God’s away

Reivew of Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World
Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 2019). 306pp., £112.00 hb., £32.00 pb., 978 1 50173 099 3 hb., 978 1 50173 100 6 pb. Willem Styfhals’ new book offers a conceptual history of Gnosticism within a deceptively narrow discursive field. Though Gnosticism re-emerged and become […]
Lift on the end of a bridge

Earth systems

Reivew of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Climate of History in a Planetary Age
Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). 296pp., £76.00 hb., £20.00 pb., 978 0 22610 050 0 hb., 978 0 22673 286 2 pb. The bright red time ball atop Flamsteed House at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich rises halfway up its mast each day at […]

Frames of modernity

Reivew of Susan Buck-Morss, Year One: A Philosophical Recounting
Susan Buck-Morss, Year One: A Philosophical Recounting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021). 416pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 26204 487 5 Philosophers of the enlightenment such as Rousseau, Kant and Hegel imagined their projects as universal in reach and scale. Whether these philosophers were writing about the social contract, the foundations of moral law or the […]

Climate struggle

Reivew of Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War
Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (London: Verso, 2022). 320pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78873 388 5 The US Congress passed its largest ever investment in clean energy in August – the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – and yet it remains impossible to shake the feeling that, […]
White outdoor stairs leading into an appartment block with image of rowers on wall behind

Knowing looks

Reivew of Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself
Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 278 pp., €22.00 pb., 978 3 94336 597 9 Tom Holert remarks near the beginning of Knowledge Beside Itself that art has traditionally been defined in contradistinction to knowledge, at least scientific or systematic knowledge. How then to understand the proliferation of […]
Photo of a photo of a white brick modernist building

Crisis within crisis

Reivew of Dario Gentili, The Age of Precarity: Endless Crisis as an Art of Government
Dario Gentili, The Age of Precarity: Endless Crisis as an Art of Government, trans. Stefania Porcelli in collaboration with Clara Pope (London and New York: Verso, 2021). 136pp., £12.99 pb., 978-1-78873-380-9 This is the new English translation of a book first published in Italian in 2018. In a world that is still struggling with the […]

Intersectional humanism

Reivew of Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown, eds., Raya Dunayevskaya's Intersectional Marxism
Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown eds., Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 350pp., £99.99 hb., 978 3 03053 716 6 Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-1987) was a Marxist, humanist, feminist and revolutionary thinker, neglected in both Marxist and feminist traditions. This collection presents […]
Dunayevskaya lecturing with expressive right arm

Allegorical mappings

Reivew of Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology
Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 2019). 432pp., £19.99 pb., 978 1 78873 043 3 A concern with allegory as a mode of interpretation rather than as a literary historical description of a moribund genre has been a leitmotif in Fredric Jameson’s thought from Fables of Aggression (1979) and The Political […]
Map of a landscape and seashore

Estranging capitalist estrangement

Reivew of Mattin, Social Dissonance
Mattin, Social Dissonance (Falmouth: Urbanomic/Mono, 2022). 256pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 91302 981 4 Both a reconstruction of the notion of alienation and a partisan reflection on the relationship between experimental art and a social world, Social Dissonance could be considered the first work of ‘Brassierian Marxism’. If the study of Wilfrid Sellars led Ray […]
Sign with 'Laption + LCD Repairs' in gaudy blue on pink with coils of wire below

Theoretical practices

Reivew of Natalia Romé, For Theory: Althusser and the Politics of Time
Natalia Romé, For Theory: Althusser and the Politics of Time (Lanham, Boulder, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). 206pp., £81.00 hb., 978 1 53814 764 1 Although Natalia Romé’s book For Theory: Althusser and the Politics of Time comes in the disguise of humble secondary literature, it is not just an account of Althusser’s theory of […]
Blue one way street sign pointing left with white building behind

Back from the future

Reivew of Keti Chukhrov, Practicing the Good
Keti Chukhrov, Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism (Minneapolis: eflux/University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 336pp., £22.99 pb., 978 1 51790 955 0 Spinoza’s dictum that we ought to understand first – not ridicule, not cry, nor detest – is ignored surprisingly often, even in philosophical scholarship, when it comes to revising and […]
Neighbourhood mozaic hidden behind long grass showing woman in white holding child, doctor, soldier, student.

