radical philosophy

Name of the Father, ‘One’ of the Mother: From Beauvoir to Lacan

To Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragossa, perched on her column, ‘But there is something more, a puissance beyond the phallus.’ If I take a few aspects of the thought of Jacques Lacan, and investigate their relation to Simone de Beauvoir around one specific point, I have no intention of making him out – against received opinion – to be a feminist who didn’t know it and even less […]

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 […]

Figures of interpellation in Althusser and Fanon

Friedrich Adolf Kittler, 1943–2011

It is a mark of how far Kittler’s reputation had spread in the English-speaking world that he had acquired his own cutely alliterative epithet: ‘the Derrida of the digital age’. It was probably an inevitable moniker for a figure who brought his own brand of poststructuralist thinking to bear on media technologies, but it is misleading for those coming to his work for the first time. Certainly, Kittler’s work would […]

David Macey, 1949-2011

David Macey died from complications of lung cancer on 7 October. He embodied the paradox of being a fine public intellectual while remaining an intenselyprivate person. He was one of the best intellectual historians of his generation and added appreciably to scholarly knowledge, yet did his most significant work as a freelance writer outside the confines of the conventional academy. To an editor concerned with making serious work accessible to […]

‘All human beings are pregnant’

Mexico 1968

Jean Oury

Inside out

Mirrors without images

Vocabulary of European Philosophies, Part 1 (Subject)

Introduction From Abstraction to Wunsch: The Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies Howard Caygill Subject Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, Alain de Libera

Kostas Axelos

Family values

It’s the political economy, stupid!

The sword and the bridge

Psychoanalysis and politics

Jean Laplanche

Jean Laplanche is the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day. Setting out from a critical reconstruction of Freudʼs terminology, he has developed a systematic rethinking of psychoanalytic metapsychology under the heading of a ʻgeneral theory of seductionʼ. Still best known in Britain for his early joint work with Pontalis – ʻFantasy and the Origins of Sexualityʼ (1964; trans., International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 1968) and The Language […]

Demanding approval

The singular and the specific

‘Radical evil’ revived