Article archive

In April 2017, a law adopted by the Hungarian authorities, and promptly nicknamed ‘Lex CEU’, made the operation of the Central European University (CEU) impossible. The CEU is an English language graduate university with accreditation both in Hungary and in the USA, which was based in Budapest from 1991. Following a long process of attempted […]

Exchange: Marx’s theatre of economic categories It is a privilege to read Asad Haider’s critical response to my article, ‘The Theatre of Economic Categories: Rediscovering Capital in the late 1960s’ in Radical Philosophy 2.08). 1 His enthusiastic defence of Althusser’s theoretical innovation allows one to witness the impact of Reading Capital on a disciple who […]

Scholars of European history and critical theory observing American politics in recent years have often found themselves experiencing déjà vu. History, the truism goes, does not repeat itself, but last summer, with calls for ‘law and order’ and armed right-wing militias clashing with anti-racist protestors across America, many asked, what more are you waiting for? […]

Effective Altruism (EA) is a programme for rationalising charitable giving, positioning individuals to do the ‘most good’ per expenditure of money or time. It was first formulated – by two Oxford philosophers just over a decade ago – as an application of the moral theory consequentialism, and from the outset one of its distinctions within […]

Exchange: Marx’s theatre of economic categories All the characters in this misunderstanding are on stage here, each playing the part ascribed to it by the effect expected of this theatre. Louis Althusser, Reading Capital You too, my friend, should have come here in disguise – as a respectable doctor of scholastic philosophy. It’s my mask […]

Beyond a doubt Hegel knew about real slaves and their revolutionary struggles. In perhaps the most political expression of his career, he used the sensational events of Haiti as the linchpin in his argument in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The actual and successful revolution of Caribbean slaves against their masters is the moment when the […]

In The Evolution of Educational Thought (1938), Emile Durkheim recounted the historical irony that undergirds the idea of institutionality – by pitting it against the birth of the university in medieval Europe. He noted how the coming into being of a corporative organisation – the universitas – was effectively an attempt at ‘unionising’ the body […]

In April 2021, dozens of asylum seekers were moved back to the Napier Barracks in the UK, after the barracks had been emptied a month earlier following protests and media reports on its unsuitable conditions. Migrant support groups and NGOs denounced the ‘terrible conditions of the substandard accommodation and the effects it is having on […]

For what is possibly the first time in history, we have been living for the last few years in a social system that could easily provide for its own needs by working considerably less than in the past, if it was equipped with fair modes of distribution and was reasonably planned. Why is it then […]

In this intervention I investigate the relationships between feminist practices, basic income and the notion of ‘self-determination income’, focusing on the Italian feminist movement Non Una di Meno. The piece contends that self-determination income might foster a society of care and help to address the social and economic transformations occurring over the past three decades, […]

[O]ne might refer to the fascist movements as the wounds, the scars, of a democracy that, to this day, has not lived up to its own concept. Theodor Adorno What’s in a name? First things first: to speak of ‘Bolsonarismo’ is not the same as speaking of Bolsonaro voters. Evidently, whatever we can call ‘Bolsonarismo’ […]

1. As a younger activist I used to find it puzzling that some people who suffer the most from inequalities in capitalist society had little interest in radical egalitarian imaginaries, in the form of, for example, communal solidarity economies. 1 Certain individuals were attracted to groups defending those ideas only temporarily in crisis situations, when […]

This article investigates how the concept of gender might be located within a broader history of the medicalisation and policing of a binary concept of sexual difference and of reproductive knowledge and control. It begins by tracing the origins of gender as a clinical and behavioural category, which was first introduced to medicalise intersex and […]

While debates over race and higher education in the UK have long focused on questions of access, in recent years a host of campaigns have drawn attention to the alienation of students and staff of colour who succeed in entering white-dominated institutions. Their claims, often articulated on social media with the pithiness that hashtags require, […]

Marx prefaces the first edition of the first volume of Capital with a laconic proviso. ‘To avoid any possible misunderstandings’, he writes, ‘a word. I do not by any means depict the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, […]

‘There is no beginning and no end in music … Some people want it to end but it goes on’ Florian Schneider, 1975 Not long after the death of Florian Schneider was announced in May of this year, 1 I re-watched the 1979 film Radio On, directed by Chris Petit, and co-produced by Wim Wenders. […]

Weaker now, we mistakenly identify ourselves as our bodies. Ilona Sagar, ‘Correspondence O’, digital video, 2017 I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854 The last […]

The Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 was the most devastating natural disaster of the eighteenth century, and probably the first disaster on such a scale in modernity. It was an event that profoundly disturbed many Enlightenment philosophers. 1 Kant wrote three scientific studies that attempted to explain it from the standpoint of natural history, and […]

Cops forcibly removing someone from a bus for not wearing a face mask, arresting people for failure to socially distance on a crowded subway platform, moving people on if they look like they are socialising in excessive numbers, determining who can attend a public event. This is the new reality of policing the virus. The […]

In the past few years, the number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea has dramatically increased due to the strengthening of border controls and a deliberate politics of migration containment put into place by the EU in cooperation with third countries. In 2018, according to UN Refugee Agency [UNHCR] estimations, an average of six […]

1. I will attempt here to reflect on three major themes, ‘masses, class, suggestion’, with the hope that, by doing so, I will also indirectly bring to light the relevance of Gabriel Tarde’s thought today. One may wonder why my title does not include – perhaps in place of the term ‘class’, which is not […]