radical philosophy

Open your head

In June 2015, twenty-two years after Frank Zappa’s death in 1993 and just before dying herself, his widow Gail released Dance Me This, his last completed album. While he was alive, Zappa’s each release mauled a fan’s idea of ‘good music’, exposing a previous identity as partial and bigoted, trashing personal taste in order to …

Letter: A response to Aradau on citizenship in the UK

I take no issue with the majority of Claudia Aradau’s powerful ‘Become a permanent migrant to the UK!’ (RP 194). I think, however, that she is wrong to see the UK citizenship test as representing a point of discontinuity within the ‘procedure of continuous control’ which is the disciplinary power of the British state.

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Pre-emptive strike

A response to ‘Resisting resilience’

As the editor of the new journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, published by Taylor & Francis, I am pleased to have a chance to respond to the ‘pre-emptive strike’ launched against the journal as a neoliberal ‘corporate-cum-academic dream’ in Mark Neocleous’s piece ‘Resisting Resilience’ (RP …

On theoretical foundations: Theses on Brecht

Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on Brecht’

Andrew McGettigan

These four short paragraphs, translated here into English for the first time, were sketched out in Walter Benjamin’s hand on a sheet filed alongside a transcript for his radio talk ‘Bert Brecht’, broadcast on Frankfurter Rundfunk in June 1930.1 In content, they resemble …

De-definition of media: A telegraphic postscript

A “telegraphic postscript” by Éric Alliez to the dossier of articles on “What is German Media Philosophy?”

Who Was Oscar Masotta? Response to Derbyshire

Philip Derbyshire (‘Who Was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysisin Argentina’, RP 158) should be commended for his insightful consideration of the literary and psychoanalytic writings of Oscar Masotta, one of the most important Argentine intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to make a case for juxtaposing these texts with Masotta’s idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary explorations …

It was better not to know

What have we learnt from Andrew McGettigan’s reconstruction (in RP 161) of the photographedSvendborg chess match? In a nutshell, that Brecht played bad moves and Benjaminfailed to take advantage. For those of us who have long cherished the idea of these two playingmatches of the highest standard to match their contributions outside the chess board, …

Benjamin and Brecht

Andrew McGettigen on Benjamin and Brecht’s games of chess.

Critical views of South Africa & Reply

Exchange on DJ Rottweiler

Exchange on ‘Fixing meaning’

Exchange on Hegel’s racism

Institutional critique-by-numbers

Levinas and the Right

On Humanitarian Bombing

Ideology is everyday; Fractured community

Blindspot on race

Critical social science and psychological explanation

Dearing revalued

Lesbians, gays and mainstream politics; Guy Hocquenghem