Lenin and Gandhi: A missed encounter?

The theme I shall address today has all the trappings of an academic exercise.* Still, I would like to attempt to show how it intersects with several major historical, epistemological and ultimately political questions. As a basis for the discussion, I will posit that Lenin and Gandhi are the two greatest figures among revolutionary theorist–practitioners […]

Noam Chomsky: Freedom and power

Interview noam chomsky Freedom and power Peter hallward I’d like to start by asking you about some of your basic philosophical principles, starting with your understanding of human freedom and creativity. In the modern European tradition I’m most familiar with, freedom is a dominant philosophical theme from Descartes through Rousseau to Kant. With Kant we […]

Also Sprach Zapata: Philosophy and resistance

Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw his adversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance. Clausewitz, On War, 1832Receive our truth in your dancing heart. Zapata lives, also and for always in these lands. Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee ZNLA, ‘Votan-Zapata or Five […]

Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence

Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence Andrew Thacker To become a work of art is the object of living – Oscar Wilde What role has aesthetics in the later work of Mic heI Foucault? In the final completed volumes of his History of Sexuality (translated as Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure and Vol. 3, The Care […]

Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism

Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism Kate Soper I shall not begin, as I probably should, by offering to define my terms. Instead, I shall acknowledge that I have brought together three concepts admitted on all sides to be well-nigh indefinable. Or, if they are definable, they are so only by reference to a particular thinker’s usage […]

Socialism, Feminism and Men

Socialism, Feminism and Men Peter Middleton Feminism has been both welcomed and resisted by socialist men in the past twenty years. As a critique of exploitation and inequality, feminism has been easily recognisable to socialism. Women can be added on to its emancipatory project as another oppressed class to be liberated. In practice this has […]

The Return of the Subject in late Foucault

The Return of the Subject in late Foucault Peter Dews The following essay is an initial attempt to extend the comparison of the thought of Michel Foucault with that of the Frankfurt School, begun in my Logics of Disintegration (Verso, 1987), to cover the work ofFoucault’s last phase. It does not claim to be a […]

The Human Body in Social Theory

The Human Body in Social Theory: Reich, Foucault and the Repressive Hypothesis Russell Keat 1. Are human bodies human? / recurrent issue in both philosophy and the human sciences has been the possibility of identifying distinctively human characteristics – such as the capacities for language, purposive action and conscious experience; sodallty, historlcity, and cultural diversity; […]

Politics Re-entered: The State in its Place

Politics Re-entered: The State in its Place Tony Skillen Though we cannot turn our backs on it or imagine, or wish, that it will wither away, the idea that the state is by definition the sole locus of politics seems Increasingly archaic. The price of retaining ‘the statist conception of politics’ seems to me that […]

The Real Meaning of Conservatism

The Real Meaning of Conservatism Andrew 8e/sey After the Affluent Fifties, the Swinging Sixties and the Doubting Seventies, what – the Authoritarian Eighties? Events around the world – in the Soviet Union, in the United States, in Thatcherite Britain, in South America, in Iran, Korea, Turkey and plenty of other places – suggest that aggressive, […]

The political function of the intellectual

The political function 01 the intellectual Michel Foucault ~. The text here translated consists of extracts, published in Politigue Hebdo No. 247, 29 November 1976, from a preface to the Italian translation of a collection of articles and interviews by Michel Foucault, entitled ‘Microphysics of Power’, to be published shortly by Einaudi, Turin. The preface […]

Birth of the Subject

Birth of the Subject Colin Gordon Since 1970 Michel Foucault has published three books, L ‘Ordre du Discours (The Order of Discourse), Surveiller et Punir (Surveillance and Punishment) and La volonte de savoir (The Will to Knowledge), none of which has yet appeared in English in this country. 1 This body of untranslated work, which […]

Michel Foucault: Prison Talk

PRISON TaLK: an interview with Miehel Foueault Introduction This interview dates from June 1975 when Michel Foucault published Surveiller et Punir (Surveillance and punishment), subtitled: Naissance ‘de la Prison (Birth of the Prison). This book can be seen as forming a trilogy with Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation (1961) and Birth of the Clinic (1963); each […]

The space of flows and timeless time: Manuel Castells’s The Information Age

The space of flows and timeless time Manuel Castells’s The Information Age Simon bromley is not new. Giddens, for example, has argued that the world is increasingly moving towards a situation where ʻthe consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized than beforeʼ, and in both The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-Identity […]

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 […]