168 Reviews: Books Reviewed:Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental TheoryPeter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of TimeAndrea Cavalletti, ClasseGail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art TheoryDavid Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the ListenerAndrew Finlay, Governing Ethnic Conflict: Consociation, Identity and the Price of PeaceManuel De Landa, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic ReasonBill Griffiths, Collected Earlier Poems (1966–1980)

Reviews History flows through some problems Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Robert Bononno, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2010. viii + 299 pp., £18.50 pb., 978 0 8166 5687 8. To state that ‘reality is a construction’ might elicit two opposed responses. Certain philosophers and social theorists would welcome the claim, in so […]

Radical, like in the eighties

Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011. 320 pp., £34.50 hb., 978 0 231 14938 9. Luke White Dialectical Passions is a book about art and architectural theory in the wake of the New Left. It locates itself in the context of a turning tide in thinking […]