Article archive

Whatever happened to martial law? Detainees and the logic of emergency Mark neocleous Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated. Guantánamo guard diary entry, 20 December 2002What is a detainee? The term has been given a […]

The promise of justice Howard caygill Breaking the promise of justice is an act peculiarly repugnant to reason. It implies a double betrayal: not only of the promised justice but also of the justice of the promise. Nevertheless, how is it possible to do justice to the promise of justice? Especially when this very promise […]

Diderot’s egg Divorcing materialism from eliminativism Isabelle stengers I have taken the invitation to speak about materials and materialisms* as an opportunity to re-examine the position I adopted nearly thirty years ago now, when writing La Nouvelle Alliance (translated as Order Out of Chaos) with Ilya Prigogine. [1] In that book, I proposed a definition […]

Going into the mould Materials and process in the architectural specification Katie lloyd thomas To know the true hylomorphic relation it is not enough to go into the workshop and work with the artisan: one must go into the mould itself to follow the operation of form-taking at different levels and scales of physical reality. […]

Clouds of architecture Mark dorrian According to the newspapers, the recent unveiling of Frank Gehryʼs design for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation – to be built in the Jardin dʼAcclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne – left observers struggling for a suitable metaphor. However, as the Guardian reported it, the architect himself seemed in […]

The inorganic open Nanotechnology and physical being Nathan brown But what is an object? Bernard Stiegler, Technics and TimeWhat is the status of the object in contemporary philosophy? How is the question of the object sutured to particular determinations of the concept of ʻlifeʼ – a concept that, according to Giorgio Agamben, ʻmust constitute the […]

materials and materialisms 2 The pig in the bath New materialisms and cultural studies Michelle henning On 24 July 1945 the Austrian logical positivist Otto Neurath, who had been closely involved in the economic and social projects of Red Vienna in the 1920s, visited the borough of Bilston near Wolverhampton, to advise councillors on their […]

The incomplete materialism of French materialist feminism Alison stone According to one important and influential line of feminist interrogation of the category of sex, we only believe that there are two biological sexes because our thought and perception are constrained by the two-gender social system under which we currently live. [1] The French materialist feminists […]

Sexmat, revisited Stella sandford As a genre of intellectual production, ‘feminist theory’ emerged in the 1980s, hot on the heels of the criticisms of the white Eurocentrism and heterosexism of classic second-wave writing. The conjunction of these criticisms and the growing influence of various philosophical and psychoanalytic theoretical elements developed, in one strand of feminist […]

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity Stewart martin Art’s relation to commodification is an unavoidable and entrenched condition for much of the theory, history and practice of art today; so entrenched, in fact, as to have become implicit and assumed for many. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, considerations of this relation have […]

Recent cultural histories have gone to considerable lengths to define an ‘alternative modernity’ for China, going back to the commercial developments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. [1] As delineated via the complex relationship between dominant Western and ‘other’ versions of modernity, its general form has been indicated by, for example, Dorothy Hodgson, […]

Dossier documenta 12 magazines projectDebaclethe magazines – such as consultation about their presentation at the exhibition, and their modes of participation in the accompanying series of talks – Documenta simply broke the agreement. It had nothing to gain from realizing the project, rather than merely staging its idea. Indeed, the Magazines Project team seemed genuinely […]

The sublime whiff of criticality Radical culture research collective Documenta has always had a political agenda. The first Documenta, organized by Arnold Bode in 1955, was intended to signal to the international art world that the dark days of Nazi philistinism were definitively over: Germany’s demonstrative openness to ‘avant-garde’ art could be taken as a […]

Magazines field, or, the next Documenta should be curated by magazines Patricia Canetti with Leandro de Paula Canal Contemporâneo I attended Documenta 12 on two different occasions: in June, for the show’s opening, and in July, in order to participate with Canal Contemporâneo in the Magazines Project’s Lunch Lectures. Each visit was marked by an […]

The big lie Dario Corbeira and irene montero, Brumaria When Brumaria was invited to take part in the Documenta 12 Magazines Project, in February 2006, we were filled with enthusiasm. We drew up an ambitious project, ‘Art: The Radical Political Imagination’, which, based on post-1968 experiences and recent experiments in counter-hegemonic practices, tried to set […]

Commentary Nasrallah’s reasons Hizbullah and the conflict in Lebanon Nicholas noe‘t errorist organizations like Hizbullah … cannot be deterred’, wrote prominent right-winger and former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens in a recent piece for Haaretz. ‘There is only one option here: these organizations must be defeated.’ Unfortunately, Arens’s logic now appears to be the dominant […]

government and body politic are not only unacceptable as a matter of principle, but would entail harsh, targeted sanctions by the USA. Instead, although President Bush recently signed an Orwellian executive order broadly sanctioning anyone who threatens the ‘stability’ of the current pro-Western Lebanese government, administration officials regularly meet with Israelis, such as cabinet minister […]

Marx and the philosophy of time Peter osborne What is Marx’s contribution to the philosophy of time? Or, to put it another way, what has a temporal reading of Marx’s writings to contribute to the understanding of the philosophical aspects of his thought? How, for example, might it reconfigure the relationship between the historical, analytical […]

Fetal culture Ultrasound imaging and the formation of the human Mahmut mutman and ersan ocak If the medicalization of pregnancy is a defining aspect of modernity, it has reached a new stage with the invention of ultrasound imaging of the human fetus in the womb. The use of ultrasound imaging has become a routine aspect […]

The idea of a ‘politics of sympathy’ has its roots in the classical liberalism of the eighteenth century, represented quintessentially by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. A best-seller in its time, Smith’s treatise can be read as preparing the ideological ground for the Wealth of Nations, furnishing the economic logic of capital with the […]

Commentary Fear of heights Bolivia’s constituent process Jon Beasley-murray La Paz is the world’s highest capital city, at 3,636 metres above sea level. So it is all the more surprising that to get there, you have to descend: it is located in what the locals call a hueco, a hole or a hollow. When I […]