Moribund elegance

Reivew of Philipp Ekardt, Benjamin on Fashion
Philipp Ekardt, Benjamin on Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 256pp., £74.59 hb., 978 1 35007 599 3 In Daniel Mourenza’s Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film (2020), we learn that Walter Benjamin, in the summer of 1938, went to see a Katharine Hepburn film at the cinema — it might have been Holiday, it might […]
Photograph of Helen Hessel with eyes closed

Between speculation and discipline

Reivew of Christopher Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner
Christopher Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 376pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 69119 866 8 Christopher Tomlins is not the first historian to have focused on the Nat Turner rebellion. In 1831, the slave Nat Turner led a group of blacks in an insurrection in St. […]

Masses, class and the power of suggestion

1. I will attempt here to reflect on three major themes, ‘masses, class, suggestion’, with the hope that, by doing so, I will also indirectly bring to light the relevance of Gabriel Tarde’s thought today. One may wonder why my title does not include – perhaps in place of the term ‘class’, which is not […]

Soap and bones

Reivew of Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals
Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (London: Reaktion, 2016). 288pp., £25.00 hb., 978 1 78023 645 2 When viewed on a hot plate under a polarising microscope, liquid crystals appear as a fluctuating kaleidoscope of colour: swirling, as Esther Leslie describes them, like ‘twisting lines of silks’, ‘pearlescent baubles’ […]

Gillian Rose’s critique of violence

The crisis of the legitimacy of the liberal democratic state is being posed today with an urgency and acuity not seen since the debates over the legitimacy of Weimar parliamentary democracy. Its constitutive claim to be able to satisfy both the values of justice and pluralism appears to be coming apart at the seams. Far […]

Art, documentary and the essay film

Dossier: Philosophy of the Essay Film

Dossier PHILOSOPHY OF tHE ESSAY FILM Art, documentary and the essay film Esther LeslieFilm as document The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960.1 Kracauer recalls watching a […]

Defiance or emancipation?

Defiance or emancipation? peter hallward What is resistance? Rather than offering a conceptual definition, Howard Caygill’s new book* approaches resistance as a problematic and elusive practice that calls for reflective judgement in the Kantian sense. His point of departure is the claim that resistance demands appreciation on its own evolving terms, rather than as an […]

Generative grafting: Reproductive technology and the dilemmas of surrogacy

COMMENT Generative grafting Reproductive technology and the dilemmas of surrogacy Elina staikou In 2013, at the advanced age of 101, Howard W. Jones, a medical pioneer in reproductive technology, published Personhood Revisited: Reproductive Technology, Bioethics, Religion and the Law. Looking back at the development of what came to be called the ARTs (assisted reproductive technologies), Jones […]

Socialism and the sea: Allan Sekula, 1951–2013

Obituary Socialism and the sea Allan Sekula, 1951–2013 Photographer, film-maker, cultural theorist and political activist, Allan Sekula was one of the outstanding Marxist intellectuals of his generation. The author of pioneering histories of photography, he produced genre-shifting exhibitions, books and videos. Almost at the end of his life, he co-directed an award-winning documentary film, and […]

Total social crisis and the return of fascism

Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left

Total social crisis and the return of fascism Elsa papageorgiou In memory of Sahtzat Loukman, 27 years old, murdered on 17 January 2013 in Athens, and Clément Méric, 18 years old, murdered on 5 June 2013 in Paris.This contribution seeks to mobilize certain concepts in order to symbolize what, in part, always resists symbolization. What […]

Look at his marvellous hands!

Reviews Look at his marvellous hands! Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2013. 336 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 30015 193 0. Yvonne Sherratt’s book on the response of philosophers to the Third Reich is written in the style of a docudrama. There are colourful descriptions of foliage in […]

Politics in a Tragic Key

In memory of Joel Olson (1967–2012) In the quarter-century or so since the obscure disaster of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, two words have been pinned to that of ‘communism’ with liberal abandon: ‘tragedy’ and ‘transition’. Tragedy, to signify the magnitude of suffering, but not the greatness of the enterprise; the depth of the fall, but […]

On theoretical foundations: Theses on Brecht: With an Introduction by Andrew McGettigan

Document Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on Brecht’These four short paragraphs, translated here into English for the first time, were sketched out in Walter Benjamin’s hand on a sheet filed alongside a transcript for his radio talk ‘Bert Brecht’, broadcast on Frankfurter Rundfunk in June 1930.1 In content, they resemble ideas developed in other texts […]

Voyage au bout de l’ennui

After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May–15 July 2012; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 21 September–16 November 2012; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 17 October 2012–7 January 2013. In a darkened room stand seven podiums, like black treadmills at a standstill. Each faces a digitized photo­graph projected onto a bare wall. The […]

174 Reviews: Books Reviewed:Walter Benjamin, Early Writings, 1910–1917Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New ManifestoBernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial DemocraciesMiguel Abensour, Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian MomentErika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecologism and Global PoliticsAlison Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal SubjectivityCatherine Malabou, Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of PhilosophyNadir Lahiji, ed., The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Re-opening Jameson’s NarrativeGillian Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of MethodMartin Woessner, Heidegger in AmericaChris Danta, Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot

Reviews SWøWalter Benjamin, Early Writings, 1910–1917, trans. and intro. Howard Eiland, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. 320 pp., £20.95 hb., 9 780 67404 993 2. This translated collection of forty-five of Benjamin’s early writings begins with his first published work, a poem that appeared pseudonymously just before his eighteenth birthday, and follows the tempestuous […]

Elementary

Ben Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, Unkant, London, 2011. 217 pp., £10.99 pb., 978 0 95681 760 0. David Cunningham In a much-cited March 1936 letter to Walter Benjamin, Adorno famously remarks of the separation between autonomous art and mass culture that, while both ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism’, and ‘both contain elements of change’, they […]

Occupy Time

3 Thanks to Anustup Basu for his generous help in the preparation of this article. See, in particular, Carlos Ruiz, De la república al mercado. Ideas educacionales y políticas en Chile, LOM Ediciones, Santiago, 2010. 4. ^ José Joaquín Brunner, Hernán Courard and Cristián Cox, Estado, mercado y conocimientos: políticas y resultados de la educación […]

Philosophy for children

Philosophy for children Matthew charles A well‑orchestrated public relations campaign led pri‑marily by educational charity The Philosophy Shop has helped raise the profile of the philosophy for children movement in the UK significantly over the last few years. Whilst The Philosophy Shop has been promoting its ‘Four Rs’ campaign to make ‘Reason‑ing’ a central feature […]