Letters on Strawbridge and Althusser

Letters Dear Radical Philosophy, Sheelagh Strawbridge’s article ‘From “Over determination” to “Structural Causality”: Some Unresolved Problems in Althusser’s Treatment of Causality’ (RP 38) was informative and served to help me get to grips with this widely quoted contemporary thinker. However, I’m still not entirely clear about various matters pertaining to the concept of contradiction and […]

From ‘Overdetermination’ to ‘Structural Causality’: Some Unresolved Problems in Althusser's Treatment of Causality

From ‘Overdetermination’ to ‘Structural Causality’: Some Unresolved Problems in Althursser’s Treatment of Causality Sheelagh Strawbridge Introduction .Much of Althusser’s work, in collaboration with Balibar, is concerned, by means of a ‘symptomatic’ reading of Marx’s mature work, to draw out the latent, silent, untheorised concepts present in that work and provide and adequately describe these missing […]

The Trouble with Contradictions

THE TROUBLE WITH CONTRADICTIONS Joe In a critical comment in Radical Philosophy 16 Russell Keat has raised some interesting objections to Ray Edgley’s account of the significance of the dialectic for social science (1). Pro.minent among them is the charge that while this account ‘succeeds in showing the critical practical function of scientific knowledge’ the […]

Misadventures of the Dialectic

Misadvenlures of Ihe Dialeclic Peter Dews I would like to offer some kind of critical response to the ideas on dialectic and social science which have been developed by Roy Edgley in articles published in Radical Philosophy (‘Reason as Dialectic’ RP15) and, more recently. in Critique (‘Dialectic: The Contradiction of Colletti’, Critique 7). As Edgley’s […]

On Dialectic

This paper is the first stage of an attempt to answer the question ‘What is dialectic?’ I assume no prior knowledge of the subject and only a minimal prior knowledge of philosophy. I am aware that this task has been attempted many times before. But one of the things which I have found particularly confusing […]

The Marxist Dialectic

as I ~have already said, this seems too banal and obvious. Hopefully not that’ everything is always changing’, since this is false. There is stability within change. We cannot describe change except by talking about ‘things which change’, and to say that a thing is changing is . to imply that within the process of […]

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? […]

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 […]