Reviews World enough? David Chandler, Hol ow Hegemony: Rethinking Global Politics, Power and Resistance, Pluto Press, London, 2009. 272 pp., £60.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 74532 921 5 hb., 978 0 74532 920 8 pb. Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2009. 304 pp., £46.50 […]

Fuad Rahmat reports from the 'World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth' in Cochabamba, Bolivia (19-22 April 2010).

Commentary Longing for a greener present Neoliberalism and the eco-city Ross adams In recent years, architects have found themselves increasingly commissioned to design entire new cities: a phenomenon that has been accompanied by a commitment to those terms of ‘sustainability’ which now seem inseparable from the urban project itself. While ‘sustainability’ remains a vague concept […]

What’s so great about ‘timeless’? Architecture and the Prince, again Victoria mcneile Whoever succeeds in redeveloping the Chelsea Barracks site will probably produce a small book to mark its completion. This will include an account of the site’s history, illustrated with maps and engravings, rather furry black-and-white photographs and a selection of press cuttings. There […]

In our recent highlight from RP163, David Cunningham examines the relationship between Lukács' 'The Theory of the Novel' and his later Marxist works, and its asks how we are to read this work today.

Noir into history James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover John kraniauskas ‘… history, the billiondollar speedup’ John Dos Passos, USA, 1938Blood’s a Rover (2009) is the final volume of James Ellroy’s ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy, which includes American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001).1 It is one of a recent glut of long, serially formatted […]

Andeanizing philosophy Rodolfo Kusch and indigenous thought Philip derbyshire The belated English translation of Rodolfo Kusch’s Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América (originally published in Spanish in 1970)* introduces this Argentine author to an English-speaking audience for the first time. What makes his work interesting is that it takes indigenous thinking seriously as philosophy – […]

It’s hard to know exactly who the audience is for this small book, the fifth in Semiotext(e)’s Intervention Series, and an uneasy bedfellow with its immediate predecessor in the series, Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War. Taken broadly, it’s an overview of the concept of the machine/machinic as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari, combined with post-autonomist […]

Chess news It was better not to know What have we learnt from Andrew McGettigan’s reconstruction (in RP 161) of the photographed Svendborg chess match? In a nutshell, that Brecht played bad moves and Benjamin failed to take advantage. For those of us who have long cherished the idea of these two playing matches of […]

The machines in the shop roar so wildly that often I forget in the roar that I am; I am lost in the terrible tumult, my ego disappears, I am a machine. I work, and work, and work with- out end; I am busy, and busy, and busy at all time. For what? and for […]

Forensic architecture Only the criminal can solve the crime Eyal weizman A strange story unfolded in the shadows of the legal and diplomatic furore that accompanied the release, on 15 September 2009, of Richard Goldstone’s Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which alleged that the Israeli army (and Hamas) […]

The African intellectual Hountondji and after Omedi ochieng Every thought, however original it may be, is to some extent shaped by the questions that it is asked. Paulin J. Hountondji, The Struggle for MeaningOne of the characteristic features of African philosophy is that it tends to pose epistemological questions in terms that preserve their dialectical […]

Who needs postcoloniality? A reply to Lindner Harry harootunian In Marx’s articles for the New York Tribune on British colonialism in India and the events leading to the Second Anglo-Chinese War (Opium War), critics have caught sight of a double mission attributed by him to British imperialism and colonialism to tear down the structure of […]

Reviews FlexploitationBrett de Bary, ed., Universities in Translation: The Mental Labor of Globalisation, Traces, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2010. 408 pp., £56.50 hb., £28.50 pb., 978 962 209 991 3 hb., 978 962 209 992 0 pb. Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, New […]

Philip Derbyshire (‘Who Was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysis in Argentina’, RP 158) should be commended for his insightful consideration of the literary and psychoanalytic writings of Oscar Masotta, one of the most important Argentine intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to make a case for juxtaposing these texts with Masotta’s idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary […]

individual capitalists and investor groups but from the juggernaut that is the inextricably entangled mass of global capital. Such a role could only come about under a change in the worldwide correlation of class and social forces in favour of popular and working classes. Yet mass socialist and worker movements, although they are burgeoning, are […]

Alternatives to austerity The need for a public utility finance system Robin blackburn The Great Credit Crunch of 2007–10 was, it is almost universally agreed, brought about by the irresponsibility and greed of bankers. But the huge public deficits needed to prevent a meltdown of the financial system are to be paid for by slashing […]

In an article first published in July 1968 in New Left Review, Perry Anderson gave an analysis of a critical weakness of British intellectual culture. His diagnosis is remarkable and surprising. One of the key problems, Anderson argued, was that Britain has failed to make any contribution to the classical sociological tradition; moreover, this failure […]

Reviews He preferred not to…Rob Chapman, Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head, Faber & Faber, London 2010. 441 pp., £14.99 pb., 978 0 571 23854 5. ^ Julian Palacios, Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe, Plexus Publishing, London 2010. 448 pp., £14.99 pb., 13 978 085965 431 9. ^ Michele Mari, Rosso Floyd, Giulio […]

Let me start with an apology: this conference obviously is concerned mainly with philosophy, literature, the social and human sciences, much more than with those sciences that are known as exact, natural or whatever – but which could probably, more to the point, be called ‘inhuman’ and ‘asocial’. It is thus for me, as a […]

What is sex? Some feminists have harboured suspicions about this form of question, given its philosophical (or ‘metaphysical’ [1] ) pedigree. But philosophy no longer has the disciplinary monopoly on it. Indeed, with regard to sex, the more interesting task today is to pose and to attempt to answer the question from within a transdisciplinary […]