Article archive

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. […]

After life De anima and unhuman politics Eugene thacker Since the 1960s, the NASA programme has supported research into the exploration of life on other planets. Currently, their astrobiology programme involves multiple institutions and research programmes, including the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Its mission statement defines astrobiology as ‘the study of the origins, evolution, distribution, and […]

The jargon of finitude Or, materialism today Bruno bosteels To ask about materialism today means to ask about the time of materialism. This can be taken in at least two different senses. First, we can take the expression to imply a rephrasing of the larger question ‘What is materialism?’ as ‘When is materialism?’ and ask: […]

Notes on the photographic image Jacques rancière In the relation between art and image, photography has played a symptomatic and often paradoxical role. Baudelaire made of it the sinister instrument of the triumph of technical reproduction over artistic imagination. And yet we also know of the long struggle of photographers (pictorialistes) to affirm that photography […]

Dossier Undoing the aesthetic image The displacement of critical energies from politics into aesthetics has a history as long as that of aesthetics itself. Indeed, a case can be made that in its immediately post-Kantian formation ‘aesthetics’ simply is the name for the displacement of political desire into a philosophical discourse about the structure of […]

People exposed, people as extras Georges Didi-Huberman The title of the first film shown in history is La Sortie des usines Lumière – in English, ‘Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory’. On 22 March 1895, in the rue de Rennes in Paris, in front of about two hundred spectators, Auguste and Louis Lumière showed for the […]

Body without image Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan Éric alliez [T]he great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. Herman Melvil e, Moby-DickThe IMAGE-grip is dislocated and a more fundamental element emerges … in short, IMAGE is not the work’s supreme motive or unifying end. Hélio Oiticica, Block Experiments […]

This is not my body Elisabeth lebovici Indeed there are not two genders, there is only one, the feminine, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general. [1] These two sentences, written by Monique Wittig in 1983, pronounce a regime of visibility and invisibility for the feminine […]

William James An ethics of thought? Isabelle stengers William James’s pragmatism, and in particular the thesis according to which the sole truth of ideas is the difference that they make, and therefore also the interest that they create, has often been felt to be an offence by those who consider themselves to be engaged ‘for’ […]

Theatre and the public Badiou, Rancière, Virno Simon bayly and ‘relational’ turn in contemporary art practice. The claim restaged here is that the theatrical is still what makes a political problem of something like ‘the public’, which in many contemporary philosophical understandings no longer appears at all. Making public The lack of the appearance of […]

They the people Problems of alter-globalization Gayatri chakravorty spivak You have asked for current thinking about different concepts and forms of political collectivity.* If I were speaking as an academic, I would, I suppose, look once again at the implications of ‘multitudes’, as conceived by our colleagues and allies Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Speaking […]

The involution of photography Andrew fisher As we settle further into the era of digital media and globalized visual culture, it might be tempting to think that photography holds no more than historical interest. Yet it continues to feature in debates with considerable significance for the present. [1] The terms by which it was negotiated […]

In the invitation to speakers for the conference From Structure to Rhizome, we suggested that talks might set out by re-examining (and hence ‘re-founding’) texts that we qualified – in far too rapid and expeditious a fashion – as ‘founding’. But we did not make this suggestion without being conscious of the difficulty involved in […]