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They the people: Problems of alter-globalization

They the people Problems of alter-globalization Gayatri chakravorty spivak You have asked for current thinking about different concepts and forms of political collectivity.* If I were speaking as an academic, I would, I suppose, look once again at the implications of ‘multitudes’, as conceived by our colleagues and allies Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Speaking as an activist, however, I am obliged to say that the bold and indeed brave and intr...

Theatre and the public: Badiou, Rancière, Virno

Theatre and the public Badiou, Rancière, Virno Simon bayly and ‘relational’ turn in contemporary art practice. The claim restaged here is that the theatrical is still what makes a political problem of something like ‘the public’, which in many contemporary philosophical understandings no longer appears at all. Making public The lack of the appearance of a collective political subject is embraced by contemporary philosophies of multitude, which re...

The concept of money

The concept of money Christopher J. Arthur In the history of philosophy the greatest minds have been aware that the existence and power of money pose a problem. One need only mention Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Simmel. Of course, if one accepts, as I do, that Capital is a work of philosophy as much as of economics then pride of place must go to Marx, who was fascinated from early on by the ability of money ʻto make opposites embraceʼ. Within econo...

Necro-economics: Adam Smith and death in the life of the universal

Louis Althusser began Reading Capital with the statement, ʻWe have all certainly read and are all reading [Marxʼs] Capital.ʼ While Althusser is undoubtedly addressing here his seminar, the focus of which was precisely Marxʼs Capital, the sentence that follows elevates the act of reading this particular text to the status of the universal: the entire world has read and is reading Capital. Marx has been read for ʻnearly a centuryʼ not only by ʻusʼ ...

Answering the question: What is to be done?: Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Dossier: documenta 12 magazines project

Answering the question: What is to be done? (education) David cunningham The question ʻWhat is to be done?ʼ, Adorno remarked, frequently ʻsabotages the logical progress of knowledge that alone allows for changeʼ . However, despite being always-already-inscribed within the imperatives of instrumental rationality, it is, he acknowledged, nonetheless ʻunavoidableʼ. [1] This is especially so for the Left, and for a radical philosophy that is obliged ...

Playing the code: Allegories of control in Civilization

Playing the code Allegories of control in Civilization Alexander R. Galloway With the progressive arrival of new media over the last century or so there appears a sort of lag time, call it the ʻthirty-year ruleʼ, starting from the invention of a medium and ending at its ascent to proper and widespread functioning in culture at large. This can be said of film, from its birth at the turn of the last century up to the blossoming of classical film form...

The sublime from Lyotard to Schiller: Two readings of Kant and their political significance

The sublime from Lyotard to Schiller Two readings of Kant and their political significance Jacques rancière I will here offer a few reflections on a paradoxical object that Jean-François Lyotard puts at the centre of aesthetic theory: the aesthetic of the sublime. Two closely interconnected questions will be raised: What makes this theoretical construction possible? What is at stake in it? I will focus on Lyotardʼs short essay ʻAfter the Sublime, ...

What is feminist phenomenology?: Thinking birth philosophically

What is feminist phenomenology? Thinking birth philosophically Johanna oksala In one curious and exceptional fragment from 1933 Husserl discusses sexuality phenomenologically. Even if his taciturnity and his heterosexual prejudices concerning sexuality hardly make him a very original thinker on the topic, this fragment is interesting in relation to the question of the phenomenological importance of womenʼs experiences. Starting from himself as a ...

Surplus consciousness: Houellebecq’s novels of ideas

Surplus consciousness Houellebecq’s novels of ideas Martin ryle Michel Houellebecqʼs fiction is said to be selling better outside France than that of any French novelist since Camus. Atomised (1999) and Platform (2001), his two more recent novels, appeared in English within a year of their publication. [1] The comparison some reviews have drawn with Camus is of limited help in reading Houellebecq, but it opens questions about 1960s ʻalienationʼ, c...

Demanding Deleuze

Demanding Deleuze Keith ansell pearson The Shortest Shadow and The Puppet and the Dwarf are the first two books in a new series edited by Slavoj Žižek entitled ʻShort Circuitsʼ.* In his seriesʼ foreword Žižek proposes that the shock of short-circuiting provides one of the best metaphors for a critical reading. His proposal is that we can take a major classic text, an author or a notion and read it in a short-circuiting way through the lens of a ʻm...

