'Lynne Segal' tag archive

REVIEWS Biographemes Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography, translated by Sarah Wykes, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994. xiv + 291 pp., £25.00 hb., 0 7456 1017 X. In 1968, Roland Barthes solemnly announced the death of the author in a short article that echoed the obituary for man penned by Foucault in the final lines of […]

REVIEWS Paradise postponed David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, Cambridge and Paris, Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de I’Homme, 1993. xiii + 387 pp., £40.00 hb., 0 521 41851 8. Despite a dismal economic performance since its resurgence in the late 1970s, it is currently fashionable to be for capitalism. Throughout the […]

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 […]

REVIEWS FEMINIST FUTURES Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female?, London, VIrago, 1986. Lynne Segal, in Is the Future Female?, criticises much contemporary feminism as uniformly celebrating difference between the sexes, and thereby downplaying the changes that have taken place, historically, in women’s lifes, and the social, psychological and economic variations amongst women. Offering analyses of […]

To see clearly requires distance, but during the last century Western intellectuals were too close to psychoanalysis to get a good view. Insider accounts, both friendly and antagonistic, predominated. The decline in analytic fortunes since the 1960s, along with the general shift in the Zeitgeist, has opened a path for historical perspective. Cassandraʼs Daughter is […]

Friedrich Schlegelʼs two-hundred-year-old fragment ʻNothing is more rarely the subject of philosophy than philosophy itselfʼ shows its age. Now, its inversion seems true. Whether through recognition that philosophyʼs self-legitimating critique of the unexcavated presuppositions of other disciplines threatens to prove itself wanting; or, through various concerns for philosophyʼs apparently imminent death (which philosophers frequently seem […]

Reviews Universalism’s struggleMartha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. xxi + 312 pp., £20.00 hb., 0 521 66086 6. Nussbaumʼs is a moral project, couched in ethical arguments that stipulate and champion a list of ʻcapabilitiesʼ. These are the capabilities which allow women, the traditionally disadvantaged group […]

The ethical dimension of Adornoʼs work is elusive and gestural, but it is an ineliminable part of his philosophy. Jay Bernstein attempts to do justice to what he terms the ʻethical intensityʼ of Adornoʼs writing by reconstructing the ethical content and premisses of his philosophical output. However, this book is not only a mining of […]

‘You nearly gave me a heart attack’, a friend told me, after my talk at the opening session of the event in London celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first national Women’s Liberation Conference in the UK, at Ruskin College, in February 1970. Appropriately enough, the feminist publisher and cultural entrepreneur Ursula Owen had organized […]