Article: “You all ok?” The Impossibility of Being Alright amid Mass Violence

by Christopher G. Robbins

In response to the 17th mass shooting in only 14 days of February 2023, or the 71st mass shooting in 45 days of 2023 in the U.S, this time at Michigan State University, my friend who lives a world away in Australia wrote a short, caring message, “You all ok? Re Lansing?” I live approximately 60 miles away from Lansing and have colleagues who work there and close friends whose children attend school there.

Matthew Barker on Alfonso Lingis: ‘The bodies that touch us’

by Matthew Barker

Alfonso Lingis asks the reader in the opening paragraph of Bodies That Touch Us: “are the bodies we touch really the bodies described by phenomenology?” (p.159). His question probes the limits of the possibilities of description vis a vis the actual body described. To answer the question, Lingis wanders through selected phenomenological texts and writers, pulling attention to moments of significance. His approach is meditative rather than calculative (see Heidegger, 1966) and his overture to Maurice Merleau-Ponty is as noticeable as his silence on Emmanuel Levinas.

The Carnival is Over

by Howard Prosser

“Carnivals in History” (1981) is the only article Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published in Thesis Eleven. The piece’s appearance, then and now, arguably says more about the journal than it does the esteemed historian. Having him appear in its early pages was a coup for the new publication. Other big names followed. And, mercifully, some lesser ones. To include his piece in the Top 40 offers a marker of the journal’s prestige as well as the persistence of critical thought among its many pages.
 

Article: Where are we home? Revisited

by Katie Terezakis

Home is a loaded idea. Call to mind the common sayings: home is where the heart is, you can never go home again, etc. The abundance of mottoes doesn’t dampen the sentiment; the idea of home remains charged with longing for a place we knew or hope to create.

If The Beatles had read Heller

by Mark Davis

It’s an evocative theme, a ‘Top 40’. A little alarmingly for some listening no doubt, Thesis Eleven was first conceived the year I was born, 1978. Growing up here in the UK during the 1980s, encountering the ‘Top 40’ meant listening to the radio (later watching TV) to learn which songs had climbed or fallen a few places in the charts depending on the music-buying public’s affections. I used to wait, enduring the songs that didn’t excite me in order to sing the songs that did.

Jack Palmer on ‘The Making and Unmaking of Strangers’

by Jack Palmer

I first read ‘The Making and Unmaking of Strangers’ where it is republished in Postmodernity and its Discontents, a collection of wide-ranging and loosely connected essays. A form typical of this stage of his work. Some of them are transcripts from lectures delivered at invited and esteemed lectures (the Manchester Annual Peace Lecture, for instance), reflecting perhaps a new-found fame and notoriety. Thesis Eleven was clearly a testing ground, it seems, a collection of the like-minded, alongside Telos, Theory, Culture & Society and The Jewish Quarterly.

John Grumley on George Márkus’s ‘Four Forms of Critical Theory’

by John Grumley

George Márkus’s Four Forms of Critical Theory was first published in Thesis Eleven no. 1 in 1980. Reading it again meant revisiting a paper that I had first read forty years ago with fresh eyes. I always thought George was a special person and a great philosopher. He supervised my PhD and became my senior colleague after I was appointed to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. We became close friends after his retirement.  

Stuart Macintyre 1947-2021

by Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski

Stuart Macintyre died in Melbourne on 22 November 2021. He was one of the leading Australian historians of our times, an inspiring scholar, a culture builder, and endless source of generosity and enthusiasm for the work of history as well as the social sciences. A young Althusserian, all those years ago, he was a lifelong socialist and labour movement enthusiast.

Article: My Own Private Utopia

by Peter Beilharz

Utopia has always been part of my world, ever since I started thinking about it. Was this 1968? A little after, later in high school. Utopia seemed ubiquitous; the possibilities of new worlds abundant