186 Reviews

Many reviews of books on or by Walter Benjamin begin with a capsule description of the key events in his life. It goes something like this. Born in 1892 into a well-off assimilated German Jewish family in Berlin, Walter Benjamin failed to gain an academic career, just about getting by, instead, through journalism and handouts […]

University finances: update

On 11 July, David Willetts, minister for universities and science, confirmed a new ‘operating framework’ for higher education in England. This pulled together the results of various consultations and the work done by the ‘Regulatory Partnership Group’ to set out regulatory arrangements through to 2015.1 A week earlier, Willetts had written to the Higher Education […]

On theoretical foundations: Theses on Brecht: With an Introduction by Andrew McGettigan

Document Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on Brecht’These four short paragraphs, translated here into English for the first time, were sketched out in Walter Benjamin’s hand on a sheet filed alongside a transcript for his radio talk ‘Bert Brecht’, broadcast on Frankfurter Rundfunk in June 1930.1 In content, they resemble ideas developed in other texts […]

178 Reviews: Books Reviewed: Massimilliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse–Fromm Correspondence Louis Althusser, Cours sur Rousseau McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Curious Times and Everyday Life of the Situationist International Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy Julie Stephens, Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory and Care Routledge, Security Studies: New Titles and Key Backlist, 2012 After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May-15 July 2012

Fabrication defect: Fabrication defect: François Laruelle’s philosophical materials

Fabrication defect François Laruelle’s philosophical materials Andrew mcgettigan François Laruelle, professor of philosophy at Paris X, Nanterre, has been publishing since the early 1970s and now has around twenty book-length titles to his name. English-language reception of his work owes most to the efforts of Ray Brassier, who published an account of Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’ in […]

168 Reviews: Books Reviewed:Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental TheoryPeter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of TimeAndrea Cavalletti, ClasseGail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art TheoryDavid Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the ListenerAndrew Finlay, Governing Ethnic Conflict: Consociation, Identity and the Price of PeaceManuel De Landa, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic ReasonBill Griffiths, Collected Earlier Poems (1966–1980)

Reviews History flows through some problems Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Robert Bononno, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2010. viii + 299 pp., £18.50 pb., 978 0 8166 5687 8. To state that ‘reality is a construction’ might elicit two opposed responses. Certain philosophers and social theorists would welcome the claim, in so […]

110 Reviews

I imagine that for Western Marxists (such as myself) History and Class Consciousness will have meant ideological analysis rather than what Lukács called ʻorganizational problemsʼ. This book will, in other words, have meant a breakthrough in the study of ʻthe antinomies of bourgeois consciousnessʼ (subtitle of one of its most famous chapters) rather than those […]

112 Reviews

The ethical dimension of Adornoʼs work is elusive and gestural, but it is an ineliminable part of his philosophy. Jay Bernstein attempts to do justice to what he terms the ʻethical intensityʼ of Adornoʼs writing by reconstructing the ethical content and premisses of his philosophical output. However, this book is not only a mining of […]

116 Reviews

Born in the Ukraine in 1910, Raya Dunayesvskaya emigrated to the United States in her teens. By the age of twenty she was active on the American Left, her ability to read Russian giving her an advantage in interpreting the contradictory messages emerging from revolutionary Russia. She served as Trotskyʼs secretary when the exiled Bolshevik […]

‘Questioning Religion’, British Society for Phenomenology, University of Greenwich, 11–13 July 2003

Conference report Quoi? ‘Questioning Religion’, British Society for Phenomenology, University of Greenwich, 11–13 July 2003n some of the hottest days of the summer, amidst the designs of Wren and Hawksmoor at the University of Greenwichʼs Maritime Campus, around forty speakers and many more participants attended the BSPʼs ʻQuestioning Religionʼ conference. Perhaps the surroundings gave a […]

126 Reviews

Reviews Our images, their humanityCharles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2004. 232 pp., £57.00 hb., £10.99 pb., 0 8223 3255 8 hb., 0 8223 3293 0 pb. Ted Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy, Pluto Press, London, 2003. 232 pp., £50.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 0 74532 134 8 hb., […]

133 Reviews

For more than a decade much of the anglophone literature on Simone de Beauvoir has been preoccupied with the question of her intellectual status, attacking the still prevailing presumptions that her work is not philosophical or that it is philosophically wholly indebted to Sartre. The publication of this volume – the first in the Beauvoir […]

138 Reviews

Reviews October’s tombHal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004. 704 pp., 637 illustrations, 413 in colour, £45.00 hb., 0 500 23818 9. ^ For nearly thirty years the journal October has provided the most significant platform for addressing twentieth-century art. Art Since […]

153 Reviews

Reviews AlterliberalismMichel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Col ège de France 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2008. 368 pp., £20.99 hb., 978 1 403 98654 2. Six of Foucault’s thirteen annual Collège de France lecture series have now appeared in English translation in the space of five […]

As flowers turn towards the sun: Walter Benjamin’s Bergsonian image of the past

Benjamin’s theses ‘On the Concept of History’, the final precipitate of the unfinished Arcades Project, was intended to strike at the fundamental pil ars of a thought complicit in its times. [1] On the seventieth anniversary of the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact, which prompted its drafting, it is tempting to question the attraction of this set of […]

158 Reviews

Reviews Of princes and principlesGraham Harman Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Re.Press, Melbourne, 2009. 247 pp. £16.00 pb., 978 0 9805440 6 0. Unlike those of some of his compatriots, the name of Bruno Latour is not one to have graced the pages of Radical Philosophy with much frequency. It is not just […]

160 Reviews

Reviews Remake, the sequelMichael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2009. xiv + 434 pp., £25.95 hb., 978 0 674 03511 9. With Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri bring to a conclusion the trilogy they began a decade ago with the publication of Empire in 2000. Multitude, […]