Obituary archive

Obituary The writer’s malady André Gorz, 1923–2007 When André Gorz committed suicide with his wife last September, even President Sarkozy felt obliged to pay tribute to ‘a major intellectual figure of the French and European Left’. Gorz never courted fame or celebrity, but the dramatic manner of his death created a storm of publicity and […]

Obituary J.G. Ballard, 1930–2009 I always suspected that eternity would look like Milton Keynes. J.G. Bal ard (1993) With the recent outpouring of tributes to the late J.G. Ballard on the part of mainstream literary culture, it is easy to forget that he was in the 1970s the recipient of a reader’s report that read […]

Obituary A mother’s thought Sara Ruddick, 1935–2011 ‘i speak about a mother’s thought’ wrote the feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick, who has died in New York at the age of 76. ^ Along with Adrienne Rich, Ruddick was probably the most important philosophical thinker to address the issue of mothering and motherhood since second-wave feminism, and, […]

Patrice Maniglier argues that if the next century might be one day be recognized as Deleuzian or Badiouian, it won't be so without us first realizing that the one that has just ended was Lévi-Straussian.

Obituary The incremental anarchist Colin Ward, 1924–2010 Colin Ward, who died on 11 February 2010, was the leading anarchist thinker and writer of postwar Britain. Ward’s anarchism was at once constructive, creative and immensely practical. It drew critical but sympathetic attention from many outside the anarchist movement, and arguably it still holds lessons for contemporary […]

Ben Watson assesses Beefheart's work as a protest against those who profit from the very separation of elite and mass music.