Article archive

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 […]

The ‘Introduction’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit has enjoyed a long and rich critical reception in the history of Hegel scholarship. 1 Distinguished from the famous ‘Preface’ in that it introduces the particular ambitions of the Phenomenology as opposed to Hegel’s philosophical enterprise as a whole, the opening section of the 1807 work has been […]

Present theories of computation and artificial intelligence often claim that philosophy should either discard its principal modes of gnoseology (that is, its theories of knowledge and cognition) and anthropomorphic genesis, or declare philosophical speculation obsolete altogether, since it fails to provide any precise knowledge regarding the most significant contemporary scientific and technological concerns. If post-structuralism […]

I want to identify not with creaturely life but with the stolen life of imagining things. Fred Moten, ‘There is no Racism Intended’ Fred Moten’s three-volume collection of essays, consent not to be a single being, draws together some fifteen years of his consistently inventive but widely dispersed work in Black Studies, thus allowing his […]

On Friday 18 October 2019, a long series of mass demonstrations began in Chile against the right-wing government led by president Sebastián Piñera. 1 Despite brutal and continuous police repression, these demonstrations persisted, day after day, with remarkable stamina and inventiveness, right through to 13 March 2020, when the risks posed by Covid-19 led Piñera […]

The crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism has been unfolding spectacularly under our eyes in recent months, provoking ever greater social upheavals in an ever greater number of places. 1 Events in the Arab region fit into this general global crisis, to be sure, but there is also something specific about the region. There, […]

When a notable philosopher, having established a reputation for rigorous argumentation and scholarship, directs a major new book toward a popular audience, a certain skepticism may be forgiven among those familiar with the earlier work. However welcome an accessible style may be, popular address too often gives way to the popularisation of philosophical concepts and […]