radical philosophy

Drone geographies

by Derek Gregory / RP 183 (Jan/Feb 2014) / Article

Last year Apple rejected Josh Begley’s Drones+ app three times. The app promised to send push notifications to users each time a US drone strike was reported, but Apple decided that many people would find it ‘objectionable’ (they said nothing about what they might feel about the strikes). When he defended his thesis at NYU …

Defiance or emancipation?

by Peter Hallward / RP 183 (Jan/Feb 2014) / Article

On Howard Caygill, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, Bloomsbury, London, 2013. 264 pp., £20.00 hb., 978 1 472522 58 0. Numbers in parentheses in the main text refer to pages of this book.

What is resistance? Rather than offering a conceptual definition, Howard Caygill’s new book approaches resistance as a problematic and elusive practice …

Anti-Revolutionary Republicanism

Claude Lefort’s Machiavelli
by Knox Peden / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Article

Amidst the enthusiasm marking the five hundredth anniversary of Machiavelli’s composition of The Prince in 1513, there is one recent publication that risks being overlooked. Last year saw the belated appearance in English of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort’s most substantial work, his 1972 doctoral thesis: Le travail de l’œuvre Machiavel. This volume, abridged …

Cannibal metaphysics: Amerindian perspectivism

With an introduction by Peter Skafish
by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Peter Skafish / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Article

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), …

Police power, all the way to heaven

Cujus est solum and the no-fly zone
by Mark Neocleous / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Article

What is a no-fly zone? Formally, it is a prohibition on flying in order to call a halt to hostilities in the region, usually enacted in aid of a group or groups which might otherwise suffer violence. When the Libyan civil war broke out in early 2011 one of the first demands made by several …

Our contemporary impotence

Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left
by Alain Badiou / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Article, Dossier, The Greek Symptom

We have, in this conference, discussed all of the crucial aspects of the situation in Europe and especially in Greece. We have, of course, analysed the great historical structures at stake: the particularly aggressive global politics of contemporary capitalism, the complicit weakness of the various states, and the reactive role played by Europe as it …

Debt society: Greece and the future of post-democracy

Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left
by Yannis Stavrakakis / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Article, Dossier, The Greek Symptom

The passage from early to late modernity is generally associated with a gradual process of democratization, in both political and economic realms. Politically speaking, representative democracy has enjoyed an unprecedented global spread. In the West, especially, political and social rights seemed to have flourished until quite recently. Economically speaking, we have witnessed a ‘democratization of …

From the end of national Lefts to subversive movements for Europe

Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left
by Antonio Negri / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Article, Dossier, The Greek Symptom

When we speak of the globalization of markets we also speak of a limitation imposed on the sovereignty of nation-states. In Western Europe, the essential error of national left-wing movements and parties [des gauches nationales] has been their failure to understand that globalization is an irreversible phenomenon.

Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, …

How can the aporia of the ‘European people’ be resolved?

Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left
by Étienne Balibar / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Article, Dossier, The Greek Symptom

The question that I deal with here is by no means a purely speculative one. It certainly evokes theoretical notions from different disciplines and from philosophy, but it does so because of a specific economy of circumstances, a crisis of economics, in a particular place (Greece), which happens to be at the origin of the …

The Greek symptom

Debt, crisis and the crisis of the Left
by Radical Philosophy / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Article, Dossier, The Greek Symptom

The texts in this dossier were initially presented to an international conference on the current crisis in Greece, ‘Le symptôma grec’, held on 18–20 January 2013, at the University of Paris 8 and the École normale supérieure.

The conference took as its point of departure the exemplary role that Greece has played over the last …

Total social crisis and the return of fascism

Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left
by Elsa Papageorgiou / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Article, Dossier, The Greek Symptom

In memory of Sahtzat Loukman, 27 years old, murdered on 17 January 2013 in Athens, and Clement Meric, 18 years old, murdered on 5 June 2013 in Paris.

This contribution seeks to mobilize certain concepts in order to symbolize what, in part, always resists symbolization. What is at issue is the return of …

Time of Debt

On the Nietzschean origins of Lazzarato’s indebted man
by Simon Morgan Wortham / RP 180 (July/Aug 2013) / Article

Among the many recent writings on the debt crisis engulfing economic relationships across the globe, one that is currently receiving a great deal of interest is Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition*.

Politics in a Tragic Key

by Alberto Toscano / RP 180 (July/Aug 2013) / Article

In memory of Joel Olson (1967-2012)

In the quarter-century or so since the obscure disaster of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, two words have been pinned to that of ‘communism’ with liberal abandon: ‘tragedy’ and ‘transition’. Tragedy, to signify the magnitude of suffering, but not the greatness of the enterprise; the depth of the fall, …

Here comes the new

Deadwood and the historiography of capitalism
by David Cunningham / RP 180 (July/Aug 2013) / Article

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. …

Spontaneous generation

The fantasy of the birth of concepts in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
by Stella Sandford / RP 179 (May/Jun 2013) / Article

In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, at the end of the transcendental deduction of the categories, Kant distinguishes the doctrine of transcendental idealism from competing theories of knowledge – or, more specifically, theories of the relation between concepts and experience – by characterizing them in terms of various theories …

Philosophy and the Black Panthers

by Howard Caygill / RP 179 (May/Jun 2013) / Article

The vanguard party only teaches the correct methods of resistance.

Huey P. Newton, 1967

‘Hey Joe! How many of you motherfuckers are coming out here?’ ‘Here’ was Santa Rita Jail, California, early morning, Thursday 3 December 1964. ‘Joe’ was Joe Blum, a student radical, and the accompanying ‘motherfuckers’ were the 814 …

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

With introduction by Penelope Deutscher
by Françoise Collin / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013) / Article

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 – …

The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process

With introduction by Bruno Bosteels
by Alain Badiou / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013) / Article

After achieving considerable critical acclaim with Almageste and Portulans – two avant-garde novels that promptly caught the attention of his long-time intellectual model Jean-Paul Sartre – Alain Badiou published ‘The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process’, his first work as a philosopher.1 Written in 1965 as part of a seminar presented under the aegis of his …

Extraction, logistics, finance

Global crisis and the politics of operations
by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013) / Article

Now that the global crisis of capitalism is entering its fifth year, it is possible to discern the contours of its unfolding. No New Deal or world war is emerging to save the day. The ritual purification of austerity has not cleansed the global sewer of finance despite the harsh and unequal punishments it has …