Pieces by Harry Harootunian

Tosaka Jun, Ideologie, Medien, Alltag: Eine Auswahl ideologiekritischer, kultur-und medientheoretischer und  geschictsphilosophischer Schriften, ed. Fabian Schaefer, Leipziger Universitatsverlag, Leipzig, 2011. 230 pp., €29.00 pb., 978 3 86583 581 9. It is a paradox of Western Marxism that it insisted on its own geopolitical specificity – the West – and yet made its particularity a universal […]

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 […]

Reviews Respect (or lack of it) Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. viii + 246 pp., £45.00 hb., 0 7456 1655 0. ^ Tim Hayward, Political Theory and Ecological Values, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. viii + 196 pp., £49.50 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 7456 1808 1 hb., 0 7456 […]

Out of Japan The New Associationist Movement Harry harootunian If the news from Japan during the last decade has concentrated on the depressing symptoms of decline of what once had been hailed as a miracle model of capitalist development, the announcement last year of the establishment of the New Associationist Movement in Osaka and Tokyo […]

Despite recent reassurances that ʻwe have never been modernʼ, owing to a conception of the modern based on the separation of nature from the order of society that has never functioned strictly according to the rules of its ʻconstitutionʼ, it is, nevertheless, this capacity to think the modern as temporally different from its antecedents that […]

One of the rarely noticed historical ironies of the twentieth century was the effort of societies located on the capitalist periphery – outside of Euro-America – to resort to a philosophy which had no place for them in order to explain their entry into and experience of capitalist modernization. Japan led the way in this […]

Since the collapse of actually existing socialism and the abrupt ending of the Cold War that had polarized the world along the lines of contending theories of modernization, there has been a steady attempt to recover historical intensities that had been displaced by the reduction of political differences to a dyadic struggle between ʻtotalitarianismʼ and […]

Reviews There is no science of languageJean-Jacques Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, trans. Gregory Elliott, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2006. vii + 240 pp., €113.00 hb., 9 00414 751 9. ^ Marxism, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle concedes in this clever, incisive and witty book, has made few sustained contributions to the philosophy of language. Despite […]

Reviews Disposable timeIstván Mészáros, The Chal enge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2008. 479 pp., £16.95 pb., 978 1 58367 169 6. In recent years there has been a surprisingly steady growth of interest in the status of time and temporality and the role accorded […]

Who needs postcoloniality? A reply to Lindner Harry harootunian In Marx’s articles for the New York Tribune on British colonialism in India and the events leading to the Second Anglo-Chinese War (Opium War), critics have caught sight of a double mission attributed by him to British imperialism and colonialism to tear down the structure of […]