Fallen angel: Guy Lardreau's later voluntarism

The French philosopher and erstwhile Maoist militant Guy Lardreau (1947-2008) was the first to admit that much of his work was haunted by a single problem, one posed by the revolutionary political history of the twentieth century. 1 The great revolutions in Russia and China, and several other places inspired by their example, pursued radical […]

French philosophy today

Reivew of Christopher Watkin, French Philosophy Today
Christopher Watkin, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 272pp., £24.99 pb., 978 1 47441 473 9 Following an earlier study of ‘post-theological thinking’ in the work of Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux and Jean-Luc Nancy (2011), Christopher Watkin’s new book on several […]

Jacques Derrida: The Deconstruction of Actuality

The Deconstruction of Actuality An Interview with Jacques Derrida This interview was conducted in Paris in August 1993, to mark the publication ofDerrida’ s Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilee, 1993), and was published in the monthly review Passages in September. This English translation appears in Radical Philosophy with permission. Passages: From Bogota to Santiago, from […]

Return of the Translator

COMMENTARY Return of the Translator Jonathan Ree ‘The Death of the Author’ is one of the great catchphrases of recent philosophy. It started as the title of an essay by Roland Barthes in 1968, and cleverly captures the idea that the act of reading ought to attend to textual structures rather than authorial personalities – […]

Svelte Discourse’ and the Philosophy of Caution

‘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 […]

The ‘New Philosophers’ and the End of Leftism

THI ‘NIW PHILOSOPHIRS’ AND THI IND or LlrTISM Peter Dews Introduction Fashion moves fast in Parisian salons, and the taste for intellectual scandal demands the constant breaking of fresh taboos. Three years ago, in the spring of 1977, a group of young authors styling themselves the ‘New Philosophers’ moved rapidly to the centre of attention, […]

Philosophy in Germany

Philosophy in Germany Simon critchley and axel honneth SC: Simply as a way of initially organizing our discussion, we both agreed to read a short article by Dieter Henrich that appeared in Merkur in his philosophy column, ʻEine Generation im Abgangʼ (ʻA Passing Generationʼ). [1] Henrich rightly claims that a change of generations is coming […]

Neo-classic: Alain Badiou’s Being and Event

Neo-classic Alain Badiou’s Being and Event Peter osborne If anyone was in doubt about the continuing grip of French philosophy on the theoretical imagination of the anglophone humanities, the reception of the writings of Alain Badiou must surely have put paid to such reservations. The translation of his magnum opus, Being and Event, in spring […]

Theory: (Madness of)

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

Forty years or so after it initially rose as a rather new name for a rather new thing, theory is still an obtruse signifier, troubling and floating, requiring we go back to basics. Theory as we most often understand it today is the name given by the English-speaking intellectual community to a certain type of […]

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 […]