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 […]

The better half

Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2010. 196 pp.,£60.00 hb., 978 0 74863 863 5. Knox Peden There’s an old Ziggy cartoon that finds the eponymous misanthrope standing waist-deep in water in a flooded basement, remarking to nobody in particular: ‘I wonder if this […]

145 Reviews

Reviews Analogical nostalgiasAntonio Negri, The Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, trans. Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano, Verso, London and New York, 2007. 344 pp., £6.99 pb., 1 84667 582 3. Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes presents two thinkers at pains to make nostalgia productive. First there is Descartes, who, following an explosion of […]

149 Reviews

Reviews The Maoist march through the institutionsJulian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May ’68 and Contemporary French Thought, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal and London, 2007. 488 pp., £19.99 hb., 978 0 77353 199 4. ^ Julian Bourg’s rich study of the fallout from May ’68 in French political and intellectual life seeks to move beyond […]