radical philosophy

The ship sails on

Review | RP184 (Mar/Apr 2014)

Alain Badiou, Cinema, Polity, Cambridge, 2013. 320 pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 74565 567 3 hb., 978 0 74565 568 0 pb.

To call a book simply Cinema is to frame its contents as a contribution to the theorization of cinema, and thus, for a certain readership, …

Our contemporary impotence

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 …

Politics in a Tragic Key

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, …

The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process

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 …

An introduction to Alain Badiou’s ‘The autonomy of the aesthetic process’

See Alain Badiou, ‘The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process’ (in the same issue)

The Two Names of Communism

Toujours avec l’espoir de rencontrer la mer, lis voyageaient sans pain, sans batons et sans urnes, Mordant au citron d’or de l’ideal amer. Stephane Mallarme, 18621

The recent explosion of writing on the communist idea, ideal and ‘communization’ recovers or expands a moment in the early to mid-1980s when French politi­cal theory and philosophy (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), …

Flickers

Bruno Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis and Religion in Times of Terror, Verso, London and New York, 2012. 326 pp., £19.99 pb., 978 1 84467 755 9.

Bruno Bosteels is probably best known to readers of Radical Philosophy as translator of and commentator on the work of Alain Badiou …

176 Reviews

Reviewing Rancière. Or, the persistence of discrepancies

In the nearly four decades since its original publication, Althusser’s Lesson has acquired a certain mythical aura as the dark precursor of things to come. Even with the wealth of translations of Jacques Rancière’s work that have been published at an increasingly feverish pace over the past few years in the wake of the …

Flaubert’s parrot

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2011. 215 pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 74564 531 5 hb., 978 0 74564 530 8 pb.

David Cunningham

The ongoing role played by French philosophy in underwriting the contemporaneity of anglophone theory has entailed, since …

Theatre and the public

156 Reviews

Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions Alberto Toscano

Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks Tiziana Terranova

Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? Andrew Goffey

Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption Alison Stone

Damian F. White, Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal Mick …