Rock as minimal modernism
I wouldn’t recommend me as entertainment. – Lou Reed, 1978 It has acquired the status of a primal scene. 1964. A party in New York’s Lower East Side, the mythical site of the period. Terry Phillips, an...
View ArticleStuart Hall, 1932–2014
After Pan-Africanism Placing Stuart Hall Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Edward W. Said died in 2003. Jacques Derrida died in 2004. Kofi Awoonor was killed in Westgate Mall last year. Now Stuart Hall is...
View ArticleRhetorics of populism
The publication of Ernesto Laclau’s The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, only weeks after his death in April 2014, confirms his status as one of the foremost contemporary political theorists of the...
View ArticleRealism and moral being
Andrew Collier, who died on 3 July after more than a decade living with cancer, was a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective during the 1990s and a longstanding contributor to the...
View ArticleHarun Farocki, 1944–2014
In one of the last electronic letters that Harun Farocki sent me this summer (his emails were often genuine letters), he remarked on the World Cup and Germany’s victory over Argentina, pointing out the...
View ArticleDialectical negativism: Michael Theunissen, 1932-2015
Michael Theunissen applied a motto to his understanding of his own philosophy, drawn from Kierkegaard: to aim to be a corrective to one’s time. However, he did not take this to imply merely the...
View ArticleOpen form: Pierre Boulez, 1927–2016
The death of Pierre Boulez came as a gentle shock to those for whom he is a figure of colossal importance in the postwar musical world. Pierre Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma, the title of Joan...
View ArticleA political Marxist: Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1942–2016
I have a vivid memory – too vivid to be an accident – of the first time I read something written by Ellen Meiksins Wood. It was an article in New Left Review on the separation of the economic from the...
View ArticleStanley Cavell, 1926-2018
Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, was one of the most prominent philosophers of the second half of the twentieth...
View ArticlePaul Virilio, 1932–2018
The disappearance of Paul Virilio is my concern. It provides an opportune moment for a ‘spontaneous declaration’, as well as for some clarification with respect to a series of apodictic interventions....
View ArticleMichel Serres, 1930–2019
In Serres’s works, the table of method is the method, the idea is its own image, the code is already overcoded. Serres cannot be commented but only stuttered. A repetition won’t add anything to a text...
View ArticleBernard Stiegler, 1952-2020
The death of Bernard Stiegler in August, aged 68, will surely be met by a glut of biographies documenting a far from conventional philosophical eccentric. It is undeniable that he could be difficult,...
View ArticleNeil Davidson, 1957-2020
Neil Davidson – the most significant Scottish intellectual of the radical left – died at the beginning of May 2020 from a brain tumour. He was 62. Davidson was a prolific writer of historical sociology...
View ArticleMaría Lugones, 1944-2020
The task of remembering one’s many selves is a difficult liberatory task. 1 María Lugones, a feminist philosopher, sociologist, activist and Professor of Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies at...
View ArticleJean-Luc Nancy, 1940-2021
One day, what I am saying to you today will no longer have any sense or any handle on the period. But today this is where there is some sense: in saying sense is absent, in saying that this absence is...
View ArticleDan Graham, 1942–2022
Dan Graham and I were friends for about 50 years. We began a correspondence in the late 1960s and met for the first time in London in 1972, when he had his first exhibition at the Lisson Gallery, which...
View ArticleSylvère Lotringer, 1938-2021
Sylvère Lotringer’s life been celebrated as a ‘total work’ – a lived embodiment of the radical theories he did so much work to disseminate and promote. His commitment to an art of living, his...
View ArticleDescription of a Self-Portrait
Shortly after Jean-Luc Godard’s death at the end of 2022, the Parisian Ménagerie de verre, a private art space primarily dedicated to dance, showed excerpts from the late work of the grand master, in a...
View ArticleDrucilla Cornell, 1950-2022
I met Drucilla Cornell at the New School for Social Research, shortly after my arrival in the US at a time of political turmoil. I joined the Philosophy Department in 2010, and one of the first things...
View ArticleMaria Mies, 1931-2023
When Maria Mies died, on 15 May 2023, I was re-reading her work on India, to reflect on its contemporary relevance for analyses of the world of work. I am profoundly saddened that the first way in...
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