'Capitalism' tag archive

Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, trans. Daniel Ross, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011. 200 pp., £55.00 hb., £16.99 pb., 978 0 74564 809 5 hb., 978 0 74564 810 1 pb. Bernard Stiegler’s work addresses the relationship between philosophy, technology and culture. This combination has proved popular, and has been furthered by Stiegler’s impressive output: […]

Fredric Jameson, Representing ‘Capital’: A Reading of Volume One, Verso, London and New York, 2011. 158pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 84467 454 1. John Kraniauskas Fredric Jameson’s latest book, published hot on the heels of a monograph on Hegel’s Phenomenology (The Hegel Variations, 2010) and a large collection of essays on the dialectic (Valences of […]

New YorkEvaluation of a movement is never an easy task. Emphatically not so, when it is ongoing and moving in confrontation with power, going through ups and downs, gains and losses. Historically there are many examples in which the loss of one achievement or a digression led to a gain or advancement elsewhere. Development is […]

Robinson in Ruins New materialism and the archaeological imagination Paul dave Robinson in Ruins (2010) is the third of Patrick Keil er’s fictionalized documentaries featuring the investigations and struggles of his character, the ‘wandering, cracked scholar’ and political visionary, Robinson. [1] The first in the trilogy, London, was released in 1994, and the second, Robinson […]

SYMPOSIUM Spectres of Derrida The limits of hauntology G hosts are not renowned for their sense of humour. As Charles Lamb (he of the undeconstructed tales from Shakespeare) put it; ‘Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?’ But the ghost ofthe theorist of farcical returns might well […]

mind/geist of Europe by its cultural others and inferiors. Derrida’s fascination is with Hamlet-as-geist haunted by the corporeal form of the ghost, as a trope for the irreducible spectral implication of spirit and spook. However, this Vah~ryian reading of Hamlet forecloses his distinctive relation to the premodern, conscripting his melancholic Renaissance proto-modernity into a latterday […]

Fashion in Ruins History after the Cold War Susan Buck-Morss On Pariser Platz at the Gate’s east side, vendors sell souvenirs of the fallen Wall and mementos of the fallen regime. To the north, above the tree-line, the German flag flies over the ruins of the Reichstag that was burned in 1933 and bombed during […]

Marxism Today An Interview with Istvan Meszaros /stwin Meszaros left Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956. He recently retiredfrom a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He established his reputation in the English-speaking world with his widely translated Marx’s Theory ofAlienation (1970), which was awarded the / saac Deutscher Memorial Prize. His […]

‘Svelte Discourse’ and the Philosophy of Caution Stuart Sim Recently, Radical Philosophy was offered a piece by JeanFrancois Lyotard, one of the leading lights of the postmodernist movement, entitled ‘Svelte Discourse and the Posunodern Question’. The piece came not from Lyotard himself but from his translator, Mark S. Roberts. So odd did this particular piece […]

Marx’s “Social Revolution” and the Division of Labour Istvan Meszaros Marx was well aware of the burden of class de terminations which tend to subsume the individuals under their own logic; from his early writings to the Grundrisse and Capital he never stopped defining the task of emancipation as belonging to the social individual. Equally, […]

Locke also has a principle – we should notice which limits the volume of goods that may be accumulated to that quantity which can be properly used or disposed of. A person ‘offended against the Law of Nature’ if he allowed the things in his possession to spoil or perish ‘without their due use’ (25). […]

Sexism, Gapitalism ” the ramil, I~_ __ Bosalind Delmar (This paper was written for the Womens Liberation Conference, London, November 1972) The relation between sexism and capitalism is often expressed as an opposition: is it a sexist society or a capitalist society? Are we interested in feminism-or socialism? We see socialist women denouncing feminism as […]

his way of obviating the “victories of an excessive relativism” was to resort to the possibility of explaining diverse views. But if ‘explanation’ is to be understood as legitimation, he is no better off. The ‘relativist’ is perfectly prepared to admit differenc&,f of legitimation and characterisation co-ordinate with differences in moral view. Finally, he might […]

Commentary Philosophy on television Ben watson Marx remarks somewhere that all true philosophy begins with the criticism of religion. If he had lived through the postwar era, he would have added: and the religion of a triumphant capitalism is television. Just as the medieval cathedral was the apotheosis of feudalism, television is the techno-exemplification of […]

Commentary Oppositional mentalities Intellectuals, protest and the Left Martin ryle‘t he “oppositional” mentality of the British Leftʼ, wrote E.P. Thompson in 1965, ʻis certainly a limiting outlook; but it has grown up simply because our Left has had so bloody much to oppose … The British Left … has been immersed in ineluctable political contexts […]

Despite recent reassurances that ʻwe have never been modernʼ, owing to a conception of the modern based on the separation of nature from the order of society that has never functioned strictly according to the rules of its ʻconstitutionʼ, it is, nevertheless, this capacity to think the modern as temporally different from its antecedents that […]

Anti-Oedipus – thirty years on Éric alliez I, for my own part, made a sort of move into politics around May 1968…Gilles Deleuze, NegotiationsThis title was suggested to me some months ago by my best enemy – or my best fiend, to paraphrase Werner Herzog – who also happens to be a very good friend: […]

Commentary It’s not the culture, stupid Interpreting the US election Ken hirschkop Elections first and foremost decide governments, but they are also conjunctures when political forces are organized and realigned. The very act of mobilizing activists or energizing groups within the franchise can have long-term effects, and in the course of a campaign ideologies that […]

W.G. Sebald and the modern art of memory Stewart martin been repressed within cultural consciousness, but with what has been repressed by the dominant scenes and institutions of memory, with what the memory of the repressed itself represses. This is controversial but also timely, as the recent commemorations of the bombing of Dresden indicate. It […]

In what sense would a certain concept of the urban meet, as Henri Lefebvre asserted some thirty-five years ago, a ʻtheoretical needʼ? What forms of crosscultural and cross-disciplinary ʻgeneralityʼ would be at stake here? And if this is indeed, as Lefebvre always insisted, a question of a necessary ʻelaboration, a search, a conceptual formulationʼ, what […]