Article archive

Everybody thinks: Deleuze, Descartes and rationalism

In his 1968 book Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze famously stresses the violent, unnatural and shocking character of thought, counterposing his own anti-representational philosophy of difference to what he depicts as a dogmatic, humanist ‘image of thought’. In his own words: ‘“Everybody” knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under […]

Imaginative mislocation: Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome, ground zero of the twentieth century

Imaginative mislocation Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome, ground zero of the twentieth century Matthew charles The average Westerner … was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields. Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906The controversy […]

Dossier On Universities

Dossier: Universities

The immediate causes of the current protests by students, lecturers and academic researchers in Europe are contingent; they are directed at individual educational institutions or administrators, and the demands they make are capable of being met over the short term.* But on a second level, one that cannot be separated from the immediate events, protestors […]

Andeanizing philosophy: Rodolfo Kusch and indigenous thought

Andeanizing philosophy Rodolfo Kusch and indigenous thought Philip derbyshire The belated English translation of Rodolfo Kusch’s Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América (originally published in Spanish in 1970)* introduces this Argentine author to an English-speaking audience for the first time. What makes his work interesting is that it takes indigenous thinking seriously as philosophy – […]

The African intellectual: Hountondji and after

The African intellectual Hountondji and after Omedi ochieng Every thought, however original it may be, is to some extent shaped by the questions that it is asked. Paulin J. Hountondji, The Struggle for MeaningOne of the characteristic features of African philosophy is that it tends to pose epistemological questions in terms that preserve their dialectical […]

Networks

Dossier: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)

In an article first published in July 1968 in New Left Review, Perry Anderson gave an analysis of a critical weakness of British intellectual culture. His diagnosis is remarkable and surprising. One of the key problems, Anderson argued, was that Britain has failed to make any contribution to the classical sociological tradition; moreover, this failure […]

Science: The invisible transdisciplinarity of French culture

Dossier: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)

Let me start with an apology: this conference obviously is concerned mainly with philosophy, literature, the social and human sciences, much more than with those sciences that are known as exact, natural or whatever – but which could probably, more to the point, be called ‘inhuman’ and ‘asocial’. It is thus for me, as a […]

Sex: a transdisciplinary concept

Dossier: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)

What is sex? Some feminists have harboured suspicions about this form of question, given its philosophical (or ‘metaphysical’ [1] ) pedigree. But philosophy no longer has the disciplinary monopoly on it. Indeed, with regard to sex, the more interesting task today is to pose and to attempt to answer the question from within a transdisciplinary […]

Structure: method or subversion of the social sciences?

Dossier: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)

It seems there’s no longer any real doubt as to the answer to this question, and that it is doubly negative. ‘Structuralism’, or what was designated as such mainly in France in the 1960s and 1970s (setting aside the question of other uses), is no longer regarded as a truly fertile method in the domains […]

Introduction: Introduction to the dossier 'From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought' (RP 165/167)

Dossier: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)

The concept of transdisciplinarity is not part of the explicit discourse or self-consciousness of ‘French thought’. Rather, it is used here, imported from the outside as a kind of operator or problematizing device, to begin a process of rethinking one of that body of thought’s most distinctive but infrequently remarkedupon characteristics – its tendency to […]

Paideia: The Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, 10–17 August 1998

It was announced in the introductory session that the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy was the largest gathering of philosophers (three thousand plus) in history and the last world congress of the twentieth century. The congress theme, grandly enough, was ʻPaideia: Philosophy Educating Humanityʼ. From the opening platform it was asserted that ʻthe clash between […]