The myth of Aufheben
Matthieu Renault argues in a recent issue of Radical Philosophy (RP 2.10, Summer 2021) that justifications for the counter-violence of the oppressed which draw on Hegel’s master-slave relation are...
View ArticleRadical Philosophy turns 50
It’s 50 years since the first issue of Radical Philosophy was published in 1972. To mark the occasion, we asked a selection of former editors to share their recollections and reflections on their time...
View ArticleAnti-abortion feminism
On 24th June 2022, anti-abortion activists across the US celebrated as the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, among them some self-described ‘feminists’. For a long time now, the...
View ArticleTutelage or assimilation?
Der Mensch kann nur Mensch werden durch Erziehung. — Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy, 1803. 1 Few topics have in recent years caused more controversy in studies in the history of philosophy than...
View ArticleThe Red Pill
Rare is the book that provokes in me both frequent agreement and teeth-clenching, head-shaking, wincing frustration. But such is Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix. 1 Chibber is his generation’s foremost...
View ArticleUntimely Media
‘It will keep your secrets. Operate it yourself.’ A. B. Dick Mimeograph Company advertisement in Life magazine, circa 1940. How can we decolonise technics today within, against and beyond Eurocentric...
View ArticleCrises and contradictions
In an August 1890 letter to Conrad Schmidt, Engels ‘Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French “Marxist” of the late [18]70s:“All I know is that I am not a Marxist”.’ Even during his lifetime...
View ArticleRobot Makes Free
The world of the future will … not [be] a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. — Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc. The word ‘robot’ entered the English...
View ArticleWhy the customer is always right
I once knew a monster who said she could not read Proust because there were no figures in Proust with whom she could identify. Theodor W. Adorno With this seemingly off-the-cuff anecdote, Adorno,...
View ArticleHistory and revolution in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle was written, as Guy Debord once put it, ‘with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society’. 1 Following the book’s publication in 1967, he and the...
View ArticleAntagonisms between bourgeois and coalitional formations
A speech that the singer, activist and historian Bernice Johnson Reagon gave at the 1981 West Coast Women’s Music Festival was published two years later in the classic anthology Home Girls: A Black...
View ArticleWhose movement is it anyway?
Your children are not your children; They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you But are not from you And though they are with you They belong not to you. You...
View ArticleCivilising through food
In January 2022, Fabien Roussel – a leader of the French Communist Party – urged the French public not to be ashamed of eating meat, drinking fine wine and eating good cheese because ‘it’s French...
View ArticleDevelopment as national liberation
During the twentieth century, the concept of development galvanised a wide variety of popular struggles for democratisation, agrarian reform, socialism, and economic sovereignty across the global...
View ArticleInterpassive students in interactive classrooms
A lecturer will ask the audience ‘and can anybody tell me what this is?’ And she or he is met by an everlasting silence, with people refusing to look her in the eye … Now the thing is, I’m a very...
View ArticleA contest over titles
Prevailing images of the Frankfurt School have long relied upon an idea of their origins that is far from self-evident. Premised upon the curious allure associated with such notions as ‘transcendental...
View ArticlePerseverance in the midst of defeat
Defeat shapes the subjectivity of the global Left in the contemporary era. The twin collapse of actually existing socialism and revolutionary nationalisms in the late twentieth century deprived the...
View ArticleDecoding the ‘Bandung Moment’
Aijaz Ahmad’s work traversed several disciplines: literary criticism, history, Marxist theory and philosophy, politics and political economy. His book In Theory navigated the intersections of class,...
View ArticleReading ‘the Signs of Our Times’
With the publication of In Theory in 1992, Aijaz Ahmad threw a spanner into the works of what seemed at the time to be the relentless march of postcolonial theory within departments of English and...
View ArticleBruno Latour, 1947–2022
Modernity is characterised by its extraordinary capacity to give a mystified image of itself, and the most enduring aim of Bruno Latour’s work might be summarised by evoking the subtitle of his last...
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