A Marxist heresy?: Accelerationism and its discontents

Dossier: Future Stasis

In his study of the semantics of historical time, Reinhart Koselleck proposes that ‘two specific determinants’ characterize modernity’s ‘new experience of transition: the expected otherness of the future and, associated with it, the alteration in the rhythm of temporal experience: acceleration, by means of which one’s own time is distinguished from what went before’. If […]

Only a poet can save us

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2012. 173 pp., £9.95 pb., 978 1 58435 112 2. This is the fourteenth book to be published in Semiotext(e)’s Intervention series of pocket-sized texts. Launched with the translation of The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection in 2009, it evidently seeks to revive […]

178 Reviews: Books Reviewed: Massimilliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse–Fromm Correspondence Louis Althusser, Cours sur Rousseau McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Curious Times and Everyday Life of the Situationist International Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy Julie Stephens, Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory and Care Routledge, Security Studies: New Titles and Key Backlist, 2012 After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May-15 July 2012

Grande biog

Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2012. 603 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 74565 615 1. ‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking?’ Despite post-structuralist philosophies’ association with Beckettian questions such as these, they remain surprisingly bound to what Foucault called that ‘singular relationship […]

176 Reviews: Books Reviewed:Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A BiographySimon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political TheologyClaudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster, Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the UnknownStuart Price, Worst Case Scenario? Governance, Mediation and the Security RegimeMartin Breaugh, L’Expérience PlébéienneTina Chanter, Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of SlaveryStella Sandford, Plato and SexAlain Badiou, with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of LoveYehoshua Yakhot, The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR: The 1920s & 1930sJay Lampert, Simultaneity and Delay: A Dialectical Theory of Staggered Time

Reviews Grande biogBenoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2012. 603 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 74565 615 1.‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking?’ Despite post-structuralist philosophies’ association with Beckettian questions such as these, they remain surprisingly bound to what Foucault called that ‘singular […]

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 […]

173 Reviews: Books Reviewed:Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds, Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and DeathStephen J. Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, BiopoliticsRoberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of LifeBen Watson, Adorno for RevolutionariesTosaka Jun, Ideologie, Medien, Alltag: Eine Auswahl ideologiekritischer, kulturund medientheoretischer und geschictsphilosophischer SchriftenJussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and TechnologyArthur Bradley, Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to DerridaCostas Panayotakis, Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic DemocracyDominic Pettman, Human Error: Species-Being and Media MachinesDonna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and ModernityTimothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial ShameClaudio Calia and Antonio Negri, Antonio Negri Illustrated: Interview in Venice

Reviews What’s left of biopolitics? Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds, Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, Duke University Press, Durham NC and London, 2011. 400 pp., £75.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 82235 003 3 hb., 978 0 82235 017 0 pb. François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder, Beyond […]

Flaubert’s parrot

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2011. 215 pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 74564 531 5 hb., 978 0 74564 530 8 pb. David Cunningham The ongoing role played by French philosophy in underwriting the contemporaneity of anglophone theory has entailed, since the 1970s, the […]

170 Reviews: Books Reviewed:Jacques Rancière, The Politics of LiteratureJudith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and Cornell West, The Power of Religion in the Public SphereClayton Crockett, Radical Political TheologyNiilo Kauppi,Radicalism in French CultureHeiko Schmid, Wolf-Dietrich Sahr and John Urry, eds., Cities and Fascination: Beyond the Surplus of MeaningAdrian Mackenzie, Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network CultureEncarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect: A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of LaborAndrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush

Reviews Flaubert’s parrotJacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2011. 215 pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 74564 531 5 hb., 978 0 74564 530 8 pb. The ongoing role played by French philosophy in underwriting the contemporaneity of anglophone theory has entailed, since the 1970s, […]

108 Reviews

Reviews Universalism’s struggleMartha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. xxi + 312 pp., £20.00 hb., 0 521 66086 6. Nussbaumʼs is a moral project, couched in ethical arguments that stipulate and champion a list of ʻcapabilitiesʼ. These are the capabilities which allow women, the traditionally disadvantaged group […]

120 Reviews

In Friedrich Schlegelʼs famous fragment, the philosophical radicalism of Fichteʼs system is compared to both the artistic experimentalism of Goetheʼs Wilhelm Meister and the politically emancipatory force of the French Revolution. The Romantic project as a whole was prototypical for Benjamin in its willingness to align just such political, historical and aesthetic phenomena with the […]

123 Reviews

In his introduction to Latin American Philosophy, Eduardo Mendieta complains that ʻone of the most amazing things about the bibliographical work on philosophy in English over the last decade or so is its utter silence about Latin American philosophy and philosophersʼ. Surveying the encyclopaedias and dictionaries of the discipline, he suggests that ʻas if by […]

126 Reviews

Reviews Our images, their humanityCharles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2004. 232 pp., £57.00 hb., £10.99 pb., 0 8223 3255 8 hb., 0 8223 3293 0 pb. Ted Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy, Pluto Press, London, 2003. 232 pp., £50.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 0 74532 134 8 hb., […]