Romanticism of the Multitude

Jon Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011. 376 pp., £56.00 hb., £15.50 pb., 978 0 81664 714 9 hb., 978 0 81664 715 6 pb. Philip Derbyshire Posthegemony is an ambitious and often pugnacious project, which, as its title indicates, seeks to go beyond neo-Gramscian accounts of the […]

169 Reviews: Books Reviewed:Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism Jon Beasley-Murray Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin AmericaRichard Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul WolfowitzJacob Rogozinski, The Ego and the Flesh: An Introduction to EgoanalysisPaul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-EjectDave Eggers, ZeitounTurbulence, What Would It Mean to Win?Team Colours, Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United StatesThe Occupation Cookbook, or, the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb

Reviews Well, the Ukraine girls really knock me out…Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. 300 pp., £25.95 hb., 978 0 26202 650 5. One of the more interesting recent Russian blockbusters, Valeriy Todorovskys 2008 Stilyagi, is a musical set in 1950s’ Moscow. The historical Stilyagi were the Soviet […]

Well, the Ukraine girls really knock me out…

Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. 300pp., £25.95 hb., 978 0 26202 650 5. Owen Hatherley One of the more interesting recent Russian blockbusters, Valeriy Todorovskys 2008 Stilyagi, is a musical set in 1950s’ Moscow. The historical Stilyagi were the Soviet Union’s beatniks, enthusiasts for modern jazz and […]

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. Michael Halewood To state that ‘reality is a construction’ might elicit two opposed responses. Certain philosophers and social theorists would welcome the claim, in so far as it appears […]

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 […]

Radical, like in the eighties

Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011. 320 pp., £34.50 hb., 978 0 231 14938 9. Luke White Dialectical Passions is a book about art and architectural theory in the wake of the New Left. It locates itself in the context of a turning tide in thinking […]

80 Reviews

REVIEWS A paradigm too far? Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, translated by Joel Anderson, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995. xxi + 215 pp., £39.95 hb., 0 7456 1160 5. Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, edited by Charles W. Wright, State […]

79 Reviews

REVIEWS Wakey wakey John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, Routledge, London and New York, 1995. x + 203 pp., £19.99 hb., 0 415 12475 1. Why should the collapse of the Berlin Wall have come to stand as the symbol of the revolutions which swept away historical […]

78 Reviews

REVIEWS Bodies in transition Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994. xvi + 250 pp., £32.50 hb., £12.99 pb., 0 253 32686 9 hb., 0 253 20862 9 pb. Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference, Routledge, London and New York, 1994. xi […]

77 Reviews

REVIEWS Where is capitalism going? Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, London, 1994. xii + 627 pp., £19.95 hb., 07181 33072. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, Verso, London, 1994. 416 pp., £39.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 1 85984915 6 hb., 1 […]

76 Reviews

REVIEWS Biographemes Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography, translated by Sarah Wykes, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994. xiv + 291 pp., £25.00 hb., 0 7456 1017 X. In 1968, Roland Barthes solemnly announced the death of the author in a short article that echoed the obituary for man penned by Foucault in the final lines of […]

75 Reviews

REVIEWS The Story of K Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, Routledge, London and New York, 1994.200 pp., £37.50 hb., £11.99 pb., 0415 101990 hb., 0415 101204 pb. Peter Fenves, ‘Chatter’: Language and History in Kierkegaard, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993. 312pp., £30.00 hb., £11.95 pb., 0 8047 1107 1 hb., 0 […]

74 Reviews

REVIEWS The hidden Goldmann Mitchell Cohen, The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics, and a Hidden God, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994, xi + 351 pp., £26.50 hb. 0691 034206. In her autobiographical roman Cl clef, Les Samourais, Julia Kristeva describes one ‘Fabien Edelman’: ‘Graying, pot-bellied, smiling, his shirt open and, of course, no tie, […]

73 Reviews

REVIEWS Marxism without Marxism Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York and London, Routledge, 1994. xx + 198 pp., £11.99 pb., 0415910455. There is no doubt that Derridean deconstruction was a political project from the outset, or that […]

72 Reviews

REVIEWS Paradise postponed David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, Cambridge and Paris, Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de I’Homme, 1993. xiii + 387 pp., £40.00 hb., 0 521 41851 8. Despite a dismal economic performance since its resurgence in the late 1970s, it is currently fashionable to be for capitalism. Throughout the […]

71 Reviews

REVIEWS Getting it right 10n Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds.,Constitutionalism and Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. vii + 359 pp., £ 12.95 pb., 0521 34530 8 hb., 0 521 45721 1 pb. Anthony Barnett, Caroline Ellis and Paul Hirst, eds., Debating the Constitution: New Perspectives on Constitutional Reform, Cambridge, Polity, 1993. xix + 183 […]

70 Reviews

REVIEWS The spectre of communitarianism Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and its Critics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993. 256 pp., £30.00 hb., 0 19 8278772. Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1993. xvi + 330 pp., £23.95 hb., 0 674 03180 6. Communitarianism has become a fashionable topic. Where, not […]

69 Reviews

I; REVIEWS The power of negative thinking Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London, Verso, 1993. xvi + 406 pp., £39.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 86091 3686 hb., 0 86091 583 2 pb. Roy Bhaskar’s previous writings have belonged to definite regions of philosophy – for the most part the philosophy of science and […]

68 Reviews

Jon Elster, Political Psychology Marcus Roberts Lin Chun, The British New Left Gregory Elliott Ross Harrison, Democracy Anne Phillips, Democracy and Difference David Copp, Jean Hampton and John E. Roemer, eds., The Idea of Democracy David Archard A. Phillips Griffiths, ed., A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, eds., A Companion to […]

67 Reviews

Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice Bob Brecher Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds., The Althusserian Legacy David Macey Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures Alan Duiant Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English […]