Cyborg soldiers and militarized masculinities

Increasing military interest in the body cancels the transgressive potential of the cyborg. Where humans become the weakest link in contemporary warfare, the cyborg represents a desire for total masculinist domination. Machines, not human bodies, are now the subjects of the text. [more]

Art and threatened, threatening nature

Adorno has been accused of elitism and ineffectuality, yet his ideas about art and nature gain new relevance as the environmental crisis forces us to rethink how we live, writes Camilla Flodin. [more]

Ecological materialism

How nature becomes political

The ecological reform of the global economy must bring on board those with no interest in preserving nature per se. The more "nature-oriented" a demand is, the less likely it is to be realized and the more catastrophic the consequences will be. [more]

Bodies without Bodhis

The shot putter is the origin of movement while the surfer enters a movement that already exists. For Deleuze, therein lies the difference between traditional and new sports. Karl Palmås rides this wave of thought towards a philosophy of surfing. [more]

The ends of censorship

As one type of censorship comes to an end, a new one is in the making, writes cultural theorist Dave Boothroyd. The power wielded by corporations such as Network Solutions or YouTube produces a new form of subjectivity characterized by self-censorship. [more]

A new possibility of life

In their efforts of marketing and conversion, both globalization and the religious are forms of total war disguised as peace. The total or global nature of this disguised war leads to what Leonard Lawlor calls "the problem of the worst". [more]

Contagiontology

Heineken, Google and Wal-Mart use pattern recognition and computer-assisted predictions of future behaviours to secure their markets. This brings renewed poignancy to Gabriel Tarde's contagion-centric thought, write Christopher Kullenberg and Karl Palmås. [more]

The aesthetic critique of judgement

What's the difference between aesthetic and political judgments? Can an aesthetic judgement be collectively valid? Is there such a thing as an aesthetic community? Christoph Menke returns to Greek drama only to end up in his own reading of modern literature. [more]

Lying and history

The existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a fiction produced to justify the war. Drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, Cathy Caruth argues that the fabrication of imagery has a tradition in US politics going back to Hiroshima. [more]

Glänta supports the financial sector

The financial crisis has made it clear how vital, yet how fragile, capitalism is. In solidarity, Glänta magazine would like to share its cultural capital. Sponsorship of the financial sector is not an act of charity! [more]

Depressive European

Chocolate cigarettes, AIDS, and homes for battered wives. Hanna Hallgren conducts a critical, poetic search for European identity. [more]

Manual for postmodern childrearing

How would you bring up a child if you took the lessons from postmodernism literally? [Estonian version added] [more]

We're like a boat with water up to the gunwales and there are waves breaking over the sides the whole time!

Pär Thörn, one of Sweden's most acclaimed young writers, studied the discussions between the executive managers on the web forum www.ledarna.se ("the executives"). Read the results of his copy-pasting. [more]

What was behind me now faces me

Performance, staging, and technology in the court of law

Is it possible to imagine a court, guided by justice and law, taking into account the new "politics of representation"? [more]

Feminism and the ethics of reconciliation

The failure of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to do justice to women rape victims was not a simple oversight but is constitutive of the symbolic order dominating the political landscape of "liberal democracies". [more]

The scream of geometry

(modified excerpts)

"How can these cities, villages, and their people exist? How can they stand there selling tomatoes and speaking their language and drying their laundry without considering the infinite number of other places where someone else is standing, selling tomatoes or potatoes and speaking their language and drying laundry?" [Estonian version added] [more]

Living without

On the moral philosophy of Jean Améry

For their testimonial value, Jean Améry's writings are obligatory reading for anyone interested in studies of the Holocaust. But Améry can and must also be read as philosophy, argues Roy Ben-Shai. [more]

Interviewing the embodiment of political evil

Arranging an interview with Luis Echeverría, former president of Mexico, leads Alejandro Cervantes-Carson to reflect on the relationship between political violence and bureaucracy. [more]

My heart belongs to Europe. Therefore it is broken

Does literature help maintain individual and collective identity, or does it inspire us to discredit it? [more]

Networking on the wall

Palestinian artists and cultural workers talk about the "art" drawn on the wall demarcating Palestinian and Israeli territory. Their opinions are revealing of the wall's significance in the Palestinian experience and the function of "network as resistance". [more]

Melancholy and the "other"

Freud analyzed melancholia as the ego's internalization of the lost object, and thus the loss of ego itself. Can the architecture of the "geographic other" be read for the symptoms of melancholy? [more]

European waistlines

Swedish poet Ida Börjel confronts us with our favourite and most insulting national prejudices about ourselves and our European neighbours. But does she confirm them? [Estonian version added] [more]

Theology of tidal waves

A post-humanist interpretation

The tsunami disaster in southeast Asia in December 2004 prompted a leading Swedish political scientist to make a public return to the Christian Church. Why are the humanities no longer able to accommodate mass suffering? [more]

Transborder translating

Translation is a form of resistance, but also "the original mother tongue of humankind". With a broad interpretaion of the concept of translation, Rada Ivekovic looks at the principles, concepts, and symbolic values of borders and boundaries. [more]

Necessary lies

Fabricated identities have become a valuable commodity for asylum seekers for whom credibility is the bottom line. Meanwhile, the media adds to the climate of disinformation. [more]

"Saving the honour of thinking"

Anders Lundberg spoke with Rodolphe Gasché about why deconstruction turned into a media "story", about developments in politics and ethics, about Europe and about the importance of a future for philosophical thinking. [more]

About War and the Missing Centre in Politics

Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann talked to philosopher Slavoj Zizek about the crisis of subjectivity and politics. [more]

Multitudes

Quick Electronic Notes

"Multitude" has become a keyword in the analyses of the globalized society and the resistance it generates. Anne Querrien points to some of the qualities carried by this variegated concept. [more]

And Thus Began the Fall of the Empire

Multitude and Movement in Genoa

On the barricades you do no longer find an avant-garde, but a multitude. In Genoa Antonio Negri saw this new proletariat, but also the ghosts of the past – a political Left too embedded in the systems of control and power. [more]

In the Name of Algeria

Frantz Fanon and the Algerian Revolution

[more]

Necessity Without Practice

A poem by one of Sweden's most interesting writers. [more]

"Mer människa än människan själv"

Det postkoloniala tillståndet i Los Angeles 2019

När Mikela Lundahl kombinerar cyborgdiskurs med postkolonial teori upptäcker hon att filmen Blade Runner kan läsas som en allegori över kolonialismen och dess ständiga följeslagare, rasismen. [more]