Lacking a homunculus

to cover this estimated cost. The Office of Budget Responsibility estimate the difference between outlay borrowing for loans and repayments to rise to nearly £10 billion by 2015/16 and to continue to rise until the mid-2030s. It would seem that the government is currently working on an optimistic understanding of what the impairment for the […]

Red years: Althusser’s lesson, Rancière’s error and the real movement of history: Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy

Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy

Red years Althusser’s lesson, Rancière’s error and the real movement of history Nathan brown The dissolution of the organizational forms which are created by the movement, and which disappear when the movement ends, does not reflect the weak‑ness of the movement, but rather its strength. The time of false battles is over. The only conflict […]

Towards a Theory of Videotics

Towards a Theory of Videotics Richard Osborne In the post-structuralist diaspora the search for a nontaxonomic ‘truth’, an understanding of the political history of the presentation of signs, demands that we interrogate our relationship to the notion of the materiality of the sign. From Copernicus to Warhol we have witnessed the destabiliza tion of the […]

Marxist Modes

MARXIST MODIS lonathan Rea 1 Here is a tempting book* – a kind of teach-yourself the new semiotics, a simple primer about Barthes, Lacan and post-Althusserian Marxis m. I came across it by accident, when I saw it peeping out of a friend’s luggage. ‘It’s very good, ‘ I was told: ‘inspiring and clear ‘. […]

Althusser’s epistemology: The limits of the theory of theoretical practice

ALTHUSSBR’S BPISTBMOLOGY: Ihe limils of Ihe Iheo..y of Iheo..elical p ..aclice PaulPatton concepts and theses which would permit the demarcation of science from other kinds of theoretical discourse. Dialectical materialism, then, was thought to be the philosophical theory Within which the scientific character of historical materialism could be demonstrated. Althusser’s marxist philosophy, however, was no […]

Post-Marxist Modes of Production

POST-MARXIST M I ‘) .. or PRODUCTION According to whoever wrote the editorial ‘notes’ for Radical Philosophy 17, ‘The present upsurge of fundamental Marxist researches may indicate an exit route from the circle of philosophy’s –deaths and re births , via which the problem of the specificity of “the philosophical” might be both subverted and […]

Who Makes History?: Althusser's Anti-Humanism

Whomakas hislory? Allhassel”s anli-hamanis.. John Mepham Introduction I am very much aware that in what follows I solve no philosophical problems. I attempt some conceptual clarifications and I propose some interpretations of theses of Louis Althusser. I hope this will at least make it possible to pose some problems more clearly than they are posed […]

Subject: (Re-/decentred)

Dossier: From Structure to Rhizome: Transdisciplinarity in French Thought (2)

Modern French thought, ‘structuralism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postmodernism’, Marxism as well, are currently associated with the so-called ‘death of the subject’. Foucault’s ‘anti-humanism’, the celebrated ‘death of Man’, the declining popularity of the rational, Kantian, transcendantal subject, reigning over what Lyotard called ‘metanarratives’, [1] are all parts of the process. Foucault’s rejection of the subject is unequivocally […]