Agonized liberalism: The liberal theory of William E. Connolly

Agonized liberalism The liberal theory of William E. Connolly Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo ʻDemocracyʼ in the discourse of the ʻFree Westʼ does not carry the same meaning as it does when we speak of ʻpopular-democraticʼ struggle or of deepening the democratic content of political life. We cannot allow the term to be wholly expropriated.… Instead, we need to develop a strategy of contestation around the term itself. Stuart HallIn the last two decades...

The reproach of abstraction

The reproach of abstraction Peter osborne This is a paper about abstraction, in particular, but by no means exclusively – and this ʻby no means exclusivelyʼ is a large part of its point – philosophical abstraction.* It is concerned at the outset with what might be called the reproach of abstraction: the commonly held view, across a wide variety of theoretical standpoints, more or less explicit, that there is some inadequacy inherent to abstractio...

Karatani’s Marxian parallax

One of the rarely noticed historical ironies of the twentieth century was the effort of societies located on the capitalist periphery – outside of Euro-America – to resort to a philosophy which had no place for them in order to explain their entry into and experience of capitalist modernization. Japan led the way in this search for meaning, owing to its good fortune in avoiding outright colonization, but even colonized regions drawn into the capi...

‘The madness of Islam’: Foucault’s Occident and the Revolution in Iran

‘The madness of Islam’ Foucault’s Occident and the Revolution in Iran Ian almond Indeed, if a philosophy of the future exists, it will have to be born outside Europe, or as a consequence of the encounters and frictions between Europe and non-Europe. Michel Foucault in interview, 19781In looking through the half-dozen articles Foucault published on the Iranian Revolution, it is interesting to see beneath the title of one piece – ʻThe Mythical Head...

Let the dead bury their dead: Marxism and the politics of redemption

Let the dead bury their dead Marxism and the politics of redemption Mark neocleous Early in the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx makes the following comment: the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition about the past. Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to dull themselves to thei...

The cyborg mother

The cyborg mother Jaimie Smith-Windsor31 January 2003. The birth of my daughter, Aleah Quinn Smith-Windsor. A few days after Quinn was born this quotation appeared, written beside her incubator: ʻEvery blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers: grow, grow.ʼ It was a near-fatal birth. Quinn was born at 24½ weeksʼ gestation, 3½ months before her due date. Her birth weight was 700 grams, about a pound and a half. 1 February 2003. I...

Orgreave revisited: David Peace’s GB84 and the return to the 1980s

Leslie Grantham: Thatʼs what the eighties are all about: nostalgia. Anita Dobson: Well… how could it be anything else?80s Mania (ITV, 12 June 2004)Most of the things one imagines in hell are there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. George OrwellOurs is a retrospective culture, in which the events and images of the 1980s have lately held much fascination. More specifically, it is an anniversarial...

Nasrallah’s reasons: Hizbullah and the conflict in Lebanon

Commentary Nasrallah’s reasons Hizbullah and the conflict in Lebanon Nicholas noe‘t errorist organizations like Hizbullah … cannot be deterred’, wrote prominent right-winger and former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens in a recent piece for Haaretz. ‘There is only one option here: these organizations must be defeated.’ Unfortunately, Arens’s logic now appears to be the dominant one when it comes to Lebanon’s militant Shiite party Hizbullah, ce...

Democratic materialism and the materialist dialectic

Democratic materialism and the materialist dialectic Alain badiou Franceʼs agony was not born of the flagging reasons to believe in her: defeat, demography, industry, etc., but of the incapacity to believe in anything at all. André MalrauxWhat do we all think, today?* What do I myself think when I donʼt monitor myself? Or, rather, what is our (my) natural belief? By ʻnaturalʼ, of course, I mean in accordance with the rule of an inculcated nature. ...

On Bergson’s metaphysics of time

The last two decades have seen a revival of interest in the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), in large part because of its role in the writings of Gilles Deleuze. However, it has been a noteworthy characteristic of the new Bergsonism (or Deleuze-Bergsonism) that it has proceeded more or less as if earlier criticisms of Bergson’s philosophy did not exist. Occasionally, reference is made to Merleau-Ponty’s 1959 paper ‘Bergson in the making’, which...

‘Joining tracks with the world’: The impossibility of politics in China

‘Joining tracks with the world’ The impossibility of politics in China Rebecca E. Karl Shortly before the October Revolution, Lenin challenged his comrades: ʻI donʼt know how radical you are or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.ʼ [1] A large part of Leninʼs challenge was to defamiliarize reality so as to find the possibility of transforming it. Indeed, in the 1920s,...