In the culture in which I was brought up, in the language that mediated this culture, ʻboycottʼ had a distinctly negative connotation. It has usually been associated with a moralistic punishment directed towards an individual or a group that has transgressed a norm without, perhaps, actually breaking the law. Admittedly, boycott was opposed to the […]
How are we to think about a museum that represents a people who not only do not exist on conventional maps but who are also in the process of resisting obliteration by one of the most brutal military complexes in the world? What is, and what can be, the role of a museum in a […]
Standing before a firing squad, in Margarethe von Trotta’s 1986 biopic Rosa Luxemburg, Luxemburg is taken in flashback to an image of herself as a child refusing to go to bed, intent on seeing the petals of a rose unfurl before her. A gun cracks, but no bullets are fired. It is when death is […]
Commentary Moving borders The politics of dirt Peter nyers Who can move? Who can speak? Who can act politically? The struggles of refugees and migrants have problematized conventional answers to these questions in a profound manner. Their struggles have demonstrated that, despite the considerable risks and dangers, new political subjects are being formed within securitized […]
NEWS Women in philosophy in Britain The good news and the bad T he Society for Women in Philosophy has now been in existence in Britain for over a decade. During this time a great deal has been achieved in terms both of the increased publication of feminist philosophy and the encouragement and support of […]
Orientalism and After An Interview with Edward Said Edward Said is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York and editor of Arab Studies Quarterly. Best known academically for his book Orientatism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), which was a milestone in the redefinition of the concerns of literary studies, […]
Levinas’s political judgement The Esprit articles 1934–1983 Howard caygill Lebanon, Levinas revealed a capacity for political judgement that at first glance seems remote from the prevailing picture of Levinasian ethics. While refusing the synthesis of realpolitik and mysticism that to some extent characterized the Likud era in Israeli politics, Levinas was nevertheless forthright in making […]
News Whose war? George Bush called it an act of war. He has rarely been good with words, but this time he was quite right. And an astonishingly brutal and vicious act of war it was. Nevertheless, the stunning violence of the attacks of 11 September does not by itself signal the beginning of a […]
Commentary A Mediterranean way for peace in Israel–Palestine? Étienne Balibar and Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond A stateʼs origins do not determine its destiny, which always opens on to various possible histories even though some of them – depending on the circumstances – seem after the event to have been more likely than others. And yet the way […]
Commentary Nasrallah’s reasons Hizbullah and the conflict in Lebanon Nicholas noe‘t errorist organizations like Hizbullah … cannot be deterred’, wrote prominent right-winger and former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens in a recent piece for Haaretz. ‘There is only one option here: these organizations must be defeated.’ Unfortunately, Arens’s logic now appears to be the dominant […]
COMMENTARY Looking Back on ’68 Managing the present Kristin Ross The problem with the past is that it is unpredictable. This may be one reason why French president Nicolas Sarkozy has recently generated a series of bizarre decrees – the precise legal status and implementation of which are uncertain, if not unimaginable – that attempt to manage the memory […]
News Walking into wallsAcademic freedom, the Israeli Left and the occupation within In March 2006, Radical Philosophy published a piece by the Israeli architect and writer Eyal Weizman, now director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Entitled ‘Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict’ (RP 136, March/April […]
Forensic architecture Only the criminal can solve the crime Eyal weizman A strange story unfolded in the shadows of the legal and diplomatic furore that accompanied the release, on 15 September 2009, of Richard Goldstone’s Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which alleged that the Israeli army (and Hamas) […]