Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, eds., A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 211pp., £20.00 hb., 978 0 69118 883 6. One thing a lot of people are saying right now – especially after the events of January 6th 2021 – is […]

Nathan Brown, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2021). 272pp., £39.00 pb., 978 0 82329 001 7 Describing the general course of twentieth-century French philosophy, Alain Badiou distinguishes between two major, divergent orientations of thought: a rationalist orientation that promotes a ‘philosophy of the concept’, following from the works […]

Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 276pp., £85.00 hb., £22.99 pb., 978 1 10849 718 3 hb., 978 1 10873 955 9 pb. At the heart of the post-World War II international order was a legitimating narrative premised on the idea that the world system was […]

Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 336pp., £28.00 pb., 978 0 23119 2972 A bold question motivates Timothy Bewes’ Free Indirect: Is a non-subjective thought possible? Bewes looks for an answer in recent developments in the novel. His contention is that the novel is a […]

Moritz Altenried, The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 217pp., £76.00 hb., £22.00 pb., 978 0 22681 549 7 hb., 978 0 22681 548 0 pb. Since the beginning of spring 2022, many countries have witnessed the return to supposedly ‘normal’ rhythms of life after the closures and […]

Shortly after Jean-Luc Godard’s death at the end of 2022, the Parisian Ménagerie de verre, a private art space primarily dedicated to dance, showed excerpts from the late work of the grand master, in a ‘visual and sonorous journey around five films made by Godard between 1999 and 2018’. Planned by his producer Jean-Paul Battaggia […]

Jill Godmilow, Kill The Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 224pp., £94.00 hb., £25.00 pb., 978 0 23120 276 3 hb., 978 0 23120 277 0 pb. Jill Godmilow’s Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars is a curious object. Although published by Columbia […]

Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2021). 857pp., £30.00 hb., 978 0 37415 845 3 During the past decade there has been an intensified debate in mainstream art criticism about the tension between art’s freedom and free speech. In this debate art’s freedom […]

Boris Groys, Philosophy of Care (London and New York: Verso, 2022). 106pp., £9.99 hb., 978 1 83976 492 9 Boris Groys’ Philosophy of Care is comprised of twelve short, pithy sections that plot an abbreviated history of mainly Western philosophy from ancient to modern times. Also included are two diversions into Russian intellectual thought, Groys […]

Thomas Lemke, The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms (New York: New York University Press, 2021). 299pp., £80.00 hb., £25.00 pb., 978 1 47980 881 6 hb., 978 1 47982 993 4 pb. Cars that measure and signal fuel efficiency, expanding markets for weather derivatives, and ‘vital systems security’ infrastructures, among other similar […]

Interview Health without security? An interview with Mark Neocleous Mark Neocleous with Sam Kelly Health without security? An interview with Mark Neocleous health, security, biopolitics, COVID-19, immunology, medicine, liberalism, police 75 87 Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University London. He is the author of numerous books including War […]

Your children are not your children; They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you But are not from you And though they are with you They belong not to you. You may give them your love But not your thoughts, They have their own thoughts. You can house […]

A speech that the singer, activist and historian Bernice Johnson Reagon gave at the 1981 West Coast Women’s Music Festival was published two years later in the classic anthology Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by the Black lesbian feminist Barbara Smith. The speech is entitled ‘Coalition Politics: Turning the Century’, and in it, […]

The intellectual movement that calls itself longtermism is an outgrowth of Effective Altruism (EA), a utilitarianism-inspired philanthropic programme founded just over a decade ago by Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill. EA, which claims to guide charitable giving to do the ‘most good’ per expenditure of time or money, originally focused on mitigating the […]

The Society of the Spectacle was written, as Guy Debord once put it, ‘with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society’. 1 Following the book’s publication in 1967, he and the Situationist International (SI) declared that it sought ‘nothing other than to overthrow the existing relation of forces in the factories and the […]

I once knew a monster who said she could not read Proust because there were no figures in Proust with whom she could identify. Theodor W. Adorno With this seemingly off-the-cuff anecdote, Adorno, lecturing on the topic of aesthetics in 1958, gave illustration to a critique of a certain kind of aesthetic reception, or against […]

The world of the future will … not [be] a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. — Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc. The word ‘robot’ entered the English language just over a hundred years ago, on 9 October 1922. It arrived with a Broadway production […]