The timely, highly-anticipated return of what has been a very important journal on the left. The editorial collective writes:
One of many self-published left-wing journals that were founded in Britain in the early 1970s, Radical Philosophy is today, however, more or less alone in its continuing independence from corporate publishing and in its political commitment to a collective editorial project. The reasons for this are not hard to see. The material, intellectual and political contexts within which a publication such as ours operates have clearly changed beyond all recognition. We began as a magazine produced on typewriters and photocopiers, with images literally cut and pasted into the text, mailed out by the collective to our readers. The changing shapes and fortunes of independent spaces of the left, and the general penetration of the computer and the internet into everyday practices of writing and reading, have since then dramatically transformed what it means to autonomously produce and distribute a publication like RP. In particular, it became apparent that, for a radical journal committed to the construction of as wide a community of readers and contributors as possible – including those outside the West European and North American academy – it was getting harder and harder to justify the access restrictions under which the magazine had come to operate. Given the new possibilities made available via the internet and ‘print-on-demand’, making a commitment to an equally radical form of openness – in a context where, too often, ‘open access’ has simply meant the revivification of the zombie forms of commercial academic publishing – became an increasingly pressing priority. By the end of 2016, as we approached both our forty-fifth birthday and our 200th issue, it thus became evident that we required a renewed confrontation with the altered demands of the philosophical and political present. As such, when five members of the previous editorial group stepped down in early 2017, we took the opportunity not only to open up and diversify membership of the collective, but also to commit ourselves to rethinking our own means and relations of production – editorial as well as technical – in order to bring new life to the project.
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In the Founding Statement of the Collective published in our first issue, the journal’s aim was articulated as one of challenging a situation in which philosophy had been made ‘into a narrow and specialised academic subject of little relevance or interest to anyone outside the small circle of Professional Philosophers’. Yet such a challenge was never about just a simple widening of the discipline. Instead, Radical Philosophy has always been about a breaking down of those fundamental institutional divisions that have so impoverished philosophy itself by separating it off both from other knowledges and from a wider political and intellectual culture of the left. The need to elaborate what Adorno once called a philosophising beyond philosophy, whether or not it originates in actual departments of academic philosophy, remains as relevant a task today as it did in 1972.
There are many reasons for this. In an editorial published on the occasion of our 100th issue, it was remarked that for all the changes it has seen, institutionally, ‘philosophy remains the most traditional and least reformed discipline in the humanities; not least with regard to race and gender’. Sadly, little has changed in this respect over the subsequent years. Amidst the current groundswell of demand for the decolonisation of knowledge, philosophy remains a central battleground, stubbornly resistant to the change that those storming its bastions wish to see. The analysis of how philosophical texts are entangled in the sordidness of the world and the evaluation of what, if anything, might be salvaged from their disentanglement, can be destabilising for a whiteness and a patriarchy that regard such texts as foundational to their very self-conception. We hope that, among other things, the pages of Radical Philosophy will become a venue for reflection upon the question of what it might mean to decolonise philosophy today. Alongside the translation and introduction of new authors, such an enterprise entails a profound questioning of the very notion of canonicity and the essence of the method of reason that calls itself philosophical. It is in keeping forever open the question of what it might mean to do philosophy that the project of a radical philosophy can remain truly radical.