Books

Promise & perdition in the thought of Gillian Rose

Edited by Peter Osborne & Howard Caygill

2026

The essays collected in this eighth volume from CRMEP Books derive from a conference on the thought of the British sociologist and philosopher Gillian Rose, held at Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury, London, 18–19 June 2025. Interest in Rose’s wide-ranging body of critical work in the sociology and philosophy of modernity has grown significantly since her early death in 1995. In the wake of the publication of a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Rose’s Love’s Work (2024), along with some of her undergraduate lectures on critical theory from the University of Sussex at the end of the 1970s (Marxist Modernism, Verso, 2024), this thirty-year anniversary event set out to explore the play of promise and perdition – from which Love’s Work itself departed – across the full span of her writings.

Conjunctions: humanatures reproduction disjunctions

Edited by Stella Sandford

2025

We have called this volume Conjunctions because the various themes which run through it – social and biological reproduction, the relationship between organic, social and technological life, the relations of all of these to sexuality and the relations between disciplines – do not form a unified picture, but they do reflect a particular state of relations between various fields in and adjacent to CRMEP as a historical project.

Futurethoughts: Critical Histories of Philosophy

Edited by Peter Osborne

2024

It is commonplace to note that, unlike analytical philosophy, modern European or so-called ‘continental’ philosophy operates with a conception of philosophy as a practice that is in large part constituted through its ongoing relations to its own history. It is less commonplace, however, to include in this thought not only broader, ‘non-philosophical’ social contexts (colonialism and industrial capitalism), but also the disciplinary and other institutional mediations through which such contexts are categorially filtered, as forms of knowledge, on their way to encountering philosophical reflection. Reflection on this fact draws attention to philosophy as a transdisciplinary as well as a historical practice. The writings in this collection – organized according to the institutional genres of the presentations within CRMEP from which they derive – revisit some of these encounters of philosophy with its constitutive boundaries.

Institution: Critical Histories of Law

Edited by Cooper Francis & Daniel Gottlieb

2023

Afterlives: transcendentals, universals, others

Edited by Peter Osborne

2022

The reception of the canonical texts and discourses of European philosophy – that is to say, their appropriation and re­ activation – has always been a politically as well as a hermeneutically contested activity. Such contestation takes place in the piecemeal manner of disputes over particular texts and authorships, in the broader field of the construction of ‘the tradition’ (struggles over canon formation and its boundaries) and, most fundamentally, through disagreements about the concept of tradition itself. Under conditions of growing global social interdependence – of which conflicts are less a negation than an effect – the self-enclosing ‘illusion of persistence’ that constitutes ‘tradition’ in any particular instance becomes ever more fragile. This is not only because the destructive, antiquating power of the new is renewed by each new cycle of crisis and accumulation, but because new forms of engagement with the standpoints of those living outside the tradition are forced on those within by the new dependencies. If all historical understanding derives from discontinuities between the ‘fore-history’ and the ‘after-history’ of historical circumstances, introduced into them by the present, then tradition, as a continuity of transmission (Überlieferung), is the very opposite of historical understanding. Transmission is itself here the catastrophe – the reproduction of the present in the image of the past.

Vocations of the political: Mario Tronti & Max Weber

Edited by Howard Caygill

2021

Following a recent and characteristically incisive intervention against the latest episode in the moral and political subsidence of the Italian left, Mario Tronti found himself being praised by an adversary as ‘the youngest, the most lucid, fresh and forward looking’ mind of the Italian left. Yet the terms of praise would be unfamiliar to most English-speaking readers of Tronti’s work: ‘a communist, but also Nietzschean … a utopian but also an operaista’. With the publication of a translation of the 1966 classic of twentieth-century political theory, Workers and Capital, in 2019, and The Weapon of Organisation in 2020, English-speaking readers are finally in a position to assess Tronti’s thought of the 1960s, but not thereafter. Tronti’s remarkable adventure of thought over the past half-century, with its utopian and Nietzschean inflections, remains largely a closed book to English-language readers. It was to address this situation that the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University decided to mark the conjunction of the publication of Workers and Capital and the centenary of Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation (1919) with a conference on the theme of Tronti, Weber and their vocations of the political.

Thinking art: materialisms, labours, forms

2020

The contributions to this second volume of essays derived from events organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) have their source in the conference ‘Thinking Art’, held at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) London on 29 February 2020, immediately prior to the Covid-19 lockdown. The unifying conceit, on this occasion, lay in repeating a trope from the ICA’s past – ‘Thinking Art’ – not in order to return to that time, but rather to take the measure of the present’s distance from it, registered in current preoccupations and concerns. What unifies the essays is not any particular theoretical stance, but a concern to maintain a thinking of art and its related discourses that is sceptical of all attempts to use the new eco-naturalisms and vitalisms as an alibi for stopping thinking about art socially.

Capitalism: concept, idea, image

2019

The 150th anniversary of Capital was the occasion for the conference that gave rise to the essays in this book, but it was not their object. This is not a book about the history of the reception of Marx’s Capital. Nor is it a series of scholarly examinations and analyses of its text and arguments, in the sense of a commentary. Nor is it a series of introductory essays. Rather, it offers the reader a snapshot of a variety of aspects of Marx’s Capital today: a range of reactions to its current relevance to the comprehension of the often very different capitalist societies in which we live, from a range of philosophical and political stand-points on the Marxist and post-Marxist Left.