Peter Osborne
Biographic Data
| ID | 162918 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Osborne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Osborne |
| SIGNATURE | OSBORNE P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Kingston University London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1615-2872 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Planet as Political Subject
An incisive critique of the absence of the social and historical in Bruno Latour’s planetary politics and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s geo-biology. The political, Osborne argues, is a modality of the social, which is already a socio-natural set of relations
Interesting Art
Judgements of the ‘interesting’ dominate critical assessments of contemporary art, but what is the logical structure of these claims? From Schlegel to Donald Judd, a rendering of the unconscious critical schema by which a work becomes ‘of interest’
What is Radical
What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarshi…
Illusions of Totality. Global Contemporaneity and the Condition of the Museum: Global Contemporaneity and the Condition of the Museum
Este artigo considera os efeitos sobre os museus de arte da condição histórica de uma contemporaneidade global, à qual estão hoje sujeitos. A principal diferença, argumenta-se, diz respeito às formas de universalidade que os museus de arte articulam e às quais aspiram. O artigo parte de uma breve revisão da cada vez mais comum "crítica do museu" empreendida nas últimas décadas, que é uma crítica da concepção de um "museu universal" do século XIX.…
Redemption Through Discourse
Out of Sync: Tomba’s Marx and the Problem of a Multi-layered Temporal Dialectic
This piece reconstructs and reflects upon the terms of the theoretical projection underlying Max Tomba’s book, Marx’s Temporalities , with particular reference to his use of the concepts of multiple temporalities (Ernst Bloch) and temporal layers (Bloch and Reinhart Koselleck). Tomba’s use of these concepts, it is argued, productively relocates Marx’s writings within the framework of the twentieth-century philosophy of time. However, Tomba’s depe…
Gillian Rose and Marxism
Returning today to the topic of "Gillian Rose and Marxism," which I first broached thirty-three years ago now, back in 1982, cannot but provoke a certain salutary temporal and existential disorientation.1 This is, first, because enough has changed world-historically—that is to say, geopolitically—in those thirty-three years to make "the project of a critical Marxism" (Rose's phrase from Hegel Contra Sociology)2 somewhat quixotic, in a way I will …
Problematizing Disciplinarity, Transdisciplinary Problematics
This article situates current debates about transdisciplinarity within the deeper history of academic disciplinarity, in its difference from the notions of inter- and multi-disciplinarity. It offers a brief typology and history of established conceptions of transdisciplinarity within science and technology studies. It then goes on to raise the question of the conceptual structure of transdisciplinary generality in the humanities, with respect to …
Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader
Philosophy in Cultural Theory
Philosophy in Cultural Theory boldly crosses disciplinary boundaries to offer a philosophical critique of cultural theory today. Drawing on the legacy of Walter Benjamin, Peter Osborne looks critically at central philosophical debates in cultural theory, such as:* the relationship between sign and image* the technological basis of cultural form* the conceptuality of art* the place of fantasy in human affairs.It will appeal to those in philosophy,…
A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals
A Critical Sense brings together in a single volume the leading figures of contemporary radical theory. Moving freely between philosophy, politics and cultural studies, it offers a fascinating overview of the lines of thought of today's intellectual left.Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and critical theory, literary studies, deconstruction, pragmatism, postcolonial and queer theory are discussed in a series of interviews from the journal Radical…
Guattareuze
Modernism and Philosophy
This article examines the relation between philosophy and modernism. It explains that although modernism is a philosophical concept, it has rarely been treated as such. Philosophers have generally contented themselves with applications of modernism to the disciplinary field of philosophy of conventional usages forged elsewhere instead of digging down through the mantle of its multifarious instances to its conceptual core and working back up to ph…
Infinite exchange: The social ontology of the photographic image
This paper approaches the problem of the ontology of the photographic image post-digitalization historically, via a conception of photography as the historical totality of photographic forms. It argues, first, that photography is not best understood as a particular art or medium, but rather in terms of the form of the image it produces; second, that the photographic image is the main social form of the digital image (the current historically domi…
