Reviews archive

REVIEWS Capitalocene Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, Verso, London and New York, 2015. 316 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 1 78168 901 1 hb., 978 1 78168 902 8 pb. Jason Moore is a key figure in the World-Ecology Research Network, an international grouping […]

Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital Kate Soper J.M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury Alastair Morgan Kenneth Goldsmith, Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century John Millar Boris Groys, In the Flow Hammam Aldouri Peter Fleming, The Mythology of Work: How […]

rug-pulling within a particular diegetic order, while stories that force their protagonists to reframe their entire understanding of the universe typically reinforce this ‘conceptual breakthrough’ with a change in the regime of verisimilitude: take a sledgehammer to the wall at the edge of the Dark City (Proyas 1998), and suddenly you are no longer in […]

REVIEWS Oxymoron Paolo Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, trans. Giuseppina Mecchia, Semiotext(e), South Pasadena CA, 2015. 264 pp., £12.95 pb., 978 1 58435 094 1. In Paolo Virno’s previous book, A Grammar of Multitude, grammar – in other words, the philosophy of language – played second fiddle to the multitude […]

REVIEWS Oxymoron Paolo Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, trans. Giuseppina Mecchia, Semiotext(e), South Pasadena CA, 2015. 264 pp., £12.95 pb., 978 1 58435 094 1. In Paolo Virno’s previous book, A Grammar of Multitude, grammar – in other words, the philosophy of language – played second fiddle to the multitude […]

as if time simultaneously existed as the universal measure for labour and as given in a value where labour has been measured through time. Yet exactly this connection between time, labour and value in capitalism is money. It is not the clock that measures labour through time by quantifying it in values. Rather, this measuring […]

REVIEWS Krisis, what’s krisis? Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson and Nicholas Brown, eds and trans., Marxism and the Critique of Value, M–C–M´ Publishing, Chicago, 2014. li + 397 pp., £17.82 pb., 978 098954 970 7. This publication presents the first translation into English of a compendium of texts from the German Marxist group Krisis. […]

On the menu, but not at the table Susanne Lettow, ed., Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 2014. vi + 294 pp., £52.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 43844 949 4 hb., 978 1 43844 948 7 pb. This collection contributes to an increasingly important issue […]

REVIEWS Operation Adorno The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, ed. and trans. Susan H. Gil espie, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2015. 248 pp., £63.38 hb., £18.16 pb., 978 0 81665 616 5 hb., 978 0 81665 617 2 pb. At the beginning of a talk on ‘Critical […]

REVIEWS Operation Adorno The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, ed. and trans. Susan H. Gil espie, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2015. 248 pp., £63.38 hb., £18.16 pb., 978 0 81665 616 5 hb., 978 0 81665 617 2 pb. At the beginning of a talk on ‘Critical […]

Anthropology becoming philosophy Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology, trans. Peter Skafish, Univocal, Minneapolis, 2014. 229 pp., £20.00 pb., 978 1 93756 121 5. While the debates and provocations of sixties France in the texts that make up post-structuralism, or, perhaps more accurately, ‘la pensée 68’, continue to influence contemporary philosophy […]

Beneath the soviets the beach McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Verso, London, 2015. xxii + 280 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78168 827 4. Geological time is long; the lifespan of critical terms is decidedly shorter. The sedimentary record of buzz words logs the granulated residue of terms that were snuffed out […]

Beneath the soviets the beach McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Verso, London, 2015. xxii + 280 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78168 827 4. Geological time is long; the lifespan of critical terms is decidedly shorter. The sedimentary record of buzz words logs the granulated residue of terms that were snuffed out […]

Are you now or have you ever been a bourgeois philosopher? Michael Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique, Bloomsbury, London, 2014. 226 pp., £65.00 hb., 978 1 47251 134 8. This book intends to proffer a Marxist or, more specifically, ‘anti-bourgeois’ reading of Kant’s critical project and the third Critique in particular, and […]

REVIEWS Universalizing the ayllu José Aricó, Marx and Latin America, trans. David Broder, Haymarket, Chicago, 2015. lii + 152 pp., £20.00 pb., 978 16 08 46411 1; Álvaro García Linera, Plebeian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, Working-Class and Popular Identities in Bolivia, selection and introduction by Pablo Stefanoni, trans. Shana Yael Shubs et al., Haymarket, […]

REVIEWS Universalizing the ayllu José Aricó, Marx and Latin America, trans. David Broder, Haymarket, Chicago, 2015. lii + 152 pp., £20.00 pb., 978 16 08 46411 1; Álvaro García Linera, Plebeian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, Working-Class and Popular Identities in Bolivia, selection and introduction by Pablo Stefanoni, trans. Shana Yael Shubs et al., Haymarket, […]

at stake, it is claimed, was ‘an experience of the unknowable – or, at least, the discursively unknowable … a way of undergoing, a giving of self and a completion of thought.’ He quotes a fragment of Aristotle that distinguishes between two types of knowing, the didactic (or discursive) and the initiatory (Kerényi refers to […]

REVIEWSAriel on the border Alejandro Arturo Vil ega, Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianopolis, 2014. 284 pp., £62.00 hb., £22.99 pb., 978 0 25301 248 7 hb., 978 0 25301 257 9 pb. Alejandro Villega’s new book is a philosophical interpretation of the philosophy emerging from Latin […]

REVIEWSAriel on the border Alejandro Arturo Vil ega, Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianopolis, 2014. 284 pp., £62.00 hb., £22.99 pb., 978 0 25301 248 7 hb., 978 0 25301 257 9 pb. Alejandro Villega’s new book is a philosophical interpretation of the philosophy emerging from Latin […]

Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2012. 248 pp., £27.95 hb., 978 0 26201 773 2. Contemporary art from its inception has been framed by two mutually constitutive crises: an identity crisis and a legitimacy crisis. The implicit periodization of contemporary art commences roughly in 1970; that is, when Adorno […]

REVIEWSNew forms, old problems Colin Mooers, Imperial Subjects: Citizenship in an Age of Crisis and Empire, Bloomsbury, London, 2014. 152 pp., £14.99 pb., 978 1 44116 493 3. This is a small book on the inner connections of global capitalism, the imperial system, and the form and content of contemporary liberal citizenship. Through the prism […]