Jean-Luc Nancy, 1940-2021

One day, what I am saying to you today will no longer have any sense or any handle on the period. But today this is where there is some sense: in saying sense is absent, in saying that this absence is what we are exposed to, and that this exposition constitutes what I will call […]
Photograph of Jean Luc Nancy speaking in a grand venue and projected on a screen behind

The Two Names of Communism

The two names of communism John roberts Toujours avec l’espoir de rencontrer la mer, Ils voyageaient sans pain, sans batons et sans urnes, Mordant au citron d’or de l’idéal amer. Stéphane Mallarmé, 18621The recent explosion of writing on the communist idea, ideal and ‘communization’ recovers or expands a moment in the early to mid-1980s when […]

79 Reviews

REVIEWS Wakey wakey John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, Routledge, London and New York, 1995. x + 203 pp., £19.99 hb., 0 415 12475 1. Why should the collapse of the Berlin Wall have come to stand as the symbol of the revolutions which swept away historical […]

63 Reviews

Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology Jonathan Hughes Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’ s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion Jonathan Rée Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality Herta Nagl-Docekal and Herlinde Pauer-Studer, eds., Denken der Geschlechterdifferenz: Neue Fragen und Perspectiven der Feministischen Philosophie […]

Birth, love, politics

Properly speaking, the individual and the community should be considered as opposites. The first term refers to something indivisible that stands by itself, while the second term, as can be seen from its root (cum), expresses the very essence of relation. Corresponding to the concept of the individual there should be that of a collectivity […]

The fate of the body politic

Whatever happened to the idea of the body politic? For those interested in social and political thought this is a pertinent question, since these fields have in recent years become saturated with discussions of the body. The loss of confidence in previously established categories has provoked a widespread return to the body as the basis […]

163 Reviews

It’s hard to know exactly who the audience is for this small book, the fifth in Semiotext(e)’s Intervention Series, and an uneasy bedfellow with its immediate predecessor in the series, Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War. Taken broadly, it’s an overview of the concept of the machine/machinic as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari, combined with post-autonomist […]