radical philosophy

Noam Chomsky

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 have an affirmation of absolute freedom from all external causation, but it remains a relatively abstract affair, a matter of ‘pure […]

Imaginative mislocation

The average Westerner … was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields. Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906 The controversy that erupted in March over the publication of Charles Pellegrino’s account of the atomic bombings of Japan, The Last Train from Hiroshima, suggests that the historical legacy […]

Who was Oscar Masotta?

As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s sardonic detective Pepe Carvalho ruefully observed, in a dictionary of Argentine clichés, psychoanalysis would have a crucial place, along with ‘tango and the disappeared’.1 ‘One’ knows that along with Paris, Buenos Aires is one of the centres of psychoanalytic practice, and one of the leading training centres for Lacanians. What is less well known is how this state of affairs came to be historically, and how […]

Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of security

An aesthetic education against aesthetic education

Nihilism and faith

A salutary shock for bien pensant Europe

Agonized liberalism

Ruptured formalism

The ethics of conviction

Oedipus as figure

‘Radical evil’ revived

Constitutional state and democracy

The new Bergsonism

Ecology and Human Emancipation

Freedom’s Devices

Active Citizenship as Political Obligation

The Inorganic Body and the Ambiguity of Freedom

Boundaries Versus Binaries

Feminism and Images of Autonomy