radical philosophy

‘For all that gives rise to an inscription in general’

Of Grammatology, which history seems likely to confirm as Jacques Derrida’s most influential book, was published almost four decades ago.* This book marked the beginning of my pathway into philosophy and it has accompanied me throughout my investigations of science and the history of science. I shall therefore begin these remarks with quite a long …

Generative grafting

In 2013, at the advanced age of 101, Howard W. Jones, a medical pioneer in reproductive technology, published Personhood Revisited: Reproductive Technology, Bioethics, Religion and the Law. Looking back at the development of what came to be called the ARTs (assisted reproductive technologies), Jones chronicles the initial controversies surrounding their emergence and his own participation …

Conditions of the university

Andrew McGettigan, The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Education, Pluto Press, London, 2013. 232 pp., £54.00 hb., £15.00 pb., 978 0 74533 294 9 hb., 978 0 74533 293 2 pb.

In an interview with Giovanna Borradori given after 9/11, Jacques Derrida said: ‘I am incapable of knowing who today …

Grande biog

Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2012. 603 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 74565 615 1.

‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking?’ Despite post-structuralist philosophies’ association with Beckettian questions such as these, they remain surprisingly bound to what Foucault …

Fabrication defect

François Laruelle, professor of philosophy at Paris X, Nanterre, has been publishing since the early 1970s and now has around twenty book-length titles to his name. English-language reception of his work owes most to the efforts of Ray Brassier, who published an account of Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’ in Radical Philosophy in 2003 and critically incorporated aspects …

The Valuation of Nature

How to value biodiversity and the mutable thing called nature, in the context of biodiversity loss in the UK and elsewhere, is a question that has been vexing biologists, conservation groups, environmental lawyers and indigenous groups. The question is posed in the context of that modestly named ‘sixth mass extinction event’, the Holocene …

Euphemism, the university and disobedience

Euphemism is the linguistic condition of contemporary society and spreads through the university as much as through any other institution. But what, exactly, is a euphemism? After having turned his attention to the different meanings of the Greek word from which ‘euphemism’ is derived, and having considered the fact that they seem to contradict each other and bring about a …

Subjectivity as medium of the media

Contemporary, let us say ‘post-modern’, discourses on media, communication, information and so on are functioning in our society in at least two different – if interconnected – ways.* First, they describe scientifically the functioning of contemporary media and their growing role in our society. But the development of media theory during recent decades was, in …

The performative without condition

‘Responsibility’ and the homonymy of autonomy

‘Take your time but be quick about it, because you don’t know what awaits you’, said French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1998 at Stanford.1 Indeed. He would not have expected to be cited like this by Valérie Pécresse, French Minster for Higher Education and Research, in January …

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908–2009

Patrice Maniglier argues that if the next century might be one day be recognized as Deleuzian or Badiouian, it won’t be so without us first realizing that the one that has just ended was Lévi-Straussian.

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 …

Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2

Aporias of free trade

Primitive accumulation is not produced just once at the dawn of capitalism, but is continually reproducing itself.

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 1

In a climate rife with threats of species extinction, we propose a genealogy of the discourse of the late twentieth century in which the meaning of the natural …

The promise of justice

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 …