radical philosophy

Introduction

Introduction

Of all the genealogical sources of contemporary critical theory, in both its German- and French-inspired variants, early German Romanticism remains the most potent, yet it is also the least explicated in relation to current theoretical trends. [*] The sources of modern criticism in Jena Romanticism are widely acknowledged, yet when theory parades as …

Futures present

‘The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy’, Adorno wrote in a sentence used here as the motto for Verso’s new ‘Futures’ series, from which these three books by Augé, Berardi and Virno form the bulk of the first batch. [*] But what becomes of the essay when …

Realism and moral being

Andrew Collier, who died on 3 July after more than a decade living with cancer, was a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective during the 1990s and a longstanding contributor to the journal. Born in Edmonton, North London, towards the end of World War II, he attended Bedford College, University of London (later …

The postconceptual condition

Those with long enough memories will no doubt recognize the crossed syntax of my title. It mimics, first, that of a text which, while in historical terms still recent, is nonetheless already antiquated, even if not yet sufficiently so to have acquired the ‘revolutionary energies’ that André Breton and, after him, Walter Benjamin sought in …

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), …

Disguised as a dog

I take my title and my philosophical cue from a passage in Marx’s 1839 ‘Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy’. I take my artistic cue from the early work of Valie Export. The passage from Marx reads as follows:

As in the history of philosophy there are nodal points which raise philosophy in …

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 …

From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought

The concept of transdisciplinarity is not part of the explicit discourse or self-consciousness of ‘French thought’. Rather, it is used here, imported from the outside as a kind of operator or problematizing device, to begin a process of rethinking one of that body of thought’s most distinctive but infrequently remarked upon characteristics – its tendency …

A sudden topicality

Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis

Undoing the aesthetic image

One hundred and fifty, not out

Jeff Wall

A very different context

Marx and the philosophy of time

Debacle

Neo-classic

What is to be done? (education)

Vocabulary of European Philosophies, Part 2 (Object)

Introduction

Gegenstand/Objekt Dominique Pradelle

Object Olivier Boulnois

Res Jean-François Courtine

Vocabulary of European Philosophies, Part 1 (Subject)

Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, Alain de Libera

Introduction by Peter Osborne.

The Dreambird of Experience