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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

An article published in this same venue opens with a grievance: ‘We lack the philosophers that we require for an era marked with agitation and occupation’ It is a common enough complaint and one worth listening to – not for its own merit, but for what it reveals about the politics that produce it Turn it inside out into a research question: ‘Do we have the philosophers we need?’ and it reveals itself as a rejection of responsibility; as if new, radical philosophy is handed out to a generation like a pamphlet or a lecture A philosopher is not something we possess, no matter what college boards have advertised They, for a time, possess us Presupposing for now that there is a ‘we’ to talk about, let’s ask a question, the answer to which would directly implicate us: ‘Why are we – the self-styled Left – failing to conjure the philosophers that we need? ‘ The answer, I suspect, will begin with an admission: ‘Because we don’t have the stomach for them’ If we can arrive at the point when we openly admit this physiological problem, then we might finally be ready to raise real philosophical questions and even draw out the people who can shoulder them   I am not the first person to suggest that philosophy will have to leave its current academic confines and become a tool for education, institution building, and politics But I can add – looking at how the past few generations of the Left have conducted themselves – that the desire for a philosophical education has disappeared Philosophy scuttles and groans in a closet, and those who are still able to dream of a different world, sleep uncomfortably   In our period of advanced capitalism things change in conditions of near-total acquiescence, as almost everyone feels invested in the current socio-economic system In the West, slavery (in the form of wage-labour at home and abroad) is accepted and promoted by all classes, even as a precondition of their parliamentary freedoms If the society had any political volition at

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

READ NEXT

Prize Entry

April 2017

Terre Haute

Lauren Van Schaik

Prize Entry

April 2017

We’ve been quarantined in the school gym for three weeks when we realise just how much we’ve forgotten. Not...

fiction

January 2014

Leg over Leg

Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq

TR. Humphrey Davies

fiction

January 2014

First published in 1855, Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of ‘the Fāriyāq,’ alter ego of...

fiction

April 2012

They Told the Story from the Lighthouse

Chimene Suleyman

fiction

April 2012

I found Margate watching the sea. And I walked the streets thinking they had left it sometime in the...

 

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