Taking the time to listen, learn and act—an example of complex international dialogue
Increased low‐level radioactive discharges from Sellafield in West Cumbria began to attract strong criticism from Norwegian Ministers, media, NGOs and local community groups during 2001. The best practicable environmental option was to discharge Technetium‐99 to sea but these discharges were beginning to be detected at very low levels around the Norwegian coast. During the early part of dialogue it was accepted that there were no known health or …
Où est l'œuvre d'art: L'art, l'architecture et l'espace de l'œuvre post-conceptuelle
La question de la médiation dans l'art contemporain constitue la question des formes de médiation qui composent l'art post-conceptuel. C'est dans la relation à l'architecture que se médiatise la spatialisation de l'œuvre post-conceptuelle. Cela implique une multiplicité de formes de matérialisation. Le réseau de relations entre différentes sortes de matérialisations constitue ainsi l'espace propre de chaque œuvre
Whoever speaks of culture speaks of administration as well
This essay considers the proposal of a new cultural-theoretical problematic of 'culture as resource' from three points of view: (1) its 'metacultural' structure, (2) Adorno's account of the relationship between culture and administration, and (3) the relationship between pragmatism and Cultural Studies. 'Culture as resource', it suggests, aspires to the status of a new cultural-theoretical paradigm that might transform Cultural Studies into Cultu…
How to Read Marx
Written for an introductory series, this book contains the results of research on Marx's oeuvre of both a scholarly and conceptual character. It aims to show, in textual detail, the respects in which Marx's writings are unified by a distinctive and hitherto unappreciated relation to the post-Kantian philosophical tradition, irreducible to their relations to Hegel's philosophy alone
On Comparability: Kant and the Possibility of Comparative Studies
Research Article| May 01 2005 On Comparability: Kant and the Possibility of Comparative Studies Peter Osborne Peter Osborne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2005) 32 (2): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-32-2-3 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search S…
Art beyond aesthetics: Philosophical criticism, art history and contemporary art
In 1965 the American art critic Harold Rosenberg declared: ‘Art criticism today is art history, though not necessarily the art history of the art historian.’ This raises the question of precisely what kind of art history art criticism is (or should be), and what its relations are to ‘the art history of the art historian’. This essay addresses this question through the relationship between art criticism and philosophy. More specifically, it offers…
Philosophies of race and ethnicity
Race and ethnicity have become two of the most loaded and contested concepts in the contemporary world. Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity aims to disentangle this complexity and guide the reader to a clearer understanding of the debates.Analysing the genealogy, meanings and political uses of the concepts of race and ethnicity, Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity draws on the best scholarship from philosophy, history, post-colonial studies, politi…
Installation, Performance, or What
Installation, Performance, or What? Get access Julie H. Reiss : From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art ( MIT Press : Cambridge, MA, and London, , 1999 ), xxiv + 181 pp., hardback ISBN 0-262-18196-7 , £22.50. Erika Suderburg (ed.): Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art ( University of Minnesota Press : Minneapolis, MN, and London, , 2000 ), viii + 370 pp., hardback ISBN 0-8166-3158-1 , £43.50, paperback ISBN 0-8166-3…
Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological Category
Few thickets are more tangled than that in which the idea of modernity has become enmeshed, few topics less likely to inspire confidence than the question of its relations to the ‘postmodern’. Not least of the problems concerns the character and status of the concept of modernity itself. For it is far from clear that the main figures in recent debates have been writing about, and disputing, the same set of issues when the term has been used. This…
A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson's Adorno
Fredric Jameson is by general acclaim leading Marxist critic in North America. Author of a series of books that set pace for radical literary culture in United States during 1970s through their reception of European theoretical trends (Sartre, German Marxist cultural criticism, Russian formalism, and French structuralism), he turned in 1980s first to elaboration of a distinctly political form of narratology (The Political Unconscious),' and then,…
Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter's Negatives
