

What future for utopia? Or, rather, what future for the utopian after the critique of utopia? What future for possibility after the critique of its depiction as actual?* Utopias have a notoriously contradictory structure: they evoke possibilities by depicting them as actual, yet thereby, in themselves partaking of the actual – as depictions – they […]

Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, Alain de Libera Introduction by Peter Osborne.

Mirrors without images Mimesis and recognition in Lacan and Adorno Vladimir safatle Mène-moi vers la vieAu-delà de la grille basseQui me sépare de moi même Qui divise tout sauf mes cendresSauf la terreur que jʼai de moi.Paul ÉluardIn the history of the relations between philosophy and psychoanalysis, there have been two major developments: one in […]

Introduction Gegenstand/Objekt Dominique Pradelle Object Olivier Boulnois Res Jean-François Courtine

Europe, thatʼs the Bible and the Greeks. It has come closer to the Bible and to its true fate. Everything else in the world must be included in this. I donʼt have any nostalgia for the exotic. For me Europe is central. Emmanuel Levinas, 1986 [1] Those who have sought resources in Levinas for a […]

[We] do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of oneʼs gender and hence […]

Inside out Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Papers Daniel W. Smith Félix Guattari met Gilles Deleuze in Paris shortly after the events of May 1968, through a mutual friend. Over the next twenty-five years, he would co-author five books with Deleuze, including, most famously, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia – AntiOedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus […]

An immanent transcendental Foucault, Kant and critical philosophy keith robinson Every philosophy conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilThe relation of Foucaultʼs work to philosophy remains an unsettled issue. Indeed, Foucault sometimes preferred to present himself as ʻthe masked philosopherʼ. Much like […]

In his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, Adorno maintained that ʻthe form in which metaphysics impinges on us urgently todayʼ is ʻthe question whether it is still possible to liveʼ. [1] Such a question is speculative, since the possibility of life is taken to have migrated to the margins of human experience. For Adorno, life in […]

Dossier documenta 12 magazines project What is to be done? (education)This dossier is Radical Philosophyʼs contribution to the documenta 12 magazines project. Documenta is an international exhibition of modern and contemporary art that has been held in Kassel, Germany, since 1955 and currently takes place once every five years. For many years now, it has […]