On 11 Brumaire, Year XI [November 2, 1803], a Guadeloupe tribunal sentenced Millet de la Girardière to be placed in an iron cage in the square at Pointe-à-Pitre and left there until dead. The cage employed for this public torture is eight feet tall. The criminal confined therein straddles a sharp blade. His feet are […]
'Violence' tag archive
Claire Fontaine
Interview Claire Fontaine Andrew Culp and Ricky Crano At the heart of Claire Fontaine’s critique of contemporary art is a critical appraisal of the role played by relational aesthetics in relaying the social conditions and objects of capital into the space of art. Readymades like Duchamp’s Fountain, on the one hand, saturate the art world […]
Lenin and Gandhi
Lenin and Gandhi A missed encounter? Étienne balibar The theme I shall address today has all the trappings of an academic exercise.* Still, I would like to attempt to show how it intersects with several major historical, epistemological and ultimately political questions. As a basis for the discussion, I will posit that Lenin and Gandhi […]
Statement on UC Davis
Radical Philosophy condemns the police brutality on the UC Davis campus on November 18th 2011 and the UC administration’s continuing use of violence to suppress faculty and student protest against the privatization of the UC system. We support the students and faculty members in their continuing protests, the open letter by Nathan Brown (Assistant Professor […]
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 […]
Reason and Violence
REAson AnD UIOlEn[E A fragment of the ideology of liberal intellectuals Ray Edgley The antithesis between reason and violence: some contemporary examples I want to consider a version of the ic!ea that violence is contrary to reason, or to put another way what may seem to be the same point, that reason and violence are […]
Gillian Rose and the project of a Critical Marxism
The work of Gillian Rose (1947–1995) displays a prodigious range equal to that of any British intellectual of her generation. Her output consists of eight books produced over a seventeen-year period between 1978 and her early death in 1995. The authorship falls into two distinct periods: a first phase, from 1978 to 1984, which includes […]
A global public sphere?
Commentary A global public sphere? Susan Buck-Morss When the multitude ceases to fear, it becomes fearful. Benedict Spinoza* This is the text of a talk to the Radical Philosophy Conference, Look No Hands! Political Forms of Global Modernity, Birkbeck College, London, 27 October 2001. September 11 has ruptured irrevocably the context in which we as […]
Oedipus as figure
Oedipus as figure Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe It is probable, or at the very least plausible, that Western humanity now models itself on two figures or types – two ʻexamplesʼ, if you like. They appear to be antagonistic (or are at least supported by antagonistic discourses), but their antagonism also binds together, and founds, their kinship, as […]
Geographies of violence and democracy
Commentary Geographies of violence and democracy Politics in Spain Alejandro colás On the morning of 11 March 2004, after ten bombs were detonated on four commuter trains in southern Madrid, the communist-led United Left coalition released a press statement, part of which translates as follows: Today is a day of democratic unity. With this fascist-like […]
Susan Sontag, 1933–2004
Obituary Counter-traditionalist Susan Sontag, 1933–2004 In the prefatory note to her first collection of critical writings, Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag reflected that ʻin the end, what I have been writing is not criticism at all, strictly speaking, but case studies for an aesthetic, a theory of my own sensibilityʼ. The statement holds true for […]
Israel/Palestine and the paradoxes of academic freedom
Israel/Palestine and the paradoxes of academic freedom Judith butler In the last few years, two separate debates on academic freedom have emerged in the United States, and both of them have Israel/Palestine at their centre. The first has to do with arguments against the academic boycott of Israeli institutions on grounds of academic freedom, and […]
Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 1
Entsetzen Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part One Irving wohlfarth * The present essay, to be published in three instalments, is a slightly revised version of one that appeared in the first of two col ective volumes (Der RAF und der linke Terrorismus, Hamburg, 2006) edited by Wolfgang Kraushaar under the auspices of […]
Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2
Critique of Violence: the deposing of the law Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2 Irving wohlfarth Things fal apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’The ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921, hereafter abbreviated to ‘Critique’) is the only published statement of Benjamin’s on politics and […]
Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 3
Spectres of anarchy Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part Three Irving wohlfarth There is an excel ent passage in Nadja on the ‘enchanting days spent looting Paris under the sign of Sacco and Vanzet i’ and Breton adds the assurance that in those days the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvel e [Boulevard of Good Tidings] fulfil […]