Bodies in space: On the ends of vulnerability

Weaker now, we mistakenly identify ourselves as our bodies. Ilona Sagar, ‘Correspondence O’, digital video, 2017 I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854 The last […]

Critique without ontology: Genealogy, collective subjects and the deadlocks of evidence

In the past few years, the number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea has dramatically increased due to the strengthening of border controls and a deliberate politics of migration containment put into place by the EU in cooperation with third countries. In 2018, according to UN Refugee Agency [UNHCR] estimations, an average of six […]

Gender without identities

Reivew of Judith Roof, What Gender Is, What Gender Does
Judith Roof, What Gender Is, What Gender Does (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 280 pp., £78.00 hb., £21.99 pb., 978 0 81669 857 8 hb., 978 0 81669 858 5 pb. In queer theorist Annamarie Jagose’s book, Orgasmology (2012), she argues that orgasm has been an overlooked aspect of queer critique. Part of a […]

Drone geographies

Drone geographies derek gregory Last year Apple rejected Josh Begley’s Drones+ app three times. The app promised to send push notifications to users each time a US drone strike was reported, but Apple decided that many people would find it ‘objectionable’ (they said nothing about what they might feel about the strikes). When he defended […]

Generative grafting: Reproductive technology and the dilemmas of surrogacy

COMMENT Generative grafting Reproductive technology and the dilemmas of surrogacy Elina staikou In 2013, at the advanced age of 101, Howard W. Jones, a medical pioneer in reproductive technology, published Personhood Revisited: Reproductive Technology, Bioethics, Religion and the Law. Looking back at the development of what came to be called the ARTs (assisted reproductive technologies), Jones […]

170 Reviews: Books Reviewed:Jacques Rancière, The Politics of LiteratureJudith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and Cornell West, The Power of Religion in the Public SphereClayton Crockett, Radical Political TheologyNiilo Kauppi,Radicalism in French CultureHeiko Schmid, Wolf-Dietrich Sahr and John Urry, eds., Cities and Fascination: Beyond the Surplus of MeaningAdrian Mackenzie, Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network CultureEncarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect: A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of LaborAndrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush

Reviews Flaubert’s parrotJacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2011. 215 pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 74564 531 5 hb., 978 0 74564 530 8 pb. The ongoing role played by French philosophy in underwriting the contemporaneity of anglophone theory has entailed, since the 1970s, […]

Virtual sexes and feminist futures: The philosophy of 'cyberfeminism'

Virtual sexes and feminist futures The philosophy of ‘cyberfeminism’ Jill Marsden It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’. Donna Haraway Whilst the majority of her work has received little critical attention, Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’l has rapidly attained cult status in many branches of contemporary theory. With this […]

71 Reviews

REVIEWS Getting it right 10n Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds.,Constitutionalism and Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. vii + 359 pp., £ 12.95 pb., 0521 34530 8 hb., 0 521 45721 1 pb. Anthony Barnett, Caroline Ellis and Paul Hirst, eds., Debating the Constitution: New Perspectives on Constitutional Reform, Cambridge, Polity, 1993. xix + 183 […]

Judith Butler: Gender as Performance

Gender as Performance An Interview with Judith Butler ludithButlerteaches in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France ( J987) traced the dialectic ofpro- and anti-Hegelian currents in French theory across the writings ofa wide range ofthinkers. She is best known, however, for […]

87 Reviews

Philosophy of Mind is presently regarded as one of the most productive areas of comtemporary analytic philosophy. A number of recent introductory works (here those by Jackson and Braddon Mitchell, Crane, Kim and Rey) give us a chance to reflect on the dominant paradigms in terms of which the subject is taught. These texts display […]

Contingent ontologies: Sex, gender and ‘woman’ in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler

Contingent ontologies Sex, gender and ‘woman’ in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler Stella sandford a concerted critique of the sex/gender distinction has not mitigated this sense of historical importance, or even historical necessity. But developments in feminist theory – in particular the claims being made on behalf of various feminisms of difference – and […]

Wishful theory and sexual politics

Across the last two or three decades identity and desire have been ʻtheorizedʼ relentlessly. Influences have been diverse: I remember especially the impact, for gay writing, of Barthesʼ dream, or plea, in 1975, for a radical sexual diversity wherein there would no longer be homosexuality (singular) but homosexualities, a plural so radical it ʻwill baffle […]