![]() I ran something called ‘The Philosophy Forum’ at the ICA for a couple of years in the mid-1990s, with Sonu Shamdasani, and there was a terrific buzz around the events, which featured such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Michel Serres. It was at the ICA that I first encountered Judith Butler and where she defended herself brilliantly against the voluntarist misinterpretations of Gender Trouble (1990) that have endlessly plagued the reception of her work. ![]() Indeed, an awful lot happened at the ICA in those days, which is really difficult to imagine after the decay of that institution into endlessly stupid events about neuroscience and art sponsored by transnational corporations. It seemed obvious that the questions of identity formation and political resistance posed by these approaches couldn’t simply be subsumed under the usual Marxist analysis of class. I remember being on a panel at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London listening to him talk about the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and develop his theory of culture in terms of the category of hybridity. Bhabha (then a humble lecturer at Sussex) exerted an ever-growing cultural influence. It seemed to provide a new geography for theorizing social and cultural ensembles and it changed definitively the way I approached the philosophical tradition. I started my job at Essex the same week as Paul Gilroy and learnt a lot from his work that was eventually published as The Black Atlantic in 1994. Of much greater interest was the question of what came to be known as ‘post-colonialism’. The Habermasians defended their secular, Modernist corner tenaciously, and everybody else tried to ignore them, often with great success. I remember Žižek coming repeatedly to Essex in the late 1980s and then reading the first 100 pages of The Sublime Object of Ideology when it was published in 1989 and thinking, ‘This is it.’ Sadly, my enthusiasm waned.īy the early 1990s, the pseudo-heat of the Postmodernism debate had dissipated and positions became routinized and rather tedious. People forget that it was through Laclau that Slavoj Žižek entered into theoretical debate in the English-speaking world, showing how the notion of radical democracy required a more Lacanian account of the subject, articulated in relation to the Real. the emergence of new forms of democratization after the collapse of state socialism in 1989 and the rise of new social movements organized around gender or race rather than class. It set off a wave of attacks on their unapologetic post-Structuralist post-Marxism, but for crypto-Gramscians like me, the theory of hegemony seemed to offer an account of political practice that made sense of the new situation, i.e. The publication of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) was a key moment in leftist theoretical debates in the following years. The question of the political, as it came to be called, assumed a centrality that must seem odd to those who didn’t live through the orthodox Marxism that preceded it. In those distant days, prior to the metropolitanization of intellectual life and the rise of the urban hipster and even the yBa, provincial universities like Essex, Sussex and Warwick were still places where you could think and were the crossroads or vanguard (pick your metaphor) of new ideas about theory and philosophy.ĭefinition of 'theory' in Raymond Williams' Keywords, 1976. Thirdly, and most importantly, I got a job at Essex University teaching philosophy, which was very cool. Secondly, the Cold War had ended, everyone seemed very pleased, and people began to say wildly optimistic things about liberal democracy and the End of History. Firstly, it is difficult not to exaggerate the elation that was felt at Thatcher’s resignation in late November 1990. ![]() The 1990s were something different, but it is difficult to describe exactly in what that difference consisted. He lives in Brooklyn, USA.įrom the obscure, muddy corner of England where I resided, the 1980s were a dismal period, defined by the threat of imminent nuclear catastrophe and the ineluctable rise of the right, with Thatcher’s crushing victory over organized labour and what remained of the socialist left. His books Impossible Objects: Interviews and The Faith of the Faithless are both forthcoming. Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, USA.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |