A Marxist heresy?: Accelerationism and its discontents

Dossier: Future Stasis

In his study of the semantics of historical time, Reinhart Koselleck proposes that ‘two specific determinants’ characterize modernity’s ‘new experience of transition: the expected otherness of the future and, associated with it, the alteration in the rhythm of temporal experience: acceleration, by means of which one’s own time is distinguished from what went before’. If […]

Cannibal metaphysics: Amerindian perspectivism: With an introduction by Peter Skafish

Can anthropology be philosophy, and if so, how? For philosophers, the matter has been and often remains quite simple: anthropology’s concern with socio-cultural and historical differences might yield analyses that philosophy can put to use (provided that it condescends to examine them), but only rarely does anthropology conceive its material at a level of generality […]

The map is the territory

Dossier: What is German Media Philosophy?

When I read the expression ‘The map is not the territory’ for the first time, it occurred to me that it contained the quintessence of Anglo-American philosophy of common sense. The defiant insistence on a logic of representation, a common-sense belief in the evidence of an objective ‘reality’ that is prior to all mental representations […]

Architectural Deleuzism: Neoliberal space, control and the ‘univer-city’

For many thinkers of the spatiality of contemporary capitalism, the production of all social space tends now to converge upon a single organizational paradigm designed to generate and service mobility, connectivity and flexibility. Networked, landscaped, borderless and reprogrammable, this is a space that functions, within the built environments of business, shopping, education or the ‘creative […]

80 Reviews

REVIEWS A paradigm too far? Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, translated by Joel Anderson, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995. xxi + 215 pp., £39.95 hb., 0 7456 1160 5. Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, edited by Charles W. Wright, State […]

Creativity as criticism

At first glance, Deleuze and Guattariʼs What is Philosophy? may appear to confirm the mainstream critical opinion that poststructuralism has gone astray. [1] What was once a radical agenda questioning the legitimacy of social institutions and the nature of modern subjectivity has now become, in the words of one reviewer, a matter of doing ʻphilosophy […]

The new Bergsonism: Discipline, subjectivity and freedom

This article is intended to raise a number of connected issues. It concludes by suggesting that certain theories of self-organization, in particular the theory of autopoiesis developed by Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and, latterly, Fritjof Capra, might help us to reassess how we view the relationship between discipline, subjectivity and freedom. However, the first half […]

Walking through walls: Soldiers as architects in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

This article is based around several interviews I conducted with both Israeli military personnel and Palestinian activists following the 2002 Israeli incursion into Palestinian areas as part of operation ʻDefensive Shieldʼ. [1] Using these interviews I will try, in what follows, to reflect upon an emergent relationship between armed conflicts and the built environment. Contemporary […]

Inside out: Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Papers

Inside out Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Papers Daniel W. Smith Félix Guattari met Gilles Deleuze in Paris shortly after the events of May 1968, through a mutual friend. Over the next twenty-five years, he would co-author five books with Deleuze, including, most famously, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia – AntiOedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus […]

A very different context: Dossier: Art and Immaterial Labour (with an introduction by Peter Osborne)

Dossier: Art and Immaterial Labour

Dossier Art and immaterial labour ‘Art and immaterial labour’… the conjunction is at once innocent and presumptuous. As Adorno suggested, if the general problem with using the word ‘and’ in titles is that it ‘permits everything to be connected with everything else and is thus incapable of hitting the mark’, in some instances it nonetheless […]

Rhizome: (With no return)

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

In the invitation to speakers for the conference From Structure to Rhizome, we suggested that talks might set out by re-examining (and hence ‘re-founding’) texts that we qualified – in far too rapid and expeditious a fashion – as ‘founding’. But we did not make this suggestion without being conscious of the difficulty involved in […]

Everybody thinks: Deleuze, Descartes and rationalism

In his 1968 book Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze famously stresses the violent, unnatural and shocking character of thought, counterposing his own anti-representational philosophy of difference to what he depicts as a dogmatic, humanist ‘image of thought’. In his own words: ‘“Everybody” knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under […]