The concept of the ‘event’ has accumulated around it a somewhat varied stream of interventions in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. In The Event of Style in Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) I tried to think of the event in relation…
How are we to assess the impact of activities (e.g. words, songs or gestures) associated with sectarianism in contemporary Scotland? In the increasing absence of easily attributable effects such as crimes or disorder, or blatant forms of discrimination in the…
In the August 2015 issue of Scottish Affairs, a team of researchers explore the findings of a study they carried out for the Scottish government on community experiences of sectarianism. Here, one of the authors, Kay Goodall, sets out some…
Western Europe experienced the immigration of people from a Muslim background after World War II who settled in countries like France, Britain or Germany to fill the labour shortage and made important contributions to the economic recovery of Western European…
Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) is the contemporary philosopher to whom Badiou returns more than any other. His engagement with Deleuze is however neither homogeneous nor unequivocally critical, as it is often thought to be. In short, Deleuze figures in Badiou’s work as his preeminent philosophical disputant.
Jean Baudrillard on Muslims in France, the simulation of freedom in America, the demise of the intellectual and why French theory is like the Statue of Liberty.
There is a shortage of men in neo-Victorianism. Or that, at least, is how it would appear to look at many critical works on neo-Victorianism at the present time. Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Luminaries (2013), with…
By Ashley Woodward Peter Shaffer’s play Equus is perhaps best known to some today as ‘the one in which Harry Potter gets his kit off’ (as one of my students put it). Yet apart from the fact that it’s controversial…
By William Knox Violence is an area much neglected by Scottish historians unlike those working in other countries, such as England, Western Europe and the USA, where its study has become central to our understanding of social relations, in particular class and…
By Michael Nathanson The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, i.e., impasse over land ownership of the former mandatory Palestine, is rooted in and continuously being stoked by competing narratives. The Zionist movement adopted the master narrative of the Hebrew Bible, anchored by the…