• A photograph of a drawing of a crowd watching a theatrical performance inside a nineteenth-century style theatre hall

Remembering Sarah Kofman in the 2020s?

By Jacob Bates-Firth Sarah Kofman and the Relief of Philosophy (ed. Bates-Firth and McKeane) is out now as a special issue of Paragraph, 44:1 (March 2021) and concurrently in book form with Edinburgh University Press. Backdrop When John and I began to…

Photograph of the US Capitol at night

Spinoza and democracy in peril

By Dan Taylor In October 2020, in the days leading up to the US Presidential Election, over 130 leading historians of fascism signed an open letter. They warned that democracy today is deeply imperilled. It is either ‘withering or in…

The world of Spinoza's Theological–Political Treatise

The world of Spinoza’s Theological–Political Treatise

By Dan Taylor Baruch Spinoza’s Theological–Political Treatise, published anonymously in 1670, quickly turned Europe upside-down. Dismissed by one contemporary as a book ‘forged in hell by the Devil himself’, it argued that for societies to endure conflict and flourish, they…

Buddhism and Cinematic Technicity-Consciousness

By Victor Fan ‘Cinematic Imaging and Imagining through the Lens of Buddhism’ (from the latest issue of Paragraph) is one of my ‘test drives’ for a longer and more substantial project that seeks to reconfigure film and media philosophy by…

Aristotle and the Open Future

By Jason W. Carter How much do we know about the future? Some people think that we can know a lot about the future – even the distant future. We might now know, for instance, that a catastrophe caused by…

About William S. Burroughs

By Stanley Gontarski American outlier writer, William S. Burroughs, was a creative force, as a writer in his own right, and as a cultural theorist, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call “a society of control” or “a…

The myth of the selfless philosopher

By Enrico Galvagni There is a myth that spans the history of western thought: the myth of the selfless philosopher. True philosophers, the myth says, are ethereal creatures who dropped every trace of pride, egoism, and vainglory to devote their…

Detail from the Paul Klee painting Camel (in Rhythmic Landscape with Trees, showing an brightly coloured abstract image of a camel surrounded by trees

Rhythm and Critique

Sunil Manghani explores how rhythm came to be one of the most productive terms for critical enquiry into our social, political and cultural lives, and looks to the future of research into rhythm.