Violence, justice and justification

Reivew of Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence; Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified?; Adriana Cavarero with Judith Bulter and Bonnie Honig, Towards a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence.
Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso, 2020). 224pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 78873 276 5. Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified? (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). 140pp., £35.00 hb., £9.99 pb., 978 1 50952 920 9 hb., 978 1 50952 921 6 pb.. Adriana Cavarero with Judith […]
Sticker on lampost which reads 'NO MORE POLICE POWERS! KILL THE BILL'.

What a body can do

On 11 Brumaire, Year XI [November 2, 1803], a Guadeloupe tribunal sentenced Millet de la Girardière to be placed in an iron cage in the square at Pointe-à-Pitre and left there until dead. The cage employed for this public torture is eight feet tall. The criminal confined therein straddles a sharp blade. His feet are […]

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 […]

Statement on UC Davis

Radical Philosophy condemns the police brutality on the UC Davis campus on November 18th 2011 and the UC administration’s continuing use of violence to suppress faculty and student protest against the privatization of the UC system. We support the students and faculty members in their continuing protests, the open letter by Nathan Brown (Assistant Professor […]

The Politics of Aggression

contradictory claims r~ard1ng freedOm and necessity in the same work. An alternative approach to the determinism debate is the one adopted in Alienation which underscores the elastic meaninq of ‘ciCuse’ and ‘detelllLine’, but this doesn’t bring out adequately the reasohs for such variations. If Marx’s materialist conception of history, then, deals with the determining role […]

A global public sphere?

Commentary A global public sphere? Susan Buck-Morss When the multitude ceases to fear, it becomes fearful. Benedict Spinoza* This is the text of a talk to the Radical Philosophy Conference, Look No Hands! Political Forms of Global Modernity, Birkbeck College, London, 27 October 2001. September 11 has ruptured irrevocably the context in which we as […]

Oedipus as figure

Oedipus as figure Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe It is probable, or at the very least plausible, that Western humanity now models itself on two figures or types – two ʻexamplesʼ, if you like. They appear to be antagonistic (or are at least supported by antagonistic discourses), but their antagonism also binds together, and founds, their kinship, as […]

Susan Sontag, 1933–2004

Obituary Counter-traditionalist Susan Sontag, 1933–2004 In the prefatory note to her first collection of critical writings, Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag reflected that ʻin the end, what I have been writing is not criticism at all, strictly speaking, but case studies for an aesthetic, a theory of my own sensibilityʼ. The statement holds true for […]

Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2

Critique of Violence: the deposing of the law Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2 Irving wohlfarth Things fal apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’The ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921, hereafter abbreviated to ‘Critique’) is the only published statement of Benjamin’s on politics and […]