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 […]

The minimus poems

Reivew of Nathan Brown, The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics
Nathan Brown, The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 296pp., £32.00 hb., 978 0 82327 299 0 As its starting point, Nathan Brown’s excellent new book The Limits of Fabrication asks disarmingly simple questions: how are poems made, and what are poems made of? He takes these questions […]

Student problems (1964): Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy (with an introduction by Warren Montag)

Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy

Dossier Thealthusser–Rancière Controversy Introduction to Althusser’s ‘Student Problems’ Warren montag For those familiar with Louis Althusser’s published work, reading his relatively early essay entitled ‘Student Problems’ may be a surprising and even disconcerting experience. Part of the surprise lies in the fact that the essay exists at all. Although it was published in Nouvelle Critique […]

Translation, philosophy, materialism

Translation, philosophy, materialism Lawrence Venuti Philosophy does not escape the embarrassment that faces contemporary academic disciplines when confronted with the problem of translation. In philosophical research, widespread dependence on translated texts coincides with neglect of their translated status, a general failure to take into account the differences introduced by the fact of translation. The problem […]

Knowledge as a Social Phenomenon

Knowledge as a Social Phenomenon Sean Sayers The idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon is no longer either novel or unfamiliar. With the growth of the social sciences, we are accustomed to seeing ideas and beliefs in social and historical terms, and trying to understand how they arise and why they take the forms […]

The Cunning of History in Reverse Gear

The Cunning of History in Reverse Gear Istvan Meszaros 1. ‘Llst der Vernunft’ and the ‘Cunning of History’ The Marxist notion of the ‘cunning of history’ was formulated as a ‘materialist standing on its feet’ of Hegel’s ‘cunning of Reason’ (Ust der Vernunft). According to Hegel, the latter is: ‘an artful device which, whlle seeming […]

From ‘Overdetermination’ to ‘Structural Causality’: Some Unresolved Problems in Althusser's Treatment of Causality

From ‘Overdetermination’ to ‘Structural Causality’: Some Unresolved Problems in Althursser’s Treatment of Causality Sheelagh Strawbridge Introduction .Much of Althusser’s work, in collaboration with Balibar, is concerned, by means of a ‘symptomatic’ reading of Marx’s mature work, to draw out the latent, silent, untheorised concepts present in that work and provide and adequately describe these missing […]

Materialism, Realism and the Reflection Theory

Materialism, Realism and the Reflection Theory* Sean Savers I The reflection theory is the traditional theory of knowledge of Marxism. It is this theory which is put forward by Engels and which is developed and defended at length by Lenin in MateriaZism and EmpirioCriticism [1]. The basic principles of this theory are simply stated and […]

On Materialism

On Materialism· Wal Suchting TEACHER SI FU TEACHER SI FU TEACHER SI FU Si Fu, name the basic questions of philosophy. Are things external to us, selfsufficient, independent of us, or are things in us, dependent on us, non-existent without us? What opinion is the correct one? There has been no decision about it …. […]

Philosophical Materialism or the Materialist Conception of History

PHILOSOPHICAL MATERIALISM OR THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION or HISTORY Alison Assiter Introduction ‘Marxism is a materialism’. This idea has become co.mmonplace. Usually, it amounts to placing Marx and Marxism inside a philosophical tradition; one whose roots lie in the atomistic philosophies of De.mocritus and Epicurus. Much r~cent ‘Marxist’ materialism imitates or reproduces many of the ideas […]

Reply to Keat and Dews on Dialectic

DIALICTIC: A RIPLY TO KIAT A.ND DBWS RoyEdgley In an article in Radical Philosophy 15, ‘Science, Social Science, and Socialist Science: Reason as Dialectic’, I argued that one of the central doctrines of dialectical materialism, that there are contradictions in reality, and with it the claim that science can be critical of its real object, […]

Misadventures of the Dialectic

Misadvenlures of Ihe Dialeclic Peter Dews I would like to offer some kind of critical response to the ideas on dialectic and social science which have been developed by Roy Edgley in articles published in Radical Philosophy (‘Reason as Dialectic’ RP15) and, more recently. in Critique (‘Dialectic: The Contradiction of Colletti’, Critique 7). As Edgley’s […]

Winch, Wittgenstein and Marxism

‘ Radical Philosophy :Thl.. leell Wlllch, WIII,gellslelll alld Ma.. xlsm ~. Ted Benton A Introduction This paper suffers from a certain ‘instability’ deriving from its having been written some years ago, and then substantially modified more recently to serve quite different purposes. This modification,has, unfortunately, been insufficiently thorough, although the instability of the paper may […]

In Defence of Internal Relations

In Defence of Inlemai Relalions -Beriell OIlman 11 Most of the criticisms of Alienation have centered on my account of Marx’s philosophy of internal relations. I would like to take advantage of the appearance of a second edition to develop my defence of this philosophy beyond the brief remarks found in the appendix on this […]

On Materialisms

expected is an analysis of our present situation with s’ome general guidelines for the transition to socialism. Dialectical change provides us with ever new situations which for an understanding demand that a wide range of experience .be drawn upon from within and without the revolutionary core. This in turn requires a respect for the opinions […]

Jospeh Dietzgen

Joseph Dj-elzgeD This article is the first of a series on neglected philosophers. Some subjects will, like Dietzgen, be largely unknown, others simply forgotten by British philosophy departments. Later articles will (we hope) include introductions to Merleau-Ponty, Cassirer, Collingwood and Fouca~lt. Other suggestions would be welcome JOSEPH DIETZGEN is indeed a neglected philosopher. How many […]

Reductionism and the ‘Uniqueness of Man’

ing-class Clbove one’s own as an individual. Not only is it a form of moral philistinism to construct a theory in which they must be excluded, but it can only devalue an important (though subsidiary) weapon in the working-class armoury for use in the class struggle. The Valu~ of Morality Morals, or rather moral principles […]

Common Sense

Common sen’se State power conceal what it doesn’t want to know a ‘theoretical’ laboratory which has ‘been found to be well-equipped for this universal function of non-thought, the effects of which can be spotted as much in the discourse of Marxist scholars as in that of professional revolutionaries. ——————————————————–(Note added February 1973) Correct ideas, says […]

Truth and Practice

TRUTH AnD PRA[TI[E Andrew [allier of scientific enquiry and experiment, this is common ground not only of all Marxist theories, but of intelligent bourgeois theories as well. Peter Binns’ paper ‘The Marxist Theory of Truth’ in Radical Philosophy 4 exemplifies what seems to have become a new orthodoxy among Marxists, as well as many bourgeois […]