Obituary archive

When Maria Mies died, on 15 May 2023, I was re-reading her work on India, to reflect on its contemporary relevance for analyses of the world of work. I am profoundly saddened that the first way in which I will use my notes are to write this obituary. Yet, I am also profoundly honoured to […]

I met Drucilla Cornell at the New School for Social Research, shortly after my arrival in the US at a time of political turmoil. I joined the Philosophy Department in 2010, and one of the first things I was invited to do was help organise an international conference called ‘The Anarchist Turn’. The conference took […]

Shortly after Jean-Luc Godard’s death at the end of 2022, the Parisian Ménagerie de verre, a private art space primarily dedicated to dance, showed excerpts from the late work of the grand master, in a ‘visual and sonorous journey around five films made by Godard between 1999 and 2018’. Planned by his producer Jean-Paul Battaggia […]

Sylvère Lotringer’s life been celebrated as a ‘total work’ – a lived embodiment of the radical theories he did so much work to disseminate and promote. His commitment to an art of living, his embodiment and dissemination of thought, and his cultural experimentation have been widely affirmed – with the ‘primary text’ of his life […]

Dan Graham and I were friends for about 50 years. We began a correspondence in the late 1960s and met for the first time in London in 1972, when he had his first exhibition at the Lisson Gallery, which had opened five years earlier. In his later years Dan became increasingly forthright about the psychological […]

One day, what I am saying to you today will no longer have any sense or any handle on the period. But today this is where there is some sense: in saying sense is absent, in saying that this absence is what we are exposed to, and that this exposition constitutes what I will call […]

The task of remembering one’s many selves is a difficult liberatory task. 1 María Lugones, a feminist philosopher, sociologist, activist and Professor of Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies at Binghamton University in New York State, died on July 14 2020. Sadly, she did not live to see the victory of feminists in her country of […]

Neil Davidson – the most significant Scottish intellectual of the radical left – died at the beginning of May 2020 from a brain tumour. He was 62. Davidson was a prolific writer of historical sociology and a critical analyst of contemporary politics, particularly the Scottish scene. His learning was immense, his reading power prodigious and […]

The death of Bernard Stiegler in August, aged 68, will surely be met by a glut of biographies documenting a far from conventional philosophical eccentric. It is undeniable that he could be difficult, and not just because of the density of his prose and tendency to write exclusively in neologisms; but he could also be […]

In Serres’s works, the table of method is the method, the idea is its own image, the code is already overcoded. Serres cannot be commented but only stuttered. A repetition won’t add anything to a text that knows better than anyone how to repeat itself in its innovations, or how to innovate by repeating itself. […]

The disappearance of Paul Virilio is my concern. It provides an opportune moment for a ‘spontaneous declaration’, as well as for some clarification with respect to a series of apodictic interventions. 1. The personal facts. Memory – transformed recollections and changed expectations – delivers to me a Virilio who was, alongside Michel de Certeau, Louis […]

Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, was one of the most prominent philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, who developed over the course of five decades an impressive oeuvre characterised by two main quests that define the singularity of his […]

I have a vivid memory – too vivid to be an accident – of the first time I read something written by Ellen Meiksins Wood. It was an article in New Left Review on the separation of the economic from the political; it was, of course, polemical. I didn’t know the context of the polemic […]

Open form Pierre Boulez, 1927–2016The death of Pierre Boulez came as a gentle shock to those for whom he is a figure of colossal importance in the postwar musical world. Pierre Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma, the title of Joan Peyser’s 1976 book, does only partial justice to a musician whose contribution was truly much, much […]

Michael Theunissen applied a motto to his understanding of his own philosophy, drawn from Kierkegaard: to aim to be a corrective to one’s time. However, he did not take this to imply merely the vigilance of an intellectual who identifies, explains and criticizes moral and political distortions, any more than did the thinker to whom […]

OBITUARY The image scout Harun Farocki, 1944–2014often accompanied by texts. [1] From his first militant films, his first creations for television, and his first critical writings onwards, a theoretical and materialist concern sustained his intentions, had always addressed themselves to the medium that received them. And so he studied the way people saw the Vietnam […]

Andrew Collier, who died on 3 July after more than a decade living with cancer, was a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective during the 1990s and a longstanding contributor to the journal. Born in Edmonton, North London, towards the end of World War II, he attended Bedford College, University of London (later to […]

Rhetorics of populism Ernesto Laclau, 1935–2014 John kraniauskas The publication of Ernesto Laclau’s The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, only weeks after his death in April 2014, confirms his status as one of the foremost contemporary political theorists of the Left.* Since the 1980s, his influence has been extraordinary, particularly in the UK and Latin America: […]

Edward W. Said died in 2003. Jacques Derrida died in 2004. Kofi Awoonor was killed in Westgate Mall last year. Now Stuart Hall is gone. A generation of intellectuals and activists, and intellectual–activists, is disappearing. Academics worldwide could not think ‘Black Britain’ before Stuart Hall. And in Britain the impact of Cultural Studies went beyond […]

‘I wouldn’t recommend me as entertainment’. Lou Reed, 1978. It has acquired the status of a primal scene. 1964. A party in New York’s Lower East Side, the mythical site of the period. Terry Phillips, an executive at Pickwick Records, meets two ‘long-haired’ young men. Thinking they look the part, he asks them if they […]

Obituary Socialism and the sea Allan Sekula, 1951–2013 Photographer, film-maker, cultural theorist and political activist, Allan Sekula was one of the outstanding Marxist intellectuals of his generation. The author of pioneering histories of photography, he produced genre-shifting exhibitions, books and videos. Almost at the end of his life, he co-directed an award-winning documentary film, and […]