92 Reviews

Reviews In the Name of the FatherElisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, translated by Barbara Bray, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997. xix + 574 pp., £25.00 hb., 07456 1523 6. In the spring of 1962, a 21-year-old woman is standing on a balcony in Paris, anxiously waiting for her father to keep his appointment with her. She waits […]

Fanon, phenomenology, race

Fanon, phenomenology, race David macey ʻThe black man is not. Nor the white.ʼ [1] Thus Fanon in the concluding section of Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), in my translation. It is quite impossible to work with the existing versions, the most obvious index of that impossibility being the unfortunate decision to translate the title of […]

97 Reviews

Reviews The tamagochi and the objet petit aSlavoj Žižek, The Žižek Reader, edited by Elizabeth and Edmond Wright, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999. xii + 332 pp., £55.00 hb., £15.99 pb., ISBN 0 631 21200 0 hb., 0 631 21201 9 pb. This is all delivered with such good humour that the critic stands disarmed. Anyone wishing […]

98 Reviews

Reviews Respect (or lack of it) Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. viii + 246 pp., £45.00 hb., 0 7456 1655 0. ^ Tim Hayward, Political Theory and Ecological Values, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. viii + 196 pp., £49.50 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 7456 1808 1 hb., 0 7456 […]

104 Reviews

Reviews Whatever happened to analytical Marxism? G.A. Cohen, If Youʼre an Egalitarian, How Come Youʼre So Rich?, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000. xii + 233 pp., £30.95 hb., 0 674 00152 2. This is a strange and disappointing book. The jokey and populist title is misleading. In fact the book contains the […]

106 Reviews

Friedrich Schlegelʼs two-hundred-year-old fragment ʻNothing is more rarely the subject of philosophy than philosophy itselfʼ shows its age. Now, its inversion seems true. Whether through recognition that philosophyʼs self-legitimating critique of the unexcavated presuppositions of other disciplines threatens to prove itself wanting; or, through various concerns for philosophyʼs apparently imminent death (which philosophers frequently seem […]

109 Reviews

Reviews The tale of TedTed Honderich, Philosopher: A Kind of Life, Routledge, London, 2001. x + 441 pp., £20.00 hb., 0 415 23697 5. There has been a surprisingly close relationship between philosophy and autobiography ever since Augustine. Indeed, it could plausibly be argued that modern European philosophy begins with Descartesʼ first-hand account of how […]

110 Reviews

I imagine that for Western Marxists (such as myself) History and Class Consciousness will have meant ideological analysis rather than what Lukács called ʻorganizational problemsʼ. This book will, in other words, have meant a breakthrough in the study of ʻthe antinomies of bourgeois consciousnessʼ (subtitle of one of its most famous chapters) rather than those […]

122 Reviews

in Vaneigemʼs expressionist polemic. Here, you suffer jolt after jolt, as intriguing commentaries on particular rights finish, and another right is bannered in capitals across the page (in this, it recalls the experience of Hegelʼs Logic, where the expositions in smaller type – oral improvisations transcribed by his students – are more accessible than the […]

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 […]

128 Reviews

Reviews ‘To be matter’Claudine Frank, ed., The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2003. 416 pp., £17.95 pb., 0 82233 068 7. ^ In 1934 two men in Paris contemplated something new and wonderful. They had obtained a pair of Mexican jumping beans. The younger of the two wanted […]

Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004

Obituary symposium Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004 David Cunningham In an interview with Le Monde published a couple of months before his death at the age of 74 from pancreatic cancer on Friday 9 October 2004, Jacques Derrida confirmed what many already knew, that he was ʻdangerously illʼ, ʻat war against myselfʼ. If questions of ʻsurvivalʼ had […]

130 Reviews

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life John Kraniauskas Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice Françoise Vergès Alessandra […]

136 Reviews

When, in 1973, the Bulgarian-born Julia Kristeva published her vast Revolution in Poetic Language, she had already been a highly significant figure on the Parisian scene for some years. Her earliest work had helped to make Bakhtinʼs dialogism and theory of the carnivalesque familiar to a French audience, whilst the closely related concept of intertextuality […]

146 Reviews

Reviews There is no science of languageJean-Jacques Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, trans. Gregory Elliott, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2006. vii + 240 pp., €113.00 hb., 9 00414 751 9. ^ Marxism, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle concedes in this clever, incisive and witty book, has made few sustained contributions to the philosophy of language. Despite […]