Archive of Huw Lemmey
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Concept and Form: Miller writes to Hallward and Badiou responds
Following the publication of Concept and Form, a two-volume edition examining the work and legacy of the philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, writer and psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller wrote an open letter to editor Peter Hallward. Below we publish the response from philosopher Alain Badiou.
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London anarchist bookshop firebombed
Freedom, London's oldest anarchist bookshop, was firebombed in the early hours of Friday 1st Febuary. Early reports suggest the bookshop on the ground floor and the building's electrics were "seriously damaged", despite the bookshop having been fitted with metal shutters following a bombing by members of Combat 18, a British neo-fascist group, in 1993. Thankfully, nobody was hurt in last night's attack.
Freedom Bookshop is home of Freedom newspaper, Britain's longest running anarchist newspaper, as well as the Freedom Press, the country's largest anarchist publishers. It also offers facilities for a number of radical and anarchist organisations including the Anarchist Federation, the Solidarity Federation, London Coalition Against Poverty, the Advisory Service for Squatters and Corporate Watch.
Freedom was founded in 1886 by volunteers including Peter Kropotkin and Charlotte Wilson. As well as arson attacks, the paper has also suffered repression at the hands of the state, with four editors being arrested for attempting "to undermine the affections of members of His Majesty's Forces" in 1945. Contributors to the paper have included Emma Goldman, George Orwell and Ethel Mannin. The bookshop remains a vital and lively hub for the anarchist movement in Britain.
Verso Books offer our solidarity to Freedom Bookshop. A cleanup will take place at the bookshop at 84b Whitechapel High St tomorrow, Saturday 2nd, at 1pm. A fundraising and donations campaign will open shortly. For more information please visit the Freedom facebook page. -
"Do we, too, have a fabricated history?" : Moncef Marzouki on The Invention of the Jewish People
After reading Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, President Moncef Morzouki of Tunisia asks about the lessons Sand's book might have for other nations and peoples.
Do we, too, have a fabricated history?There is no doubt about it - the book The Invention of the Jewish People by the Jewish Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, which stirred up great controversy in Israel and was translated into 26 languages in less than a year, came as a pleasant surprise to all its Arab readers, including to the author of these lines.
What this historian, whose hostility towards Zionism cannot be dismissed as mere Anti-Semitism, establishes very clearly is that the Zionist claim to their right to the lands of Palestine is void. He proves, relying on a vast amount of sources – many of them Jewish – that the forceful expulsion of the Jews from Palestine after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans is a myth.... that the preservation of a pure race during years of exile is a myth... that the claim that the ones who returned to conquer Palestine were the grandchildren of those exiled thousands of years earlier is a myth... And even the exodus from Egypt and the Kingdom of David and Salomon, all of these are legends upon legends.
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"The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass": Jacques Rancière on Populism
Writing in Libération, Jacques Rancière talks about populism and French politics today.
The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass
Not a day goes by without the risks of populism being denounced on all sides. But it is not so easy to grasp what the word denotes. What is a populist? Despite various fluctuations of meaning, the dominant discourse seems to characterize it in terms of three essential features: a style of speech addressed directly to the people, bypassing representatives and dignitaries; the assertion that governments and ruling elites are more concerned with feathering their own nest than with the public interest; a rhetoric of identity that expresses fear and rejection of foreigners. -
Shlomo Sand: ‘"The Zionist Left has never been less colonialist than the Right"
On the eve of the Israeli parliamentary elections, L’Express interviewed the historian Shlomo Sand. He looked back to the use of religious reference points by Israeli politicians ever since the creation of the State of Israel, holding this contradiction to blame for the failure of the Israeli Left.
'The Zionist Left has never been less colonialist than the Right'
The parliamentary elections to be held this Tuesday looked certain to confirm the Israeli electorate’s turn to the Right. On the eve of the vote, L’Express interviewed the historian Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Land of Israel: from Holy Land to Homeland. He looked back to the use of religious reference points by Israeli politicians ever since the creation of the State of Israel, holding this contradiction partly to blame for the failure of the Israeli Left.