Article archive

Dossier Art and immaterial labour ‘Art and immaterial labour’… the conjunction is at once innocent and presumptuous. As Adorno suggested, if the general problem with using the word ‘and’ in titles is that it ‘permits everything to be connected with everything else and is thus incapable of hitting the mark’, in some instances it nonetheless […]

Metamorphoses Antonio Negri To begin with, let us try, from a materialist standpoint, to situate historically the concept of plastic and figurative art – in other words, the definition of its historically determinate link, if there is one, to the development and structure of modes of production. Can this be done? Obviously, once we’re obliged to […]

Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of security Maurizio Lazzarato According to Michel Foucault, for some time we have been leaving disciplinary societies in order to enter into societies of security that, unlike the former, ‘tolerate a whole host of behaviours that are different, varied, or even deviant and antagonistic toward one another’. […]

The materiality of the immaterial Foucault, against the return of idealisms and new vitalisms Judith Revel For some years, philosophical thinking has seemed to revolve around themes and terms whose centrality merits consideration – so much more so, probably, in that this debate has been formulated from positions and questions that are moreover very heterogeneous. I […]

(T)error and poetry Franco Berardi1. The century of the future Ninety-nine years ago Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the first Manifesto of Futurism; the same year, Henry Ford opened his first automobile factory in Detroit. It was the beginning of the century that believed in the future. The Manifesto asserted the aesthetic value of the machine – that is, the ‘external machine’, […]

‘The rush to the intimate’ Counterinsurgency and the cultural turn Derek gregory In the years following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the New Yorker published a series of critical reports by its investigative journalists, notably Seymour Hersh and Jane Meyer, on the conduct of the ‘war on terror’ and the invasion and occupation […]

‘All human beings are pregnant’ The bisexual imaginary in Plato’s Symposium Stella sandford ‘All human beings, Socrates, are pregnant both in body and in soul, and when we come to be of the right age, we naturally desire to give birth.’ Symposium, 206c1–2In recent years the question of the status of sex – that is, […]

Aporias of free trade The nature of biodiversity Diana reese and lecia rosenthal Primitive accumulation is not produced just once at the dawn of capitalism, but is continually reproducing itself. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus1In a climate rife with threats of species extinction, we propose a genealogy of the discourse of the late twentieth century in […]

Orientalism in reverse Gilbert achcar The years 1978–79 constitute a watershed in Oriental and Islamic Studies, for they witnessed three outstanding events. I am referring here to events that occurred on two utterly different and therefore incomparable levels, but all three have powerfully impacted the academic field nonetheless. The first two events took place on […]

Counterterrorism legislation and the US state form Authoritarian statism, phase 3 Christos boukalas The counterterrorism legislation introduced in the USA after 11 September 2001 (hereafter S11) has been mainly conceptualized – by both critics and supporters – as an ‘internal’ legal development. Seen as an ‘encroachment on liberty’, as part of a ‘state of emergency’, […]

Entsetzen Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part One Irving wohlfarth * The present essay, to be published in three instalments, is a slightly revised version of one that appeared in the first of two col ective volumes (Der RAF und der linke Terrorismus, Hamburg, 2006) edited by Wolfgang Kraushaar under the auspices of […]

Flux and flurry Stillness and hypermovement in animated worlds Esther leslie Animation, as any Wikipedia reader knows, is ‘the optical illusion of movement’, whether achieved through photographing drawings, moving clay models and recording the tweaks frame by frame, drawing directly on film or devising models digitally. But the definition is a weak one, or only […]

Non-traduttore, traditore? Notes on postwar European Marxisms in translation Gregory elliott Certainly in the English-speaking world, probably elsewhere, we lack the most rudimentary map of European Marxism since the 1970s. Over the last two decades, there has been nothing comparable to several titles which, whatever their other differences, featured roughly the same dramatis personae – […]

Introduction to Rozitchner León Rozitchner is one of the generation of Argentine intellectuals who emerged in the 1950s around the journal Contorno. As a psychoanalyst and Marxist – and massively influenced, as were all his confrères, by Sartre and the phenomenological tradition – he undertook a lengthy theoretical project that attempted to engage psychoanalytical categories […]

Critique of Violence: the deposing of the law Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2 Irving wohlfarth Things fal apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’The ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921, hereafter abbreviated to ‘Critique’) is the only published statement of Benjamin’s on politics and […]

One of the forms in which the waves of protests against the ‘new world order’ in the 1990s and, particularly, the varied political and social movements of the new millennium have been registered in political philosophy has been in a renewed interest in the nature of ‘the political’ and its relationship with ‘politics’. Even and […]

‘Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête.’ David Rieff, perhaps the best-known American writer on humanitarianism and human rights, chose Pascal’s aphorism as the epigraph to his latest collection of essays. This cynical take on good intentions can arguably stand for the prevailing view of action in the name of humanity, or at least the […]

Spectres of anarchy Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part Three Irving wohlfarth There is an excel ent passage in Nadja on the ‘enchanting days spent looting Paris under the sign of Sacco and Vanzet i’ and Breton adds the assurance that in those days the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvel e [Boulevard of Good Tidings] fulfil […]

Can’t reason with the pusherman. Finance is all that he understands. Curtis Mayfield, ‘Little Child Runnin’ Wild’ David Simon and Edward Burns’s TV series The Wire (HBO, 2002–08) opens with a killing and builds from there, over five seasons and sixty hours of television. What it narrates is the present life of a neoliberalized postindustrial […]

and fleeting; the city as empty spaces, panic, insecurity, screams and rags, infrastructural parasitism, and so on. The postmodern, a fundamental category in regard to Koolhaas, which he had already inaugurated in his retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New York, is here defined as an irreversible category and as a way of seeing the present. […]

The will of the people Notes towards a dialectical voluntarism Peter hallward By ‘will of the people’ I mean a deliberate, emancipatory and inclusive process of collective selfdetermination. Like any kind of will, its exercise is voluntary and autonomous, a matter of practical freedom; like any form of collective action, it involves assembly and organization. […]