The spectral ontology of value

There is a void at the heart of capitalism. It arises because of the nature of commodity exchange, which abstracts from, or absents, the entire substance of use value. What is constituted therewith is a form of unity of commodities that does not rest on any pre-given common content – which does not exist, it […]

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 […]

Globalization and modern philosophy

While the need for the renovation of critical social theory has been evident for decades, radical critique has disappeared among leading philosophical schools. Mainstream social criticism, having silently accepted the rules of the game, has turned itself to the other side of the same, to a ʻcritical allyʼ of capitalism. As one modern critic puts […]

Karatani’s Marxian parallax

One of the rarely noticed historical ironies of the twentieth century was the effort of societies located on the capitalist periphery – outside of Euro-America – to resort to a philosophy which had no place for them in order to explain their entry into and experience of capitalist modernization. Japan led the way in this […]

The concept of metropolis: Philosophy and urban form

In what sense would a certain concept of the urban meet, as Henri Lefebvre asserted some thirty-five years ago, a ʻtheoretical needʼ? What forms of crosscultural and cross-disciplinary ʻgeneralityʼ would be at stake here? And if this is indeed, as Lefebvre always insisted, a question of a necessary ʻelaboration, a search, a conceptual formulationʼ, what […]

The concept of money

The concept of money Christopher J. Arthur In the history of philosophy the greatest minds have been aware that the existence and power of money pose a problem. One need only mention Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Simmel. Of course, if one accepts, as I do, that Capital is a work of philosophy as much as […]

Commodity aesthetics revisited: Exchange relations as the source of antagonistic aesthetization

Thus much of this, will make black white; foul, fair…This line from Shakespeare figures in a longer quotation in Marxʼs Capital, in the chapter on hoarding. The sentence to which the footnote with the Shakespeare quotation is attached, reads: ʻJust as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too, for its part, […]

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity Stewart martin Art’s relation to commodification is an unavoidable and entrenched condition for much of the theory, history and practice of art today; so entrenched, in fact, as to have become implicit and assumed for many. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, considerations of this relation have […]

Joseph McCarney, 1941–2007

Joseph McCarney, 1941–2007 Joe McCarney, who has died in a tragic road accident at the age of sixty-six, was a unique voice in the resurgence of Marxist theory and philosophy that took place in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. He joined the Radical Philosophy group in 1976, and he was prominent thereafter as a […]

Marx and the philosophy of time

Marx and the philosophy of time Peter osborne What is Marx’s contribution to the philosophy of time? Or, to put it another way, what has a temporal reading of Marx’s writings to contribute to the understanding of the philosophical aspects of his thought? How, for example, might it reconfigure the relationship between the historical, analytical […]

André Gorz, 1923–2007

Obituary The writer’s malady André Gorz, 1923–2007 When André Gorz committed suicide with his wife last September, even President Sarkozy felt obliged to pay tribute to ‘a major intellectual figure of the French and European Left’. Gorz never courted fame or celebrity, but the dramatic manner of his death created a storm of publicity and […]

Elasticity of demand: Reflections on 'The Wire'

Can’t reason with the pusherman. Finance is all that he understands. Curtis Mayfield, ‘Little Child Runnin’ Wild’ David Simon and Edward Burns’s TV series The Wire (HBO, 2002–08) opens with a killing and builds from there, over five seasons and sixty hours of television. What it narrates is the present life of a neoliberalized postindustrial […]

Symposium on Keynes: No New Deal Is Possible, Keynesianism Constrained, The Politics of the Long Run

Commentary symposium No New Deal is possible Antonio negri John Maynard Keynes was a gentleman – that is, an honest bourgeois, not a pettybourgeois like Proudhon, or an ideologue, but an easy man – and when political economy was still concerned with the political ordering of market and society every classical economist knew this. Keynes […]

A day in the life of Ivan Ergich: Bursaspor gets a Marxist player

A Marxist footballer in Turkey? A player who is as comfortable reeling off critical theorists of the Frankfurt School as he is of his favourite footballing colleagues, such as Messi, Ronaldinho and Zidane? This is particularly anomalous given Turkey’s history of political and ideological repression for most of the twentieth century. Adopting Mussolini’s Penal Code […]