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The Communist Hypothesis
Why does the spectre of May 68 still haunt French discourse? Alain Badiou on the country’s longue durée sequences of restoration and revolt, and the place of Sarkozy’s presidency within them. Lessons in political courage from Plato and Corneille, and a call to reassert the Manifesto’s founding wager.
Unnatural History
Do increasingly dark ecological portents indicate a deeper transformation of nature itself? Sven Lütticken elaborates a historicized conception of nature, seeking precedents and contrasts in 19th- and 20th-century philosophies and fictions. Dinosaurs and overmen, Geist and entropic decline in Verne, Nietzsche, Schelling and Smithson.
Edible Matter
Jane Bennett presents a case for seeing matter as actant inside and alongside humankind, able to exert influence on moods, dispositions, decisions. Might food in fact be seen as possessing a form of agency? Vitality and volition in motifs from Thoreau and Nietzsche, viewed through the prism of the biological and physical sciences.
Vectors of the Biopolitical
Taking coordinates from Aristotle, Malcolm Bull finds in Agamben’s biopolitics and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach the disconnected fragments of a lost vision of society, adumbrated by Marx, glimpsed and rejected by Arendt. Strange meetings as the trajectories of the disenfranchised and the empowered, human and non-human, converge.
States of Failure
The question of agency remains the central lacuna in the construction of systemic alternatives. Building on ‘The Limits of Multitude’ in NLR 35, Malcolm Bull proposes a reconceptualization of the relation between collective will and invisible hand. Can bearings drawn from Hegel, Gramsci, Sartre indicate the route to a new global order through dissolution of the Western imperial state?
Staging Equality
The ‘theatrocracy’—sovereignty of the audience—condemned in Plato’s Laws is reinstalled as a radical principle of egalitarian politics in Jacques Rancière’s work. Peter Hallward examines the implications and limitations of his approach. Is today’s post-political order vulnerable to theatrocratic attack?
The Adventure of French Philosophy
French philosophy from the 1940s to the 1990s viewed as a third exceptional moment in the history of the discipline, after classical Greece and enlightenment Germany. Alain Badiou takes four coordinates for a tour de force of terse analysis: the antecedents of this moment, the enterprises it launched, the links it forged with literature, and the relations it developed with psychoanalysis.
The Limits of Multitude
What, if any, agencies of political change exist today—and how should they be conceived? Tracing the long tradition of contrasts between a ‘people’ and a ‘multitude’, Malcolm Bull argues that the differing resolutions of them by Hobbes and Spinoza have descended to the twenty-first century, issuing into a contemporary stand-off between market globalization and populist reactions to it.
Future Unknown: Machiavelli for the 21st Century
To which thinkers should we turn in a bid to ground a new conceptualization of political agency—or to determine whether such a move has been nullified by the transformations of the last decades? Gopal Balakrishnan on Machiavelli’s parables of innovation and readings of him from Rousseau to Schmitt, Strauss to Gramsci. The Florentine as strategist of beginning anew, in the context of historic defeat.
Law versus Politics
The political and the legal as two opposite yet interdependent modes of governing societies—punctual and particular, or general and invariable—in a quartet of contrasted thinkers. The antinomies of force and justice, morals and regulations in Machiavelli and Pascal, Montesquieu and Sade.
The Labyrinth of Human Rights
Dogmatic foundations as an invariant of all civilizations, and the religious origins of the contemporary doctrine of human rights in the West. Can, despite its undemonstrability, a particular creed become a common resource of humanity, appropriated in different ways across the planet?
Capitalism and Form
If bourgeois society requires both ceaseless economic dynamism and permanent ethical stability—disorder of invention and desire, order of labour and justification—what figures of the imagination offer a synthesis of these contradictory demands? The intertwining of routines and romances, virtues and villainies, in Scott and Goethe, Dickens and Balzac, Zola and Mann.
The Talking Cure in Habermas’s Republic
To what extent do liberal democracies rest on the will of their citizens? Deborah Cook assesses how far Jürgen Habermas’s attempt to bridge the gap between their nominal pretensions and actual workings provides a convincing account of the way Western societies live now.
