Left-wing populism: A legacy of defeat: Interview with Éric Fassin

Martina Tazzioli [MT] Your latest book, published in 2017, Populisme: le grand ressentiment [‘Populism and deep resentment’], develops a critical reading of the concept and political role of populism today. 1 You offer an explanation for the apparent appeal of populist options in recent elections in Europe and the US, and you distance yourself from […]

Against goody two-shoes feminism

Reivew of Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures
Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 280pp., £74.95 hb., £24.95 pb., £24.95 eb., 978 0 23117 640 8 hb., 978 0 23117 641 5 pb., 978 0 23154 455 9 eb. A recurring theme within feminist philosophy has been the association of a feminine maternal principle […]

Choose life?

Reivew of Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood, eds., Against Life
Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood, eds., Against Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016). 277pp., £91.95 hb., £32.50 pb., 978 0 81013 213 9 hb., 978 0 81013 212 2 pb. In José Saramago’s 2005 novel, Death at Intervals, a land is stricken by a sudden uncooperative maiden of death who brings about the immortality […]

Fall of philosophicus erectus

Reivew of Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude
Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, trans. Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 208pp., £58.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 978 0 80479 218 9 hb., 978 1 50360 040 9 pb. At first glance one has the impression that Adriana Cavarero’s fascinating critique of verticality in Inclinations is a genealogical investigation […]

Between subject and citizen: On Étienne Balibar’s Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology

‘All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.’ Spinoza’s maxim, the last sentence of The Ethics, serves as a fitting observation with which to begin a discussion of Étienne Balibar’s Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, given the difficulty proper to the excellence of his text. Its difficulty is not, or not only, […]

Mark E. Smith, 1957–2018

A girl who wishes for the interesting becomes a trap in which she herself is caught. A girl who does not wish for the interesting believes in repetition. Constantin Constantius Like everyone else, I found out about the death of Mark E. Smith, singer and dominant force of the Manchester post-punk group The Fall, on […]

Everybody out!

Reivew of Yates McKee, Strike Art
Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 304pp., £16.99 hb., £12.99 pb., 978 1 78478 188 0 hb., 978 1 78478 681 6 pb. Yates McKee’s book is concerned with the power of the strike under contemporary conditions. What he understands by ‘strike’ incorporates, however, a […]

Between visible and undetectable violence

Reivew of Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, Zone Books, New York, 2017. 368pp., £32.95 hb., 978 1 93540 886 4 Unequal access to visibility, along with the erasure of traces, determine the partial undetectability of various events of violence, crimes and human rights violations. Such thresholds of detectability consist, according to Eyal […]

Powerless companions or fellow travellers?: Human rights and the neoliberal assault on post-colonial economic justice

The aim must be to reduce inequality in every area where it is found. To do this therefore we must refashion, or ‘revolutionise’, the laws which lead to the reproduction of the relations of domination and exploitation. Mohammed Bedjaoui 1 Attempts to enforce the NIEO [New International Economic Order] would lead to a Hobbesian war […]

Unusual alliances?

Reivew of Victoria Browne and Daniel Whistler, eds., On the Feminist Philosophy of Gillian Howie
Victoria Browne and Daniel Whistler, eds., On the Feminist Philosophy of Gillian Howie: Materialism and Mortality (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 304pp.,, £85.00 hb., 978 1 47425 412 0 In conversations with students feeling overwhelmed by their studies, I sometimes use the phrase, ‘remember that studying is part of life, not the other way around.’ While this […]

The wrong couple

Reivew of Gregor Moder, Hegel and Spinoza
Gregor Moder, Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). 200pp., £110.00 hb., £37.50 pb., 978 0 81013 542 0 hb., 978 0 81013 541 3 pb. Gregor Moder’s work contributes to a recent trend in continental philosophy: the reconciliation of Spinoza and Hegel. For generations, the continental field has been […]

Now the party’s over

Reivew of Paul Clements, The Creative Underground
Paul Clements, The Creative Underground: Art, Politics and Everyday Life (New York and London: Routledge, 2017). 232 pp., £110.00 hb., 978 1 13888 686 5 As Simone de Beauvoir notes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, the creative process is an event or ‘festival’ which demands a break with linear time, a de-temporalisation of modernity; a […]

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’ […]

A Deleuze for intolerable times

Reivew of Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze
Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 90pp., £7.99 pb., 978 1 51790 133 2 This book follows in a sequence of deaths: Nietzsche’s Death of God (after Feuerbach), Foucault’s Death of Man, and now, with Andrew Culp, the Death of this World. As with its predecessors, Culp’s announcement of death is […]

Before democracy

Reivew of Kojin Karatani, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy
Kojin Karatani, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 176pp., £70.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 0 82236 885 4 hb., 978 0 82236 913 4 pb. Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy is a far from straightforward book to assess. Its sustained and remarkably coherent re-reading of early Greek philosophy […]