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Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement, not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where […]

Any attempt to conceptualize transdisciplinarity is bound to experiment with disciplinary boundaries. And such experimentation cannot simply be held to the criteria of academic study. It is must in fact problematize the boundaries between academic study and forms or instances of thinking which take place outside of such scholarship. However, these disruptive practices have become […]

An appreciation and practice of the fragment is a feature of all European Romanticism, but it was in early German (or ‘Jena’) Romanticism, and most of all in the work of Friedrich Schlegel, that the concept of ‘the fragment’ was philosophically determined. Indeed, the fragment has been called ‘the central philosophical concept of early German […]

Kunstchaos Incompletion, reversibility and fragmentary montage Olivier schefer Le multiple, il faut le faire…Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus In 1798 Novalis famously wrote: ‘Poetry is the authentic absolute real. This is the core of my philosophy. The more poetic, the more true.’ [1] This aphorism expresses what might be called the artistic destiny […]

Common senses Deleuze and Lyotard between ground and form Frédéric fruteau de laclos ‘One day, perhaps, this century will be known as Deleuzian.’ This is how Michel Foucault famously opened his admiring review of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. [1] Responding to the praise, Deleuze merely called attention to the hint of humour underlying Foucault’s […]

The crisis of the legitimacy of the liberal democratic state is being posed today with an urgency and acuity not seen since the debates over the legitimacy of Weimar parliamentary democracy. Its constitutive claim to be able to satisfy both the values of justice and pluralism appears to be coming apart at the seams. Far […]

Our illnesses are mostly political illnesses. Peter Weiss In Memoirs of a Revolutionary Victor Serge describes the first decade of Soviet rule as displaying ‘the obscure early stages of a psychosis’, the symptoms of which became increasingly pronounced as time wore on and the defeats and corpses piled ever higher. The experience of living through […]

Romantic bureaucracy Alexander Kojève’s post-historical wisdom Boris groys Alexandre Kojève became famous primarily for his discourse on the end of history and the posthistorical condition – the discourse that he developed in his seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit at the École des Hautes Études in Paris between 1933 and 1939. This seminar was […]

Dossier ROMANTIC TRANSDISCIPLINARIT Y 1 Introduction Of all the genealogical sources of contemporary critical theory, in both its Germanand French-inspired variants, early German Romanticism remains the most potent, yet it is also the least explicated in relation to current theoretical trends.* The sources of modern criticism in Jena Romanticism are widely acknowledged, yet when theory […]

Bildung and strategy The fate of the ‘beautiful sciences’ Howard caygill Kant’s 1798 Conflict of the Faculties makes an explicit case for viewing philosophy as the romantic transdiscipline. The ‘lower faculty’ he explained there is less tied to the professional restrictions on research and teaching characteristic of the ‘higher faculties’ of law, medicine and theology […]

Form, as it is mastered, becomes attenuated; it becomes dissociated from any liturgy, rule, yardstick; the epic is discarded in favour of the novel, verse in favour of prose; there is no longer any orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its creator. Gustave Flaubert [1] ‘Just as our literature began with […]

The irony of anatomy Basquiat’s poetics of black positionality Nathan brown for Tanzeen DohaIsabelle Graw Should I come to New York before I write the article on you?Jean-Michel Basquiat What would you do if the artist you were writing about were dead?Graw I would do as much research as possible, get together all the available information…Basquiat […]

Radical openness Chord symbols, musical abstraction and modernism Mark abel ‘Would anyone like to suggest a chord?’, said Keith Jarrett, swivelling on the piano stool to face the audience. There were a few shouts from the auditorium such as ‘A minor nine’ and ‘E flat seven sharp eleven’. Jarrett listened distractedly for a few moments, […]

Guattari and transversality Institutions, analysis and experimentation Andrew goffey How, on the basis of what problems and concerns, in reference to what concepts, and in the light of what practices, can and should we understand the work of Félix Guattari? It is now fairly widely accepted that Guattari was not simply a junior partner in […]

Dossier PROPERT Y, POWER, LAW Race, real estate and real abstraction Brenna Bhandar and alberto Toscano The crises and mutations of contemporary capitalism have rendered palpable Marx’s observation according to which in bourgeois modernity human beings are ‘ruled by abstractions’. [1] The processes of financialization animating the dynamics of the 2007–8 crisis involved the violent irruption […]

Disaggregating primitive accumulation robert nichols For nearly 150 years now, critical theorists of various stripes have attempted to explicate, correct and complement Marx’s discussion of the ‘so-called’ primitive accumulation of capital provided in Part Eight of the first volume of Capital. [1] This is perhaps especially true of Marxism in the English-speaking world. Whereas French […]

Patent as credit When intellectual property becomes speculative Hyo yoon kang Intellectual properties, the various kinds of which are known as patents, copyright and trademarks, could be regarded as central techniques of accumulation in contemporary capitalism, if immaterial knowledge is indeed what now crucially drives accumulation in a ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘creative industries’. [1] In […]

Global homocapitalism rahul rao Temples of global capitalism have become increasingly vociferous of late in their opposition to homophobia. In February 2014, shortly after Uganda’s President Museveni gave his assent to a draconian Anti Homosexuality Act, the World Bank announced that it was delaying a US$90 million loan to Uganda on the grounds that the […]

Of all the varieties of crisis thinking, ecological crisis is perhaps the least developed. It is certainly the least conceptualized. To be sure, there is no scarcity of empirically rich analyses of biophysical shifts at every scale. But ecological crisis in its popular usage has been an expansive concept, implicating the widest range of human […]

Podemos and its critics bécquer seguín Although the movement that gave rise to it began years, if not decades, ago, Podemos, the political party, was born on 17 January 2014. For some, it was the result of years of organizing following the indignados protests, which occupied Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and other plazas across Spain […]

On the State comprises edited versions of three lecture courses that Pierre Bourdieu delivered between 1989 and 1992 at the Collège de France during his tenure of a research chair in sociology at that institution (1982–2001). [*] Beginning with the well-worn theme of the difficulties of thinking and studying the state, then illustrating the importance […]