SARTRE REIMBURSED
A reading or re-reading of Sartre's critical and philosophical writings suggests problems that cannot be bypassed, even though there may not be an outline of a solution to them in sight. Why has French radical thought in our time been clothed in the language of post-Hegelian metaphysics? This phenomenon has become so familiar that we no longer ask the obvious questions about it, or even notice the historical paradox involved. Marx wrote the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology more than one hundred years ago. But in France it is as if he had never written these destructive works; destructive, that is, of the claims of previous radical philosophies. Marx announced a new role for philo

TED HUGHES - ON WRITING
… "imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. If you do this you do not have to bother about commas and full stops or that sort of thing. You do not look at the words either. You keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them… then your worry goes into them and they set about killing

THINKING THROUGH - A FRANK ADMISSION
This will be part I of a three part series wherein I try to work through my thinking on Hegel.Perhaps the best thing about being surrounded by committed and engaged people is that their attitude becomes a cause for self-reflection. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to practise disengagement. Disengagement was the theme of a paper I gave in Amsterdam a few years back - much to the general horror of the audience who all delivered papers on various terrible-things-happening-elsewhere we must sort out after giving our papers (I waited but after tea we all went home).What people think when they hear disengagement is quietism: opting out but not in proper Tim Leary sty

A FRANK ADMISSION
It has taken me some thing to work out why I like Hegel and it should have been obvious from the start. This about sums it up:''It is easier to find a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in providence, than to see their proper import and value.'' - HegelIn philosophy the torrent of negativity can sometimes be blinding. Everything sucks and every thinker is deficient for not constantly highlighting how much everything sucks. Tearing down walls, untying knots and finding cracks but leaving the ladders at home...don't want to do any climbing. Better to throw rocks at the windows.''It shows an excessive tenderness for the world to take contradiction fro

A TIME AND A PLACE
There is one thing you can't escape when you read about Heidegger the man, as Graham Harman notes here, and that is the simple fact that Heidegger was not a nice man.From the philosophical perspective this seems an almost trite thing to say (and perhaps only our own contemporary age could be so concerned about it), but what else can you feel when you read Heidegger's letters? I actually had no idea just how icy Heidegger could be until a friend of mine, working on the NS treatment of Husserl, revealed the extent of his betrayal, and it certainly was a betrayal in my view.I often hear otherwise quite brilliant readers of Heidegger make the most dramatic apologies for