Of all the issues raised by Richter's paintings, perhaps the most intractable is that of where to place them within a critical history of contemporary art. For it is a paradox of Richter's work that while it derives both its force and its modernity from the consistency of its address to a single problem-the problem of the continuing possiblity of painting as a historically significant activity-it is precisely this consistency that threatens to cu…
Problematizing Disciplinarity, Transdisciplinary Problematics
This article situates current debates about transdisciplinarity within the deeper history of academic disciplinarity, in its difference from the notions of inter- and multi-disciplinarity. It offers a brief typology and history of established conceptions of transdisciplinarity within science and technology studies. It then goes on to raise the question of the conceptual structure of transdisciplinary generality in the humanities, with respect to …
Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological Category
Few thickets are more tangled than that in which the idea of modernity has become enmeshed, few topics less likely to inspire confidence than the question of its relations to the ‘postmodern’. Not least of the problems concerns the character and status of the concept of modernity itself. For it is far from clear that the main figures in recent debates have been writing about, and disputing, the same set of issues when the term has been used. This…
On Comparability: Kant and the Possibility of Comparative Studies
Research Article| May 01 2005 On Comparability: Kant and the Possibility of Comparative Studies Peter Osborne Peter Osborne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2005) 32 (2): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-32-2-3 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search S…
Infinite exchange: The social ontology of the photographic image
This paper approaches the problem of the ontology of the photographic image post-digitalization historically, via a conception of photography as the historical totality of photographic forms. It argues, first, that photography is not best understood as a particular art or medium, but rather in terms of the form of the image it produces; second, that the photographic image is the main social form of the digital image (the current historically domi…
Whoever speaks of culture speaks of administration as well
This essay considers the proposal of a new cultural-theoretical problematic of 'culture as resource' from three points of view: (1) its 'metacultural' structure, (2) Adorno's account of the relationship between culture and administration, and (3) the relationship between pragmatism and Cultural Studies. 'Culture as resource', it suggests, aspires to the status of a new cultural-theoretical paradigm that might transform Cultural Studies into Cultu…
Gillian Rose and Marxism
Returning today to the topic of "Gillian Rose and Marxism," which I first broached thirty-three years ago now, back in 1982, cannot but provoke a certain salutary temporal and existential disorientation.1 This is, first, because enough has changed world-historically—that is to say, geopolitically—in those thirty-three years to make "the project of a critical Marxism" (Rose's phrase from Hegel Contra Sociology)2 somewhat quixotic, in a way I will …
A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson's Adorno
Fredric Jameson is by general acclaim leading Marxist critic in North America. Author of a series of books that set pace for radical literary culture in United States during 1970s through their reception of European theoretical trends (Sartre, German Marxist cultural criticism, Russian formalism, and French structuralism), he turned in 1980s first to elaboration of a distinctly political form of narratology (The Political Unconscious),' and then,…
Out of Sync: Tomba’s Marx and the Problem of a Multi-layered Temporal Dialectic
This piece reconstructs and reflects upon the terms of the theoretical projection underlying Max Tomba’s book, Marx’s Temporalities , with particular reference to his use of the concepts of multiple temporalities (Ernst Bloch) and temporal layers (Bloch and Reinhart Koselleck). Tomba’s use of these concepts, it is argued, productively relocates Marx’s writings within the framework of the twentieth-century philosophy of time. However, Tomba’s depe…
Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter's Negatives
Of all the issues raised by Richter's paintings, perhaps the most intractable is that of where to place them within a critical history of contemporary art. For it is a paradox of Richter's work that while it derives both its force and its modernity from the consistency of its address to a single problem-the problem of the continuing possiblity of painting as a historically significant activity-it is precisely this consistency that threatens to cu…
Overcoming Philosophy as Metaphysics: Rorty and Heidegger
Overcoming Philosophy as Metaphysics: Rorty and Heidegger
Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological Category
Few thickets are more tangled than that in which the idea of modernity has become enmeshed, few topics less likely to inspire confidence than the question of its relations to the ‘postmodern’. Not least of the problems concerns the character and status of the concept of modernity itself. For it is far from clear that the main figures in recent debates have been writing about, and disputing, the same set of issues when the term has been used. This…
A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson's Adorno
Fredric Jameson is by general acclaim leading Marxist critic in North America. Author of a series of books that set pace for radical literary culture in United States during 1970s through their reception of European theoretical trends (Sartre, German Marxist cultural criticism, Russian formalism, and French structuralism), he turned in 1980s first to elaboration of a distinctly political form of narratology (The Political Unconscious),' and then,…
Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter's Negatives
Of all the issues raised by Richter's paintings, perhaps the most intractable is that of where to place them within a critical history of contemporary art. For it is a paradox of Richter's work that while it derives both its force and its modernity from the consistency of its address to a single problem-the problem of the continuing possiblity of painting as a historically significant activity-it is precisely this consistency that threatens to cu…
Installation, Performance, or What
Installation, Performance, or What? Get access Julie H. Reiss : From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art ( MIT Press : Cambridge, MA, and London, , 1999 ), xxiv + 181 pp., hardback ISBN 0-262-18196-7 , £22.50. Erika Suderburg (ed.): Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art ( University of Minnesota Press : Minneapolis, MN, and London, , 2000 ), viii + 370 pp., hardback ISBN 0-8166-3158-1 , £43.50, paperback ISBN 0-8166-3…
Philosophies of race and ethnicity
Race and ethnicity have become two of the most loaded and contested concepts in the contemporary world. Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity aims to disentangle this complexity and guide the reader to a clearer understanding of the debates.Analysing the genealogy, meanings and political uses of the concepts of race and ethnicity, Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity draws on the best scholarship from philosophy, history, post-colonial studies, politi…
Art beyond aesthetics: Philosophical criticism, art history and contemporary art
In 1965 the American art critic Harold Rosenberg declared: ‘Art criticism today is art history, though not necessarily the art history of the art historian.’ This raises the question of precisely what kind of art history art criticism is (or should be), and what its relations are to ‘the art history of the art historian’. This essay addresses this question through the relationship between art criticism and philosophy. More specifically, it offers…
How to Read Marx
Written for an introductory series, this book contains the results of research on Marx's oeuvre of both a scholarly and conceptual character. It aims to show, in textual detail, the respects in which Marx's writings are unified by a distinctive and hitherto unappreciated relation to the post-Kantian philosophical tradition, irreducible to their relations to Hegel's philosophy alone
On Comparability: Kant and the Possibility of Comparative Studies
Research Article| May 01 2005 On Comparability: Kant and the Possibility of Comparative Studies Peter Osborne Peter Osborne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2005) 32 (2): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-32-2-3 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search S…
Whoever speaks of culture speaks of administration as well
This essay considers the proposal of a new cultural-theoretical problematic of 'culture as resource' from three points of view: (1) its 'metacultural' structure, (2) Adorno's account of the relationship between culture and administration, and (3) the relationship between pragmatism and Cultural Studies. 'Culture as resource', it suggests, aspires to the status of a new cultural-theoretical paradigm that might transform Cultural Studies into Cultu…
Où est l'œuvre d'art: L'art, l'architecture et l'espace de l'œuvre post-conceptuelle
La question de la médiation dans l'art contemporain constitue la question des formes de médiation qui composent l'art post-conceptuel. C'est dans la relation à l'architecture que se médiatise la spatialisation de l'œuvre post-conceptuelle. Cela implique une multiplicité de formes de matérialisation. Le réseau de relations entre différentes sortes de matérialisations constitue ainsi l'espace propre de chaque œuvre
Taking the time to listen, learn and act—an example of complex international dialogue
