Article archive

Most branches of philosophy and many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences studied in the anglophone academy draw on texts written in languages other than English and therefore rely on the products of translation, especially translations of historical, European philosophy. However, surprisingly little philosophical attention has been paid to the role of individual […]

Bankocracy Greek money and the ‘new idea’ of Europe Marie cuillerai and Maria KakogianniJuly Monarchy–november democracy On the contrary, the faction of the bourgeoisie that ruled and legislated through the Chambers had a direct interest in the indebtedness of the state. The state deficit was really the main object of its speculation and the chief source […]

On 25 February 2002, Rafael Perez, a former oicer of the LAPD’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit (CRASH), appeared in court accused of various crimes: covering up a bank robbery, shooting and framing an innocent citizen, stealing and selling cocaine from evidence lockers, being a member of the Los Angeles gang called the Bloods, […]

Dossier BL ANQUI’ S E TERNAL GAP The radical gap A preface to Auguste Blanqui, Eternity by the Stars Jacques rancière I leaf through the programme and learn that the very stars themselves – which, I am irmly convinced, should be but rarely disturbed, and even then only for high reasons of meditative gravity … […]

Auguste Blanqui, heretical communistdaniel Bensaïd and Michael Löwy Within the history of French socialism there is an invisible, heretical, marginalized and suppressed current. It constitutes an orientation obscured by the dominant tendencies on the left from the end of the nineteenth century until today – tendencies represented by the rival and complementary pairings of Jaurès and […]

Blanqui’s bifurcationspeter hallward Auguste Blanqui’s Eternity by the Stars (1872) is perhaps the only text, across the scattered fragments of his œuvre, that poses a genuine problem of interpretation.1 How could this ultra-voluntarist revolutionary come to embrace a vision of the cosmos based on endless repetition and the eternal recycling of monotonous variation? Blanqui committed […]

From Abstraction to Wunsch The Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies Howard caygill DICTIONARY Say of it: ʻItʼs only for ignoramuses!ʼ . . ʻIʼd rather die than use one!ʼ Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received IdeasThe Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies* deserves a warm welcome from everyone interested in philosophy and its history. While connoisseurs of philosophical lexicography will […]

Kojève’s letter to stalin hager weslati The philosophical œuvre of Alexandre Kojève is often considered to consist of an eclectic and distorted Marxist–Heideggerian interpretation of Hegel. More recent biographical studies claim that his attempt to write a book that would define his ‘system of knowledge’ (interrupted by his sudden death in 1968) was an impossible […]

The postconceptual condition Or, the cultural logic of high capitalism today Peter osborne Those with long enough memories will no doubt recognize the crossed syntax of my title.* It mimics, first, that of a text which, while in historical terms still recent, is nonetheless already antiquated, even if not yet sufficiently so to have acquired […]

introduction to horkheimer, ‘sketch for a novel’ In autumn 1942, while working with T.W. Adorno on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer began to write a novel. Its lead character was the English prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940), who, in September 1938, after several meetings with Hitler and along with France’s Edouard Daladier, agreed not to […]

Drone geographies derek gregory Last year Apple rejected Josh Begley’s Drones+ app three times. The app promised to send push notifications to users each time a US drone strike was reported, but Apple decided that many people would find it ‘objectionable’ (they said nothing about what they might feel about the strikes). When he defended […]

Defiance or emancipation? peter hallward What is resistance? Rather than offering a conceptual definition, Howard Caygill’s new book* approaches resistance as a problematic and elusive practice that calls for reflective judgement in the Kantian sense. His point of departure is the claim that resistance demands appreciation on its own evolving terms, rather than as an […]

extra, extra, read all about it! Contemporary art is postconceptual art Antonia birnbaum * Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London and New York, 2013. vi + 282 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 78168 113 8 hb., 978 1 78168 094 0 pb. Numbers in parentheses in the […]

Humanist Marxist and prophet of modern life, Marshall Berman passed away on 11 September 2013, aged 72. He died of a heart attack, breakfasting with an old friend, photographer Mel Rosenthal, in one of his favourite Upper West Side eateries, the Metro Diner. Marshall Howard Berman grew up in humble Jewish Morrisania in the South […]

What is a no-fly zone? Formally, it is a prohibition on flying in order to call a halt to hostilities in the region, usually enacted in aid of a group or groups which might otherwise suffer violence. When the Libyan civil war broke out in early 2011 one of the first demands made by several […]

Can anthropology be philosophy, and if so, how? For philosophers, the matter has been and often remains quite simple: anthropology’s concern with socio-cultural and historical differences might yield analyses that philosophy can put to use (provided that it condescends to examine them), but only rarely does anthropology conceive its material at a level of generality […]

Anti-revolutionary republicanism Claude Lefort’s Machiavelli Knox peden existing socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but with what he viewed as the authoritarian style of left politics more generally. Disillusion with Trotskyism followed, as did a more general rejection of the party form and the revolutionary agenda. If the last years of Merleau-Ponty’s career […]

We have, in this conference, discussed all of the crucial aspects of the situation in Europe and especially in Greece. We have, of course, analysed the great historical structures at stake: the particularly aggressive global politics of contemporary capitalism, the complicit weakness of the various states, and the reactive role played by Europe as it […]

The passage from early to late modernity is generally associated with a gradual process of democratization, in both political and economic realms. Politically speaking, representative democracy has enjoyed an unprecedented global spread. In the West, especially, political and social rights seemed to have flourished until quite recently. Economically speaking, we have witnessed a ‘democratization of […]

Total social crisis and the return of fascism Elsa papageorgiou In memory of Sahtzat Loukman, 27 years old, murdered on 17 January 2013 in Athens, and Clément Méric, 18 years old, murdered on 5 June 2013 in Paris.This contribution seeks to mobilize certain concepts in order to symbolize what, in part, always resists symbolization. What […]

The texts in this dossier were initially presented to an international conference on the current crisis in Greece, ‘Le symptôma grec’, held on 18–20 January 2013, at the University of Paris 8 and the École normale supérieure. The conference took as its point of departure the exemplary role that Greece has played over the last […]