'Nathan Brown' tag archive

Nathan Brown, The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 296pp., £32.00 hb., 978 0 82327 299 0 As its starting point, Nathan Brown’s excellent new book The Limits of Fabrication asks disarmingly simple questions: how are poems made, and what are poems made of? He takes these questions […]

To take an attitude of partisanship towards key struggles of the past does not mean either choosing sides, or seeking to harmonise irreconcilable differences. In such extinct yet still virulent intellectual conflicts, the fundamental contradiction is between history itself and the conceptual apparatus which, seeking to grasp its realities, only succeeds in reproducing their discord […]

News occupations OaklandWe live in a time when tents have become the singular weapon of the people whom power cannot tolerate, and against whom it does not know how to defend itself. The bureaucrats are in shambles; the ‘city’ and its ‘police’ are at each other’s throats; middling reformists have no idea where to position […]

Red years Althusser’s lesson, Rancière’s error and the real movement of history Nathan brown The dissolution of the organizational forms which are created by the movement, and which disappear when the movement ends, does not reflect the weak‑ness of the movement, but rather its strength. The time of false battles is over. The only conflict […]

The inorganic open Nanotechnology and physical being Nathan brown But what is an object? Bernard Stiegler, Technics and TimeWhat is the status of the object in contemporary philosophy? How is the question of the object sutured to particular determinations of the concept of ʻlifeʼ – a concept that, according to Giorgio Agamben, ʻmust constitute the […]

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’ […]

Reviews To live without an ideaMartin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2008. 255 pp., £55.50 hb., £21.50 pb., 978 0 804 70077 1 hb., 978 0 804 70078 8 pb. In lieu of either consensus or real antagonism, assessments of deconstruction since the mid-1990s have tended to […]

Reviews Laboratory Latin AmericaPatrick Barrett, Daniel Chavez and César Rodríguez-Garavito, eds, The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn, Pluto Press, London, 2008. 320 pp., £19.99 pb., 978 0 745 32677 1. There is widespread agreement that Latin America is currently the site of the most promising experiments in political organization and creativity to be found […]