Pieces by Keith Ansell-Pearson

COMMENTARY Why i write such excel ent songs David Bowie, 1947–2016 Keith Ansell-Pearson As the limousine cruises its way through an arid Californian landscape, a pale and thin David Bowie sits in the back and humorously reflects that he never wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll star, ‘honest guv, I wasn’t even there’. This […]

Malcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche, Verso, London & New York, 2011. 256 pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 85984 574 5. This is an intriguing book, and its principal thesis is highly provocative. My reaction to it is an ambivalent one: there are aspects of the book that are to be greatly welcomed, such as its exposition of […]

Reviews The future is subhumanMalcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche, Verso, London & New York, 2011. 256 pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 85984 574 5. This is an intriguing book, and its principal thesis is highly provocative. My reaction to it is an ambivalent one: there are aspects of the book that are to be greatly welcomed, such […]

REVIEWS Biographemes Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography, translated by Sarah Wykes, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994. xiv + 291 pp., £25.00 hb., 0 7456 1017 X. In 1968, Roland Barthes solemnly announced the death of the author in a short article that echoed the obituary for man penned by Foucault in the final lines of […]

REVIEWS Paradise postponed David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, Cambridge and Paris, Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de I’Homme, 1993. xiii + 387 pp., £40.00 hb., 0 521 41851 8. Despite a dismal economic performance since its resurgence in the late 1970s, it is currently fashionable to be for capitalism. Throughout the […]

REVIEWS The spectre of communitarianism Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and its Critics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993. 256 pp., £30.00 hb., 0 19 8278772. Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1993. xvi + 330 pp., £23.95 hb., 0 674 03180 6. Communitarianism has become a fashionable topic. Where, not […]

REVIEWS AVANT-TARD Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Oxford, Polity Press, 1991. viii + 216pp., £35 hb, 0 7456 0772 1 NorbertElias, Time: An Essay, translated in part from the German by Edmund Jephcott, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1992. 216pp., £35 hb,O 631 157980 Is it ever too […]

Bernard Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory Genevieve Lloyd Len Doyal and lan Gough, A Theory of Human Need Roger Harris Gregor McLennan, Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond Kevin Magill Krishnan Kumar, Utopianism Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times Vincent Geoghegan Ellie Ragland Sullivan and Mark Bracher, […]

Kate Soper, Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism Peter Osborne, ed., Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism Dave Archard Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth and Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, Vols. I and II Kate Soper Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction Richard Rorty Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of […]

Geoffrey Scarre, ed., Children, Parents and Politics Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860-1931 David Archard Alison Assiter, Pornography, Feminism and the lndividual Jean Grimshaw Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking Jonathan Rée David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, Simon Schaffer, eds., The Uses of Experiment Jonathan Powers Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret […]

Nietzsche: A Radical Challenge To Political Theory? Keith Ansell-Pearson Only if mankind possessed a universally recognised goal would it be possible to propose ‘thus and thus is the right course of action’: for the present there exists no such goal. It is thus irrational and trivial to impose the demands of morality upon mankind. – […]

REVIEWS Isidor Feinstein Stone, The Trial of Socrates, London, Cape, 1988, xi + 282pp, £12.95 hb, ISBN 022402591-0 Near the end of his life 1. F. Stone turned away from the hidden history of US politics to look at an older story, the trial of Socrates. Always a defender of democracy and freedom of speech, […]

REVIEWS Whitehead Revisited A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. London: Free Associated Books, 1985. £4.95 pb. Free Association Books have brought out a new edition of Science and the ~odern !orld, first published m 1926. It is some years since it was last available in the UK. The initiative for this facsimile reprint was […]

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Vincent Geoghegan Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism Noel Parker Richard Edwards Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science Kathryn Russell G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic Sean Sayers Dick Howard, From Marx to Kant Keith Ansell-Pearson Hilary Lawson, Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament The Second of January Group, […]

The Narration of an Unhappy Consciousness: Lukacs, Marxism, the Novel, and Beyond Keith Ansell-Pearson Parmenides said, ‘one cannot think of what is not’; – we are at the other extreme, and say, ‘what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.’ – Nietzsche (1) Introduction J. M. Bernstein has written a book that merits […]

Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 Jeffrey Moussaleff Mason, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory Stephen Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis David Archard Noel W. Thompson, The People’s Science: the popular political economy of exploitation and crisis, 1816-34 Mike Shortland R. C. Lewontin, […]

REVIEWS Young Hegels H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development, Volume 11: Night Thoughts (Jena 1.801-6), Oxford University Press, 1983, £35 hb, lxx + 627pp Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983, £25 hb, xxiv + 646pp M.J. Inwood, Hegel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983, £24 hb, xv + 582pp In […]

REVIEWS 8yJingo Finding The Right Level John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, Manchester University Press, 1984, 288pp., 1:..25 hb MacKenzie’s book is one of that kind that takes a debate which has been going on in papers, articles and reviews, and tries to assemble a definite thesis out of the debate. It is a compilation of […]

REVIEWS Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Basil Blackwell, 1982 .Bryan Wilson’s anthology of essays on ‘Rationality’, first published in 1970, has become something of a minor classic in recent analytical philosophy, bringing together the main contributions to a lively and accessible debate, and providing the starting-point for a host of subsequent […]

REVIEWS Post-Industrial Socialism Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival (trans. David Fernbach), Heretic Books, f.3.50 pb Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (trans. Michael Sonenscher), Pluto Press, 1:.3.95 pb The ‘debate on the concept of the proletariat’ is, suggests Rudolf Bahro, ‘outdated’; it ‘tends right from the start to be scholastic’. Farewell to the Working […]

To see clearly requires distance, but during the last century Western intellectuals were too close to psychoanalysis to get a good view. Insider accounts, both friendly and antagonistic, predominated. The decline in analytic fortunes since the 1960s, along with the general shift in the Zeitgeist, has opened a path for historical perspective. Cassandraʼs Daughter is […]