radical philosophy

Is it simple to be a Spinozist in philosophy?

At strategic points in Reading Capital, Louis Althusser introduces Spinoza’s idea of an immanent cause as the decisive concept that is absent from Marx’s discourse. [1] For the Althusser of 1965, Spinoza’s model of causality is the great missing link in Marx’s thought, a philosophical omission and lacuna of symptomatic force. …

The necessity of contingency

Among the concepts proposed by Althusser in the course of his famous symptomatic reading of Marx’s Capital, structural causality plays a central role. Extrapolated from Marx’s writings via a detour through the philosophy of Spinoza, it came to represent the concept in which Althusser summed up ‘Marx’s immense theoretical revolution’. [1] …

Race, real estate and real abstraction

The crises and mutations of contemporary capitalism have rendered palpable Marx’s observation according to which in bourgeois modernity human beings are ‘ruled by abstractions’. [1] The processes of financialization animating the dynamics of the 2007–8 crisis involved the violent irruption into the everyday lives of millions of a panoply of ominous …

Anti-Revolutionary Republicanism

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 …

A precarious dialogue

Maria Kakogianni    It seems to me that we are in an intermediary situation today. The period of the great renunciation of the revolutionary past, and of the ‘end of History’, seems to be giving way to a new sequence of popular struggles (the Arab Spring, Los Indignados, Occupy Wall Street, etc.). But, within this new sequence, …

178 Reviews

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)

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), …

Figures of interpellation in Althusser and Fanon

The text that Althusser published in 1970 under the title ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, where he puts forward the thesis of the individual’s interpellation as subject, is no doubt one of his most innovative, but it is also particularly disconcerting: its exposition, in exploiting a rhetoric that combines ellipses and brute force, winds up …

The patient cannot last long

The presence on our bookshelves of such texts as Louis Althusser’s Reply to John Lewis and Jacques Rancière’s Althusser’s Lesson immediately invites the readers who pick them up to ask themselves what might be at play between titles that so readily mix, miss or specify the genres – if there are any – through which a text …

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 …

Red years: Althusser’s lesson, Rancière’s error and the real movement of history

The dissolution of the organizational forms which are created by the movement, and which disappear when the movement ends, does not reflect the weakness of the movement, but rather its strength. The time of false battles is over. The only conflict that appears real is the one that leads to the destruction of …

Student problems (1964)

What are the theoretical principles of Marxism that should and can come into play in the scientific analysis of the university milieu to which students, along with teachers, research workers and administrators, belong?* Essentially, the Marxist concepts of the technical and social divisions of labour. Marx applied these principles in the analysis of …

From the Archive: Rancière, Althusser and Ideology

The first English translation of Jacques Rancière’s 1969 essay ‘On the Theory of Ideology’ (drafted for an anthology on Althusser published in Argentina) was published in Radical Philosophy 7 (Spring 1974). This translation was based on the French version that first appeared in 1973, and included Rancière’s Afterword and the self-critical footnotes, indicating his reservations …

The gender apparatus

Feminist protest against US torture practices, including outcries over the use of sex, sexuality and sexual identity in the torture of prisoners at US detention sites from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, have understandably tended to focus on what the abuse destroys – the victim and his or her community. Here, though, I ask …

Theory (Madness of)

Forty years or so after it initially rose as a rather new name for a rather new thing, theory is still an obtruse signifier, troubling and floating, requiring we go back to basics. Theory as we most often understand it today is the name given by the English-speaking intellectual community to a certain …

Structure: method or subversion of the social sciences?

It seems there’s no longer any real doubt as to the answer to this question, and that it is doubly negative. ‘Structuralism’, or what was designated as such mainly in France in the 1960s and 1970s (setting aside the question of other uses), is no longer regarded as a truly fertile method in the domains …

Necro-economics

Louis Althusser began Reading Capital with the statement, ʻWe have all certainly read and are all reading [Marxʼs] Capital.ʼ While Althusser is undoubtedly addressing here his seminar, the focus of which was precisely Marxʼs Capital, the sentence that follows elevates the act of reading this particular text to the status of the universal: the entire …

125 Reviews

Gilbert Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder Verna V. Gehring, ed., War after September 11 Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, eds, Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 Alain Joxe, Empire of Disorder Martin Ryle

Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth Jean-Jacques Lecercle

Charity …

124 Reviews

Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogue Nina Power

Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism Michael Vaughan

Mark Neocleous, Imagining the State John Kraniauskas

Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered Mark Neocleous

Ben Watson, Shitkicks and Doughballs Ian Patterson

Bertell Ollman, …