Where is the Anti-Nietzsche?
If uncritically lyrical receptions of Nietzsche are receding, who has truly resisted his ultimate seduction—‘reading for victory’? Mere rejection of Nietzsche’s ideals does not escape his lure, Malcolm Bull argues. Only the standpoint of the subhuman is proof against his ecology of value.
Self-Realization, Ethics, and Socialism
“The cover of Sean Sayers’s new study displays a black-and-white photograph of Karl Marx, the bushy dark patch of his mouth in arresting contrast with the encircling white halo of beard and hair. The book proposes an argument as bold, graphic and firmly delineated as its cover, though . . .” read more
Slavery and the Multiple Self
“The concept of the self currently plays a significant role within moral philosophy and intellectual history. That this is so is due in some measure to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. Both philosophers treat questions about the morality of actions or agents as secondary to . . .” read more
Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler
“Judith Butler’s essay is welcome on several counts. It returns us to deep and important questions in social theory that have gone undiscussed for some time. And it links a reflection on such questions to a diagnosis of the troubled state of the Left in the current political . . .” read more
Merely Cultural
“I propose to consider two different kinds of claims that have circulated recently, representing a culmination of sentiment that has been building for some time. One has to do with an explicitly Marxist objection to the reduction of Marxist scholarship and activism to the study of culture, sometimes . . .” read more
'La Querelle des Femmes' in the Late Twentieth Century
“Although this essay is about feminist challenges to certain ideas of universal citizenship, it was provoked by anger: the intense anger being expressed by some Parisian intellectuals and journalists from across the political spectrum about American politics in general and American feminism in particular. And also my own . . .” read more
Against Voluptuous Bodies: Of Satiation Without Happiness
“In their nlr article, ‘Spectres of the Aesthetic’, Dave Beech and John Roberts critique what they call ‘the new aestheticism’, identifying my book The Fate of Art as providing the philosophical articulation of a movement which they suggest includes the writings of Andrew Bowie, Terry Eagleton, Fredric . . .” read more
Confessions of a 'New Aeshete': A Response to the 'New Philistines'
“Pausing to allow the waves of sound of the last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony to ebb away, I return to the delights of my glass of Californian Chardonnay and reflect on the way Dimitri Mitropoulos’s interpretation of the symphony steers the vital course between long-term structure, sudden . . .” read more
From Inequality to Difference: A Severe Case of Displacement?
“When considering the shifts in left thinking over the past fifteen years, it is hard to avoid some notion of displacement: the cultural displacing the material; identity politics displacing class; the politics of constitutional reform displacing the economics of equality. Difference, in particular, seems to have displaced inequality . . .” read more
Siren/Hyphen; Or, the Maid Beguiled
“‘This female savage’, noted the missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat, in his Nouveau voyage aux îles de l’Amérique, ‘was, I believe, one of the oldest creatures in the world. It is said she was very beautiful at one time. . .’ He was describing a Carib known as Madame Ouvernard, . . .” read more
A Rejoinder to Iris Young
“Iris Young and I seem to inhabit different worlds. In her world, there are no divisions between the social Left and the cultural Left. Proponents of cultural politics work cooperatively with proponents of social politics, linking claims for the recognition of difference with claims for the redistribution of . . .” read more
Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory
“Have theorists of justice forgotten about political economy? Have we traced the most important injustices to cultural roots? Is it time for critical social theory to reassert a basic distinction between the material processes of political economy and the symbolic processes of culture? In two recent essays, Nancy . . .” read more
Meaning What We Say: Feminist Ethics and the Critique of Humanism
“This article will consider a split within current feminist theory which appears to require some declaration of loyalties. The split I have in mind is not altogether easy to describe in terms of the standard academic classification of feminist positions that prevailed in the 1970s and early 1980s—the . . .” read more
The Tragedy of History
“Modern social and political thought has inherited two fundamental values from the Enlightenment: a belief in human rights or human dignity, and a belief in human progress or human destiny. Marx’s theory of history emphasizes that these fundamental values of modern political consciousness historically have been and still . . .” read more