Pascal Chabot, Global Burnout, trans. Aliza Krefetz (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 144 pp., £96 hb., £23.99 pb., £25 eb., 978 1 50133 438 2 hb., 978 1 50133 447 4 pb., 9 781 501 33439 9 eb. Philosophers have often described society as being either physically sick or mentally ill, but the diagnoses differ. Metaphors proliferate […]

Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (London and New York: Verso, 2018). 144pp., £10.99 pb., 978 1 78663 376 In an editorial in the New York Times written ten days after the 2016 presidential election, Mark Lilla (Professor of Humanities at Columbia University) challenged the so-called ‘Whitelash’ thesis, arguing […]

Giorgio Agamben, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 114 pp., $55.00 hb., $18.95 pb., 978 1 50360 220 5 hb., 978 1 50360 221 2 pb. Giorgio Agamben, Taste, trans. Cooper Francis (London and New York: Seagull Books, 2017). 90 pp., £14.99 hb., 978 0 85742 436 5 In seminars […]

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 […]

Janina Wellmann, The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830, trans. Kate Sturge (New York: Zone Books, 2017). 424pp., £27.00 hb., 978 1 93540 876 5 Janina Wellmann’s ambitious, cross-disciplinary book, first published in German in 2010, sets out to achieve two main aims. First, it attempts to retell and reframe the […]

Jeff Love, The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 376pp, £30.00 hb., 978 0 23118 656 8 In the notebooks Alexandre Kojève wrote on his way to Germany, he sketched a structure of all relevant fields of knowledge, with each field labelled ‘bolshevism in …’: ‘politics’, ‘religion’, and […]

David Sosa (ed.) Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 256pp., $60 hb., 978 01 98758 655. ‘Slurs’ – understood here to be particular words designed by convention to derogate targeted individuals or groups – are a puzzling category of speech, which raise a variety of philosophical questions pertaining to their […]

Stefanie R. Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 144pp. £86.00 hb., £21.00 pb., 978 1 51790 012 0 hb., 978 1 51790 013 7 pb. Taking to task the metaphor of the body politic that she claims is central to the concept of the state […]

Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). 140pp., £40.00 hb., £9.99 pb., 978 1 50951 802 9 hb., 978 1 50951 803 6 pb. We are fast approaching a point where one third of the global population will play video games on a regular basis. As such, video gaming ought to become a […]

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds, Veer Ecology: Companion for Environmental Thinking (Minneapolis; London: University Of Minnesota Press, 2017). 536pp., £83.72 hb., £20.93 pb., 978 1 5179 0076 2 hb., 978 1 51790 077 9 pb. The resource depletion, environmental degradation and global climate change that characterise our present time warrant an urgent questioning […]

Radical feminist analyses have always placed considerable emphasis on the crucial role played by social reproduction for the development of capitalism. Early social reproduction analyses – primarily premised on housework but also more broadly concerned with wagelessness – developed a robust critique of Marxian views that identified processes of value-generation only with the productive sphere, […]

Johan F. Hartle: I want to discuss the possibilities of Critical Theory that you and Alexander Kluge develop in your collective project. To that end, I would like to ask you to reconstruct a few points from your biography. Let’s start off by having you describe your path to the Institute for Social Research in […]

If the category ‘late’ has generally served to designate an ever-extending period of Jean-Luc Godard’s filmmaking career – typically dated from his return to cinema at the end of the 1970s when Godard was approaching fifty – with the release of his latest feature, Le Livre d’image: Image et parole [The Image Book: Image and […]

Human reproduction in the form of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and nurturing of infants and children has been at the core of Marxist feminist understandings of reproductive labour. When this labour is overtly commercialised, as in the case of surrogacy, it brings together biological processes of gestational and social processes of nurture and parenting into market […]

In one of the newspaper dailies, I read an article by an author who criticised the recent women’s renaissance for focusing on the right to vote and be elected without addressing the problems facing women as wives and mothers. And this, he argues, signals a complete collapse of the roads leading to the true path […]

During Jacques Derrida’s visit to China in 2001, he held a meeting with the Chinese philosopher Wang Yuanhua. 1 Derrida opened their dialogue with a sentence that had the effect, no doubt involuntary, of aggravating his interlocutor and all of those Chinese listeners present: ‘China doesn’t have philosophy, but/only thought [中国没有哲学, 但/只有思想, Zhongguo meiyou zhexue […]

As the articles contained in this issue of Radical Philosophy indicate, ‘social reproduction’ is today more than ever at the centre of feminist debates. Yet the same articles also express a legitimate concern that recent theorisations obfuscate the political significance of this concept and its ability to describe the changes that have taken place in […]

‘Savages’ were invented in the Old World but encountered in the New. J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion It is imperative to accept the idea that negation does not signify nothingness; that when the mirror does not reflect our own likeness, it does not prove there is nothing to perceive. Pierre Clastres, ‘Copernicus and the Savages’ […]

In 2018, the Feminist Archive South received funding from the UK Government Equalities Office to run events in community locations across the South West. This programme enabled cross-generational engagements with inspiring histories of the recent feminist past. 1 Activities were open to self-identified women and non-binary people – a point that enraged so-called ‘gender-critical feminists’ […]