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The Idea of Hope

Reflections on continental philosophy from both sides of the Rhine, tracing complex inter-relations between post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School. Problems of subjectivity and nature, social determination and individual responsibility. Philosophical contexts of critical theory—and German Idealism as laboratory for system-building and experimentalist thought.

Nietzsche for Losers?

Opening a symposium on Malcolm Bull’s Anti-Nietzsche, Dews retraces the logic of critical supersession in European philosophy before taking issue with the author’s account of Nietzschean will to power and the reading strategy to be pursued in the face of it.

Resituating the Postmodern?

Peter Dews on Peter Bürger, Ursprung des postmodernen Denkens. The origins of postmodern thought relocated from the era of late capitalism to the civilizational collapse of the First World War, and its crisis for modernity.

The Limits of Disenchantment

“In a passage from The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche affirms that ‘Hegel is a taste.—And not merely a German but a European taste.—A taste Wagner comprehended—to which he felt equal—which he immortalized—he invented a style for himself charged with “infinite meaning”—he became the heir of Hegel.—Music as “idea.”—’ . . .” read more

Adorno, Post-structuralism and the Critique of Identity

“Over the past few years an awareness has begun to develop of the thematic affinities between the work of those recent French thinkers commonly grouped together under the label of ‘post-structuralism’, and the thought of the first-generation Frankfurt School, particularly that of Adorno. Indeed, what is perhaps most . . .” read more

Power and Subjectivity in Foucault

“The ‘philosophy of desire’ developed by Jean-Fraçois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze in the period from the late 1960s to the mid-70s can be seen as the attempt, within post-structuralism, to affirm the independent force of an ‘inner nature’—that ‘transitivism of a spontaneous aesthetic’ to which Discours, Figure refers—against . . .” read more