One of the remarkable features of recent interest in the work of Louis Althusser has been the prominence granted to Althusser’s cultural criticism. However, aside from one notable exception, Althusser’s cultural criticism has not figured prominently in discussions of his late work, and the absence of Althusser’s cultural criticism from those discussions has perhaps unwittingly obscured both the genealogy of Althusser’s late aesthetic ontology and the logic of his last texts, of ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ (...) and related writings on aleatory materialism. By tracing the genealogy of the aleatory impulse in Althusser’s cultural criticism, it is possible to show how that work resonates in Althusser’s late texts including the larger unpublished manuscript from which ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ has been drawn. This reading of the philosophy of the encounter also allows us to understand the importance of Nicolas Malebranche for Althusser’s aleatory materialism. (shrink)

The article focuses on the fact that the consequence of Bourdieu’s death is that we now have to respond specifically to the texts that he produced between 1958 and 2002, rather than to the impact of writing and political action in combination, which was his goal during his life. The article raises general questions about the status of social texts in relation to the practices of philosophy and social scientific enquiry to which Bourdieu must have returned in preparing his final (...) course of lectures, published in 2001 as Science de la science et réflexivité. It then offers three case studies of this relationship in action in Bourdieu’s early work, considering his textual and scientific practices. It discusses aspects of the contemporary philosophical debate about the referentiality of texts at the time of this early work and thus indicates that this was a question of continuous importance in Bourdieu’s work. The article next reflects on the significance of Bourdieu’s thinking in this respect for the ways in which we should now respond to his texts and deploy his concepts empirically. It takes three examples of different ways in which Bourdieu’s texts have become pretexts for further research practice. These are characterized as ‘academic exploitation’, ‘nominal appropriation’ and ‘informed divergence’. The conclusion is that Bourdieu’s work demands a reflexive response, which requires that respondents should analyse rigorously their own situations and the grounds for transferring received concepts, and that this entails detailed attention to both Bourdieu’s texts and the contexts of their production, rather than a superficial exploitation or appropriation of his ‘consecrated’ texts. (shrink)

This is an account of an interview with one of Britain's foremost literary theorists, Professor Catherine Belsey. The interview was conducted in Ghent, Belgium in 1997. The discussion spans all of Belsey's works, from the earliest, Critical Practice (1980), to her latest publication, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (1999). In this piece, Belsey openly and unpretentiously discusses her feminist commitment, her sometimes controversial critical positions, some of the influences on her careers and the importance to her of her teaching.

Predicated on a one-sided focus on political ‘voice’, analyses of political silences traditionally focused almost exclusively on their negative role as the harmful absence of participation or responsibility. More recently, a new appreciation for the wide spectrum of political functions of silence has gained ground, including forms of willful renitence and even active resistance. Yet this thematic expansion has also resulted in a loss of focus. Lacking a common analytical framework, research on political silences risks limiting itself to the purely (...) additive: finding and filling in ever more minute ‘blank spots’ on the periphery of the map of political research. Building on the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, this paper proposes a solution to this dilemma by means of a reconsideration of the political role of expectations. In political discourse, the expected distribution of moments of silence and articulation expresses established power structures, while unexpected silences and the breaking of expected silences conversely present a powerful means of calling these into question. Focusing on this ambivalence paves the way to a new systematic typology of political silences as a distinct mode of political communication. But above all, it points to the value of silence as an analytical probe, an instrument to fathom the expectations and constraints structuring political discourse in various contexts and spaces. Besides providing the study of silence with an overarching research focus, such an approach would thus build a bridge between the issue of political silence and wider debates on the structures of the political field as a whole. (shrink)