Interview: Critical Theory’s contexts of cooperation

Johan F. Hartle: I want to discuss the possibilities of Critical Theory that you and Alexander Kluge develop in your collective project. To that end, I would like to ask you to reconstruct a few points from your biography. Let’s start off by having you describe your path to the Institute for Social Research in […]

Always historicize?

Arendt’s love affair with Heidegger and its aftermath, and Adorno’s love of the high life, than we learn about their philosophies and the ways in which these might emerge out of experience of and reflection on Nazi domination. (Sherratt has written elsewhere on Adorno’s philosophy, in a study titled Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, 2002.) The opponents […]

Faust on film

Faust on film Walter Benjamin and the cinematic ontology of Goethe’s Faust 2 Matthew charles Isn’t it an affront to Goethe to make a film of Faust, and isn’t there a world of difference between the poem Faust and the film Faust? Yes, certainly. But, again, isn’t there a whole world of difference between a […]

Marx the uncanny? Ghosts and their relation to the mode of production

Where Marx is closest to the spirit of deconstruction is, arguably, in these formulaic gestures towards a society that had so far transcended existing actuality that its conditions of realization could no longer be conceptualized. Marx is spectral Marx in his refusal to envision communism in his envisaging of it, in his anti-utopian utopianism. Now, […]

Naming, myth and history

Naming, myth and history Berlin after the Wall Gordon Finlayson Whoever believe that certain things are of no concern to them frequently deceive themselves, e.g. philosophers about history. Immanuel Kant, Reflections on Logic What has happened to history since the Berlin Wall fell? If Susan Buck-Morss is to be believed, fashion parades in its ruins; […]

The Politics of Time

The Politics of Time Peter Osborne The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise … is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token, its logic. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there is depressingly little belief at […]

Fashion in Ruins

Fashion in Ruins History after the Cold War Susan Buck-Morss On Pariser Platz at the Gate’s east side, vendors sell souvenirs of the fallen Wall and mementos of the fallen regime. To the north, above the tree-line, the German flag flies over the ruins of the Reichstag that was burned in 1933 and bombed during […]

Nietzsche: The Subject of Morality

Nietzsche: The Subject of Morality Ross Poole It is to be inferred that there exist countless dark bodies close to the sun – such as we shall never see. This is, between ourselves, a parable; and a moral psychologist reads the whole starry script only as a parable and signlanguage by means of which many […]

Who Made the French Revolution?

Who Made the French Revolution?: An Essay on Current Historiography Noel Parker In his most approachable work, The Coming of the French Revoiution,2 Georges Letebvre, the authoritative marxist historian of the Revolution, sub-divided it thus: an aristocratic revolution (the reform effort by the monarchy) which failed; a bourgeois revolution which succeeded, with the help of […]

Lyotard and the Politics of Antifoundationalism

Lyotard and the Politics of Antifou ndational ism Stuart Sim 11 An increasingly important trend in recent philosophy has been antifoundationalism: the rejection of the search for 10gical1y-consistent, self-evidently true “grounds” for philosophical discourse, and the substitution of ad hoc tactical manoeuvres as justification for what are quite often eccentric lines of argument. Antifoundationalism is […]

Forces of Production and Relations of Production in Socialist Society

Locke also has a principle – we should notice which limits the volume of goods that may be accumulated to that quantity which can be properly used or disposed of. A person ‘offended against the Law of Nature’ if he allowed the things in his possession to spoil or perish ‘without their due use’ (25). […]

Michel Foucault

PRISON TaLK: an interview with Miehel Foueault Introduction This interview dates from June 1975 when Michel Foucault published Surveiller et Punir (Surveillance and punishment), subtitled: Naissance ‘de la Prison (Birth of the Prison). This book can be seen as forming a trilogy with Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation (1961) and Birth of the Clinic (1963); each […]

The Politics of Aggression

contradictory claims r~ard1ng freedOm and necessity in the same work. An alternative approach to the determinism debate is the one adopted in Alienation which underscores the elastic meaninq of ‘ciCuse’ and ‘detelllLine’, but this doesn’t bring out adequately the reasohs for such variations. If Marx’s materialist conception of history, then, deals with the determining role […]

Personal Autonomy and Historical Materialism

PiRSONAL AUTONOMY a: HISTORICAL MATERIALISM Richard Archer The following is largely a criticism of some of the mistakes and certain tendencies antithetical to an historical materialist conception of the world found in Eoss Poole’s paper ‘Freedom and Alienation’. (Radical Philosophy, Winter 1975). Basically the criticism is this: because Poole never entirely leaves the framework employed […]

Who Makes History?

Whomakas hislory? Allhassel”s anli-hamanis.. John Mepham Introduction I am very much aware that in what follows I solve no philosophical problems. I attempt some conceptual clarifications and I propose some interpretations of theses of Louis Althusser. I hope this will at least make it possible to pose some problems more clearly than they are posed […]

Dialectical Reason

Richard Turner The concept ‘dialectical reason’, as used by ‘marxist’ theorists, contains buried within it a number of theoretical problems, problems which have significance for where why and how we may use dialectical reason. There are three issues, in particular, on which reflective clarity is both always needed and often lacking. Firstly, what precisely distinguishes […]

Remarks on Revolutionary Perspectives

his way of obviating the “victories of an excessive relativism” was to resort to the possibility of explaining diverse views. But if ‘explanation’ is to be understood as legitimation, he is no better off. The ‘relativist’ is perfectly prepared to admit differenc&,f of legitimation and characterisation co-ordinate with differences in moral view. Finally, he might […]

History and the process of mourning in Hegel and Freud

It is no doubt pointless to try to give a definition of the ʻworldʼ other than one that is tautological in form, like the one Heidegger attempted with the celebrated formula, Die Welt weltet, ʻthe world worldsʼ, the world is nothing other than its own becoming-world. However, as soon as there is a question of […]

Orgreave revisited

Leslie Grantham: Thatʼs what the eighties are all about: nostalgia. Anita Dobson: Well… how could it be anything else?80s Mania (ITV, 12 June 2004)Most of the things one imagines in hell are there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. George OrwellOurs is a retrospective culture, in which the […]

Paul Ricoeur, 1913–2005

Obituary Paul Ricoeur, 1913–2005 Another great French philosopher has passed away. On 20 May 2005, Paul Ricoeur died in Châtenay-Malabry, Hauts-de-Seine, west of Paris. He was born ninety-two years earlier in Valence on 27 February 1913, and quickly orphaned at the slaughter of the Marne in 1915. He died of natural causes, said his son […]