123 Reviews

In his introduction to Latin American Philosophy, Eduardo Mendieta complains that ʻone of the most amazing things about the bibliographical work on philosophy in English over the last decade or so is its utter silence about Latin American philosophy and philosophersʼ. Surveying the encyclopaedias and dictionaries of the discipline, he suggests that ʻas if by […]

Anti-Oedipus – thirty years on

Anti-Oedipus – thirty years on Éric alliez I, for my own part, made a sort of move into politics around May 1968…Gilles Deleuze, NegotiationsThis title was suggested to me some months ago by my best enemy – or my best fiend, to paraphrase Werner Herzog – who also happens to be a very good friend: […]

Demanding Deleuze

Demanding Deleuze Keith ansell pearson The Shortest Shadow and The Puppet and the Dwarf are the first two books in a new series edited by Slavoj Žižek entitled ʻShort Circuitsʼ.* In his seriesʼ foreword Žižek proposes that the shock of short-circuiting provides one of the best metaphors for a critical reading. His proposal is that […]

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., […]

131 Reviews

Reviews Culs-de-sacJacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum Press, London and New York, 2005. x + 116 pp., £14.99 hb., 0 8264 7067 X. Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005. xi + 148 pp., £29.95 hb., £12.50 pb., 0 80474408 […]

Neo-classic: Alain Badiou’s Being and Event

Neo-classic Alain Badiou’s Being and Event Peter osborne If anyone was in doubt about the continuing grip of French philosophy on the theoretical imagination of the anglophone humanities, the reception of the writings of Alain Badiou must surely have put paid to such reservations. The translation of his magnum opus, Being and Event, in spring […]

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 […]

The Substance of Thought, Cornell University, NY, 10–12 April 2008

Conference report Critical pivot The Substance of Thought, Cornell University, NY, 10–12 April 2008The stated goal of The Substance of Thought was to assess and intervene in the present theoretical conjuncture by zeroing in on the conflict between post-Kantian ‘critical’ philosophy and the speculative bent of recent philosophies displaying an allegiance to ‘pre-critical’ or ‘classical’ […]

Gramsci and the political: From the state as ‘metaphysical event’ to hegemony as ‘philosophical fact’

One of the forms in which the waves of protests against the ‘new world order’ in the 1990s and, particularly, the varied political and social movements of the new millennium have been registered in political philosophy has been in a renewed interest in the nature of ‘the political’ and its relationship with ‘politics’. Even and […]

‘On the Idea of Communism’, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, 13–15 March 2009

Conference report Celebrity Come Communism‘On the Idea of Communism’, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, 13–15 March 2009 This conference’s political conditions had been staked out in advance, on behalf of all the speakers, by Alain Badiou’s essay ‘The Communist Hypothesis’. These were the collapse of the Old Left of the Communist Party and state, […]

156 Reviews

Reviews An omelette of men Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008, viii + 231 pp., £21.50 hb., 978 0 231 14526 8. What forms can collective political action take today? As it works through its long, hesitant goodbye to the working class and grapples with […]

Theatre and the public: Badiou, Rancière, Virno

Theatre and the public Badiou, Rancière, Virno Simon bayly and ‘relational’ turn in contemporary art practice. The claim restaged here is that the theatrical is still what makes a political problem of something like ‘the public’, which in many contemporary philosophical understandings no longer appears at all. Making public The lack of the appearance of […]