Who’s a feminist?

Reivew of Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism
Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 239pp., £19.99 hb., 978 0 19090 122 6 It is the best of times and it is the worst of times to declare oneself a feminist today. Presentations of that creature have been shape shifting for decades, though right now she suddenly seems […]

Always historicize?

Arendt’s love affair with Heidegger and its aftermath, and Adorno’s love of the high life, than we learn about their philosophies and the ways in which these might emerge out of experience of and reflection on Nazi domination. (Sherratt has written elsewhere on Adorno’s philosophy, in a study titled Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, 2002.) The opponents […]

180 Reviews: Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, eds., History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past David Joselit, After Art Christoph Menke, Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images David Webb, Foucault’s Archaeology: Science and Transformation Michel Serres, Biogea & Variations on the Body Laurence Paul Hemming, Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working

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 […]

72 Reviews

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 […]

Judith Butler: Gender as Performance

Gender as Performance An Interview with Judith Butler ludithButlerteaches in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France ( J987) traced the dialectic ofpro- and anti-Hegelian currents in French theory across the writings ofa wide range ofthinkers. She is best known, however, for […]

63 Reviews

Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology Jonathan Hughes Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’ s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion Jonathan Rée Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality Herta Nagl-Docekal and Herlinde Pauer-Studer, eds., Denken der Geschlechterdifferenz: Neue Fragen und Perspectiven der Feministischen Philosophie […]

Golden Years? 25 Years of History Workshop

NEWS Golden Years? 25 Years of History Workshop Was there ever a golden age, in politics? Sooner or later, whichever may have seemed the golden years of our own personal involvement are likely to become tarnished as we are forced to see the faces then excluded, to hear the voices silenced then even as we […]

Generations of feminism

6being overlooked should we fail to keep abreast of new theoretical fashions; or unable to admit the tensions and contradictions of past attachments. A small band of feminist historians, mostly in the USA, who are trying to recapture the diversity of the movement in which they participated, declare that they cannot recognize themselves, or others, […]

103 Reviews

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 […]

106 Reviews

Friedrich Schlegelʼs two-hundred-year-old fragment ʻNothing is more rarely the subject of philosophy than philosophy itselfʼ shows its age. Now, its inversion seems true. Whether through recognition that philosophyʼs self-legitimating critique of the unexcavated presuppositions of other disciplines threatens to prove itself wanting; or, through various concerns for philosophyʼs apparently imminent death (which philosophers frequently seem […]

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 […]

112 Reviews

The ethical dimension of Adornoʼs work is elusive and gestural, but it is an ineliminable part of his philosophy. Jay Bernstein attempts to do justice to what he terms the ʻethical intensityʼ of Adornoʼs writing by reconstructing the ethical content and premisses of his philosophical output. However, this book is not only a mining of […]

Jews in the culture wars

Commentary Jews in the culture wars Lynne segal What will it take to unite the intellectual Left? After decades of internal academic strife on the Left, the moral dilemmas currently faced by Jewish academics have thrown up some unexpected alliances. The 1980s and 1990s were embattled decades in the universities, especially in North America. These […]

‘Liberate socialist eminences from their bourgeois cocks!’: Women ’68ers, marching on alone

It is hardly news that history has its blind spots, hidden even from those attentive to its most neglected byways. These are often within emancipatory struggles that are swiftly disregarded once their fervour fades. When disputed legacies originate in confrontational, often anarchic challenges to the prevailing order of just about everything, systematic accounting tends to […]

Feminism did not fail

‘You nearly gave me a heart attack’, a friend told me, after my talk at the opening session of the event in London celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first national Women’s Liberation Conference in the UK, at Ruskin College, in February 1970. Appropriately enough, the feminist publisher and cultural entrepreneur Ursula Owen had organized […]