radical philosophy

Cannibal metaphysics: Amerindian perspectivism

From anthropology to philosophy: Introduction to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Peter Skafish Can anthropology be philosophy, and if so, how? For philosophers, the matter has been and often remains quite simple: anthropology’s concern with socio-cultural and historical differences might yield analyses that philosophy can put to use (provided that it condescends to examine them), but only rarely does anthropology conceive its material at a level of generality or in relation […]

Here comes the new

We are swept up, are we not, by the large events and forces of our times? A.W. Merrick, Deadwood, Season 3 Shown across three twelve-episode series that began in 2004, Deadwood is one of several recent television programmes to develop long, serially formatted narratives of a complexity and scale hitherto unusual in its medium. Produced by HBO, the American subscription cable network also responsible for The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, […]

More than everything

There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although no one has actually read them page by page… a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us. Slavoj Žižek1 Allow me to be that figure (for now anyway), for Žižek has published a book which, while in no way unread­able – assuming one lives […]

The map is the territory

When I read the expression ‘The map is not theterritory’ for the first time, it occurred to me that it contained the quintessence of Anglo-American philosophyof common sense. The defiant insistence on a logic of representation, a common-sense belief in the evidence of an objective ‘reality’ that is prior to all mental representations or written marks, a normative concept of rigour and scientism – all that appeared to be condensed […]

Architectural Deleuzism

For many thinkers of the spatiality of contemporary capitalism, the production of all social space tends now to converge upon a single organizational paradigm designed to generate and service mobility, connectivity and flexibility. Networked, landscaped, borderless and reprogrammable, this is a space that functions, within the built environments of business, shopping, education or the ‘creative industries’, to mobilize the subject as a communicative and enterprising social actant. Integrating once discrete […]

Rhizome (With no return)

In the invitation to speakers for the conference From Structure to Rhizome, we suggested that talks might set out by re-examining (and hence ‘re-founding’) texts that we qualified – in far too rapid and expeditious a fashion – as ‘founding’. But we did notmake this suggestion without being conscious of the difficulty involved in the very idea of a ‘foundation’ for transdisciplinarity. The difference induced by the (re-founding) repetition and […]

Everybody thinks

In his 1968 book Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze famously stresses the violent, unnatural and shocking character of thought, counterposing his own anti-representational philosophy of difference to what he depicts as a dogmatic, humanist ‘image of thought’. In his own words: ‘“Everybody” knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under the impulse of a shock than in the excitement of a taste for thinking.’1 In […]

Body without image: Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan

A very different context

Grounding Deleuze

Marx and the philosophy of time

Becoming everyone

Deleuze and cosmopolitanism

An immanent transcendental

Inside out

138 Reviews

Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism Steve Edwards Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy Ian James Matthias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida Andrew McGettigan Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left:The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s Alberto Toscano Gary Peters, Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas Robin Durie […]

Walking through walls

Paolo Virno

Refiguring the multitude

Democratic materialism and the materialist dialectic