A Ticklish Subject

In a recent interview for the Guardian, Slavoj Zizek rubbished a large part of his own oeuvre, declaring, “All the talk and the writing about politics, this is not where my heart is. No. I have been sidetracked. I really mean this.”

Zizek also admitted to not having watched James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar when he wrote his interpretation of it: “I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.”

Middlesex closes its Philosophy department

Nina Power writes over at The Guardian on the closing of Middlesex’s Philosophy department. Middlesex has an excellent Philosophy department that far exceeds its modest reputation as a university, and was particularly important for its specialisation in continental philosophy, which brought some much-needed pluralism into British academic philosophy.

One Last Toast… To ‘Pointless’ Research?

A recent article on the Guardian’s website claims that new proposals concerning government funding for research are set to ‘weed out pointless university studies’. The new proposed Research Excellence Framework (REF) from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce – bear with me here!) is designed to reward academic research which is of ‘quantifiable value’. A key criterion