Pieces by Esther Leslie

Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital Kate Soper J.M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury Alastair Morgan Kenneth Goldsmith, Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century John Millar Boris Groys, In the Flow Hammam Aldouri Peter Fleming, The Mythology of Work: How […]

Dossier PHILOSOPHY OF tHE ESSAY FILM Art, documentary and the essay film Esther LeslieFilm as document The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960.1 Kracauer recalls watching a […]

Many reviews of books on or by Walter Benjamin begin with a capsule description of the key events in his life. It goes something like this. Born in 1892 into a well-off assimilated German Jewish family in Berlin, Walter Benjamin failed to gain an academic career, just about getting by, instead, through journalism and handouts […]

Reviews Look at his marvellous hands! Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2013. 336 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 30015 193 0. Yvonne Sherratt’s book on the response of philosophers to the Third Reich is written in the style of a docudrama. There are colourful descriptions of foliage in […]

Reviews Look at his marvellous hands! Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2013. 336 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 30015 193 0. Yvonne Sherratt’s book on the response of philosophers to the Third Reich is written in the style of a docudrama. There are colourful descriptions of foliage in […]

Wrapping the Reichstag Re-visioning German history Esther Leslie Whoever emerges victorious participates, to this day, in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. As is always the case, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures. The historical materialist views them with […]

Reviews Appreciating our beginningsRachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, eds, The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Womenʼs Liberation, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1998. xii + 531 pp., $20.00 pb., 0 609 80384 0. Sheila Rowbotham, Threads Through Time: Writings on History and Autobiography, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1999. 432 pp., £8.99 pb., 0 1402 275541. The […]

Althusser and usLouis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, edited by François Mathéron, translated and introduced by Gregory Elliott, Verso, London and New York, 1999. xxii + 136 pp., £20.00, 1 85984 711 0. It suffices to know the history of the constitution of nation states in broad outline to appreciate that Machiavelli does nothing but think […]

Reviews I want to tell you a story Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, translated and with an introduction by Paul A. Kottman, Routledge, London and New York, 2000. 176 pp., £47.50 hb., £13.99 pb., 0 415 20058 X hb., 0 415 20057 1 pb. What happens if you Just Say No to the […]

News Lenin in Essen Towards a Politics of Truth: The Retrieval of Lenin Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, 2–4 February 2001 Essen, home of Krupps and other behemoths of German industry, is where Slavoj Ziek has spent the past year at an interdisciplinary research college sponsoring his million-mark research prize for a project on ʻThe Antinomies of […]

Commentary Tate Modern A year of sweet success Esther leslie One room in Tate Modern is often passed through very quickly. An installation by Zurich artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss re-creates a room where redecorators are at work. Each item – buckets, brushes, a can of fizzy drink, a video cassette, palettes, a saucer […]

The thingRudi Visker, Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht/Boston/ London, hb. 1999; pb. 2001. 399 pp., £110.00 hb., £29.00 pb., 0 7923 5985 2 hb., 0 7923 6397 3 pb.by some “thing” that refuses to become part of the order of meaning (signification).ʼ My ʻthingʼ is thus something to which I […]

Conference report Letdown ‘Siegfried Kracauer’, University of Birmingham 13–14 September 2002 Only the superstitious would argue that the omens should have been heeded. Was it really the power of Friday the 13th that jinxed the event, such that all four ʻbig nameʼ international speakers failed to show at this two-day conference devoted to the work […]

Locality, locality, locality[Anti-]Globalica: Conceptual and Artistic Tensions in the New Global Disorder, Wroclaw, Poland, 1 May 2003. Organized by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa from the Institute of Digital Art and Technology at the University of Plymouth, this symposium was part of ʻGlobalicaʼ, WRO3, 10th International Media Art Biennale. It undertook to ʻinvestigate the local […]

The year 2003 has belonged to Adorno in Frankfurt. Across the city the Frankfurt sonʼs hundredth birthday was celebrated. Ten-foot-high bookshop displays pushed doorstop biographies, picture books and collations of ephemera revealing such littleknow details as Adornoʼs penchant for hippopotamus. Week after week the Literaturhaus hosted a series of salons where other Frankfurters shared their […]

Reviews AfterwardsGilbert Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder, trans. Peter Drucker, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2002. 128 pp., $15.95 pb., $55.00 hb., 1 58367 081 5 pb., 1 58367 082 3 hb. Verna V. Gehring, ed., War after September 11, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD, […]

News It could have been worse Walter Benjamin as operaBrian Ferneyhough/Charles Bernstein, Shadowtime, Prinzregententheater, Munich, 25 May 2004. Something about Walter Benjamin − the life, his theory − makes him an obvious candidate for representation or fictionalization. He has been the subject of one novel and has played a walk-on part in a couple more. […]

News Art in the age of its political reproductionPopulism, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 8 April–4 June 2005; National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, 15 April–2 September 2005; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 29 April–28 August 2005; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, 10 May–4 September 2005, www.poppulism2005.com [archive] START KAPITAL, STANDARD (OSLO), 14 April–22 May 2005, […]

Commentary From stillness to movement and back Cartoon theory today Esther leslie Just as in recent months caricatures have thrust themselves forcefully into public awareness, in the reaction to Danish newspaper cartoons of Muslim religious icons, their moving cousins, animated cartoons, are likewise more present in the world than ever before.* Cartoons have infiltrated cinema […]

Some spasm of the Zeitgeist (or was it an astrological conjunction?) in the 1990s gave birth to an extraordinary rash of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies and assorted mutants, as though a whole culture had fallen in love with the undead, those monstrous, liminal figures which hover between life and death as surely as the […]

Doing something and doing nothing Esther leslie Culture is put busily to work these days. In Europe, certainly, culture is made the bearer of promises – the promise of a better quality of life, of a more educated public, of a more efficient and value-added cultural sphere, and, not least, the promise of regenerated economies. […]