Joe Hughes

This essay examines practices of evaluation in the archive of the important journal Critique, founded by Georges Bataille in 1946. The journal was a key forum for the development of postwar philosophy and theory in France, and its archive provides a unique resource for the study of the processes of evaluation and judgement that shaped the field. Considering a variety of archival materials (including advertisements for the journal, issue covers, tables of contents, author piece rate lists, letters and private communications) alongside reviews published in the journal, we examine the institutional processes, editorial practices and thus the more-or-less implied values that organised the journal’s operations. We argue that Critique’s archive reveals a complex, socially diffuse image of value and that the field of forces in which a volume is produced is multidimensional, integrating criteria from a plurality of different fields. The act of evaluative judgement encompasses capital; the prioritisation and ordering of content; operations of recommendation, friendship and mentorship; concerns for political impact; house codes; and norms of engagement.

This article examines a series of pivotal moments in the history of the postwar French journal 'Critique', tracing the development, refinement, and reas- sertion of the journal’s singular style of critical practice. We present the journal’s founding documents and consider editor Georges Bataille’s identification of Maurice Blanchot as the guiding model for the journal. Then we examine two defining texts in the review’s development: Alexandre Kojève’s “Hegel, Marx and Christianity” (1946) and Alain Badiou’s “The (Re)commencement of Dia- lectical Materialism” (1967). Kojève’s celebrated article crystallised the ideals of the journal’s programme; Badiou’s article meanwhile tested those ideals, precipitating a minor editorial crisis.

A collection of essays on the approaches and applications of Deleuze's philosophy to the bodyUsing a variety of contemporary cultural, scientific and philosophical lines of enquiry, the contributors produce a truly multidisciplinary view of the Deleuzian body, inviting us to look afresh at art, movement and literature.The Deleuzian body is not necessarily a human body, but the lines of enquiry here all illuminate the idea of the human body and thinking about formation, origins and becoming in relation to power, creativity and affect.

ABSTRACT“The first meaning of true and false”, writes Spinoza in a neglected passage of the Metaphysical Thoughts, “seems to have had its origin in stories”. Ideas are true when they “show” us things as they are; they are false when they do not, when they are fictional. In this essay, I argue that what appears at first sight to be a simple assertion of a correspondence theory of truth in fact opens onto broad historical transformations in the nature of meaning that reshaped the very atmosphere of truth: the emergence of a new kind of fictionality, transformations in the sense of logical interpretation, and ultimately transformations in the structures and sources of the natural light, that “clarity” which constitutes for Spinoza, as for Descartes, an indispensable criterion for certainty.