Increased low‐level radioactive discharges from Sellafield in West Cumbria began to attract strong criticism from Norwegian Ministers, media, NGOs and local community groups during 2001. The best practicable environmental option was to discharge Technetium‐99 to sea but these discharges were beginning to be detected at very low levels around the Norwegian coast. During the early part of dialogue it was accepted that there were no known health or …
Modernism and Philosophy
This article examines the relation between philosophy and modernism. It explains that although modernism is a philosophical concept, it has rarely been treated as such. Philosophers have generally contented themselves with applications of modernism to the disciplinary field of philosophy of conventional usages forged elsewhere instead of digging down through the mantle of its multifarious instances to its conceptual core and working back up to ph…
Infinite exchange: The social ontology of the photographic image
This paper approaches the problem of the ontology of the photographic image post-digitalization historically, via a conception of photography as the historical totality of photographic forms. It argues, first, that photography is not best understood as a particular art or medium, but rather in terms of the form of the image it produces; second, that the photographic image is the main social form of the digital image (the current historically domi…
Guattareuze
Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader
Philosophy in Cultural Theory
Philosophy in Cultural Theory boldly crosses disciplinary boundaries to offer a philosophical critique of cultural theory today. Drawing on the legacy of Walter Benjamin, Peter Osborne looks critically at central philosophical debates in cultural theory, such as:* the relationship between sign and image* the technological basis of cultural form* the conceptuality of art* the place of fantasy in human affairs.It will appeal to those in philosophy,…
A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals
A Critical Sense brings together in a single volume the leading figures of contemporary radical theory. Moving freely between philosophy, politics and cultural studies, it offers a fascinating overview of the lines of thought of today's intellectual left.Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and critical theory, literary studies, deconstruction, pragmatism, postcolonial and queer theory are discussed in a series of interviews from the journal Radical…
Out of Sync: Tomba’s Marx and the Problem of a Multi-layered Temporal Dialectic
This piece reconstructs and reflects upon the terms of the theoretical projection underlying Max Tomba’s book, Marx’s Temporalities , with particular reference to his use of the concepts of multiple temporalities (Ernst Bloch) and temporal layers (Bloch and Reinhart Koselleck). Tomba’s use of these concepts, it is argued, productively relocates Marx’s writings within the framework of the twentieth-century philosophy of time. However, Tomba’s depe…
Gillian Rose and Marxism
Returning today to the topic of "Gillian Rose and Marxism," which I first broached thirty-three years ago now, back in 1982, cannot but provoke a certain salutary temporal and existential disorientation.1 This is, first, because enough has changed world-historically—that is to say, geopolitically—in those thirty-three years to make "the project of a critical Marxism" (Rose's phrase from Hegel Contra Sociology)2 somewhat quixotic, in a way I will …
Problematizing Disciplinarity, Transdisciplinary Problematics
This article situates current debates about transdisciplinarity within the deeper history of academic disciplinarity, in its difference from the notions of inter- and multi-disciplinarity. It offers a brief typology and history of established conceptions of transdisciplinarity within science and technology studies. It then goes on to raise the question of the conceptual structure of transdisciplinary generality in the humanities, with respect to …
Redemption Through Discourse
Illusions of Totality. Global Contemporaneity and the Condition of the Museum: Global Contemporaneity and the Condition of the Museum
Este artigo considera os efeitos sobre os museus de arte da condição histórica de uma contemporaneidade global, à qual estão hoje sujeitos. A principal diferença, argumenta-se, diz respeito às formas de universalidade que os museus de arte articulam e às quais aspiram. O artigo parte de uma breve revisão da cada vez mais comum "crítica do museu" empreendida nas últimas décadas, que é uma crítica da concepção de um "museu universal" do século XIX.…
What is Radical
What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarshi…
The Planet as Political Subject
An incisive critique of the absence of the social and historical in Bruno Latour’s planetary politics and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s geo-biology. The political, Osborne argues, is a modality of the social, which is already a socio-natural set of relations
Philosophy (17 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Art (9 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Social science (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works)