Culture Wars online review covers public talks, debates lectures and conferences in and around London, and beyond, in order to get to grips with the ideas behind the headlines.

Etienne Balibar on Constructions and Deconstructions of the Universal

Birkbeck Derrida Lecture Series

Balibar’s proposition is that rather than focusing on the dialectic of the universal and the particular, we should focus on how universalism is produced through its internal contradictions.

Slavoj Žižek: Respect for otherness? No thanks

Birkbeck Derrida Lecture Series Birrkbeck College, 20 May 2005

In seeking to unite politics with ethics, Žižek usefully exposes the political choices and consequences behind actions such as humanitarian intervention, and others which involve moral grandstanding without any idea of how this translates into a real intervention in the world.