Archive: Arena Quarterly #18

Badiou: Politics, Beings and Events

Arena Quarterly no. 18

Justin Clemens

Jun 2024

Alain Badiou’s work must be seen as an integrated whole, responding to the Left’s epochal 70s failure. His system, and understanding it, is now as essential to a new politics as was Marx’s.

Brighter Than Ten Thousand Suns?

Arena Quarterly no. 18

Christian Caiconte

Jun 2024

Artists may aspire to create autonomous subjectivities, but they do so within determined social contexts. The more ambitious an entire exhibition is to escape such determinants, the more we need to ask, without fear or favour, whether the works within have not been wholly drawn back in.

Of Something Already Fading in the World

Arena Quarterly no. 18

Valerie Krips

Jun 2024

These men are as they are because their existence matters to no one: literally removed from other people in their building, they represent the collapse of the social ties that once bound communities together.

Reply to Scott Robinson’s Critique of Degrowth

Arena Quarterly no. 18

Terry Leahy

Jun 2024

In Arena 17, Scott Robinson argued that degrowthers draw on naturalistic metaphors, opening the door to technocracy. Leahy argues they look for real limits within nature, while elaborating a full politics.

Class Warfare: The invasion of STEM education by weapons companies

Arena Quarterly no. 18

Jenny Grounds

Jun 2024

The National Youth Science Forum is partnered with the largest producer of weapons—including nuclear weapons—on the planet: Lockheed Martin

Hijabi Atheists, the Artists, and Infidel Birds…

Arena Quarterly no. 18

Christopher Houston

Jun 2024

As Istanbul rejects Erdoğan, its recent history of dissent, where poets, draft refusers and post-theist Muslims perch.

Blank Verse

Arena Quarterly no. 18

Dan Tout

Jun 2024

Ford and Clemens have produced a highly original account of the complex contribution to Australian law, politics and poetics made by this ‘largely unacknowledged’ and pun-inducing figure—‘a man with a pun for a name’—here introduced as one of Australia’s founding fathers.

Reconstituting a Radical and Critical Politics for the Twenty-First Century

Arena Quarterly no. 18

John Hinkson

Jun 2024

The increasing visibility of a crisis in human life shows the inadequacy of current approaches on the Left. Only by going to the heart of contemporary processes, and their role within that crisis, can committed intellectuals develop a transformative approach.

Raw Conservatism and the Aristopops

Arena Quarterly no. 18

Simon Cooper

Jun 2024

US postliberalism doesn’t understand the nature of the crisis it has identified.

Luso Dreaming: Portugal Turns Right

Arena Quarterly no. 18

Fernanda Trecenti

Jun 2024

Portugal’s surging CHEGA movement, like Brazil’s Bolsonaro, draws on the lusophone cultural singularity of ‘saudade’—a nostalgia for a past that never was

Standing Ground in a Turning World

Richard King

15 Jul 2024

With the Gaza protests, the Left has reunified around a material approach. Extending that to a reflection on deeper social changes of recent decades is the key to a re-oriented politics capable of gaining ground.

Australian Film Co-ops

Arena Quarterly no. 18

Hanna Chetwin

Jun 2024

The co-op started running screenings on the top floor of the Third World Bookshop in the early 1970s. Before long, screenings were taking place all over Australia.