Between context and transcendence

Reivew of Martin Jay, Genesis and Validity
Martin Jay, Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). 280pp., £26.99 hb., 978 0 81225 340 5 Can ideas transcend the context of their appearance? Can concepts depose the particularity of their origin to achieve validity? In the opening pages to a new collection of essays […]
Spines of books on shelves with titles 'A Critical History of Western Philosophy', 'THe Oxford History of Western Philosophy', 'History of Philosophy Eastern and Western'

About time

Reivew of Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in light of notions of form and individuation
Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in light of notions of form and individuation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 440pp., £88.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 0 81668 001 6 hb., 978 0 81668 002 3 pb. Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in light of notions of form and individuation, Volume II: Supplemental Texts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). […]
Jet of liquid frothing steam below, lit by bright light against black background

Lost at sea

Reivew of Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History
Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History (London: Verso, 2021). 480 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 1 83976 333 5 The second volume of Peter Weiss’s epic historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance opens in Paris in 1938. Recently defeated international brigade fighters in the Spanish Civil War, the unnamed narrator and his dejected comrades have taken […]
Painting of a ship in storm

Race after information-value

Reivew of Seb Franklin, The Digitally Disposed
Seb Franklin, The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2021). 254pp., £86.00 hb., £19.00 pb., 978 1 51790 714 3 hb., 978 1 51790 715 0 pb. As our tech overlords flee a blighted planet, a scholarly consensus is taking shape around the fallout of unchecked innovation and […]

Throwing rocks

Reivew of Avery F. Gordon, The Hawthorn Archive
Avery F. Gordon, The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 472pp., £87.00 hb., £33.00 pb., 978 0 82327 631 8 hb., 978 0 82327 632 5 pb. In discussing with Avery F. Gordon his video installation, The Beginning. Living Figures Dying (2013), a project focused ‘on the relationship […]

Protests against reality

Reivew of John Molyneux, The Dialectics of Art
John Molyneux, The Dialectics of Art (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020). 300pp., £17.99 pb., 978 1 64259 131 6 This book is a significant contribution to the Marxist reflection on art. This is not a ‘Marxist history of art’, but a Marxist book about art, composed of various essays, some of a general theoretical character, and […]

`on the roots of olive trees uprooted’

Reivew of Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human
Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). 312pp., £87.00 hb., £21.99 pb., 978 1 47800 767 8 hb., 978 1 47800 802 6 pb. In 2001 the United Nations enacted an International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict (it’s on […]
Photo of a white Israeli buildings, perhaps a settlement, set against a Palestinian landscap

Interwoven solidarities

Reivew of Bhandar and Ziadah, eds, Revolutionary Feminisms
Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, eds, Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought (London: Verso, 2020). 240 pp., £17.99 pb., 978 1 78873 776 0 In striving towards revolutionary feminisms against a backdrop of world-changing events, the need for collective solidarity has never been more important. Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah’s book begins […]
Graffiti on post which reads 'Feministes contre frontieres'.

Abstract egalitarianism

Reivew of Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice
Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 432pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 69116 308 6 In 1952, a young American philosopher named John Rawls arrived in Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. Fresh from military service in the Pacific that had diverted his […]
Band of light seen through mesh in water

Violence, justice and justification

Reivew of Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence; Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified?; Adriana Cavarero with Judith Bulter and Bonnie Honig, Towards a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence.
Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso, 2020). 224pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 78873 276 5. Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified? (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). 140pp., £35.00 hb., £9.99 pb., 978 1 50952 920 9 hb., 978 1 50952 921 6 pb.. Adriana Cavarero with Judith […]
Sticker on lampost which reads 'NO MORE POLICE POWERS! KILL THE BILL'.