Review archive

Davidson suggests, rediscovering his orthodoxy, by a working class that is fully conscious of itself and its mission to make a society free of the exploitation that deined the others. The party-form, he weakly insists, is fundamental to its realization. Despite the obvious Hegelian source of such an idealist story, it appears ironically that in […]

REViEWS The cunning of capital explained? Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2012, xxi + 812 pp., £22.99 pb., 978 1 60846 067 0. In ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’ (1976) Perry Anderson wrote: ‘Among the concepts traditionally associated with historical materialism, few have been so problematic and contested as that […]

RE V IE WSRed carnationPeter Hallward and Knox Peden, eds, Concept and Form, Volume 1: Key Texts from the ‘Cahiers pour l’analyse’, Verso, London and New York, 2012. 272 pp., £16.99 pb., 978 1 84467 872 3. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, eds, Concept and Form, Volume 2: Interviews and Essays on the ‘Cahiers pour […]

On your bike Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2013. 503 pp., £35.00 hb., 978 0 74564 921 4. Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York and Chichester, 2012. 146 pp., £41.50 hb., £13.95 pb., 978 0 23115 870 1 hb., 978 0 23115 871 8 […]

Turn left and follow the path of least resistanceAsh Amin and Nigel Thrift, Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2013. 240 pp., £62.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 978 0 82235 387 4 hb., 978 0 82235 401 7 pb. This book makes a much-needed attempt to revamp the […]

Reviews Culture and adminBéatrice Hibou, La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale, La Découverte, Paris, 2012. 223 pp., €17.00 pb., 978 2 70717 439 0. ^ Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork, Zone Books, New York, 2012. 182 pp., £19.95 hb., 978 1 93540 826 0. The ascendancy of neoliberalism […]

to cover this estimated cost. The Office of Budget Responsibility estimate the difference between outlay borrowing for loans and repayments to rise to nearly £10 billion by 2015/16 and to continue to rise until the mid-2030s. It would seem that the government is currently working on an optimistic understanding of what the impairment for the […]

Reviews Conditions of the universityAndrew McGettigan, The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Education, Pluto Press, London, 2013. 232 pp., £54.00 hb., £15.00 pb., 978 0 74533 294 9 hb., 978 0 74533 293 2 pb. In an interview with Giovanna Borradori given after 9/11, Jacques Derrida said: ‘I am incapable of […]

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 […]

that emerge in viewing the past, even our own pasts, which these psychoanalytically versed historians all choose to emphasize. The early and celebrated Italian practitioner of this genre Luisa Passerini sums up the shared outlook in the final essay in this volume: The main contribution of psychoanalysis to historical studies … has been to make […]

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 […]

in any doubt of the necessary coordination of the two impulses, of the how and the why. Rather than a simple flat-out critique of greening as seemingly inevitable cooptation, Parr could then tell us what her model of the green city would be. How can we imagine a green city in which the poor are […]

Adrian Parr, The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Columbia University Press, New York, 2013. 224 pp., £20.50 hb., 978 0 23115 828 2. This book is a welcome addition to the spate of recent books on the ecological and resource calamities currently facing the planet. Unlike so many others – one thinks in […]

Yotam feldman Dialectics of liberationKevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse–Fromm Correspondence, 1954–1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, Lexington Books, Lanham MD and Plymouth, 2012, 269 pp., £49.95 hb., £21.95 pb., 978 0 73916 835 6 hb., 978 0 73916 836 3 pb. Raya Dunayevskaya died in 1987 aged 77, but […]

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2012. 173 pp., £9.95 pb., 978 1 58435 112 2. This is the fourteenth book to be published in Semiotext(e)’s Intervention series of pocket-sized texts. Launched with the translation of The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection in 2009, it evidently seeks to revive […]

Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, London, 1994. xii + 627 pp., £19.95 hb., 0 7181 3307 2. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, Verso, London, 1994. 416 pp., £39.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 1 85984 915 6 hb., 1 85984 015 […]

After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May–15 July 2012; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 21 September–16 November 2012; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 17 October 2012–7 January 2013. In a darkened room stand seven podiums, like black treadmills at a standstill. Each faces a digitized photo­graph projected onto a bare wall. The […]

Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. 312 pp., £22.95 hb., 978 0 26201 649 0. Salvador Allende was elected as socialist-Marxist president of Chile on 4 November 1970. The USA soon after initiated an ‘invisible’ financial blockade, which would, when combined with a fall in inter­national […]

Bruno Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis and Religion in Times of Terror, Verso, London and New York, 2012. 326 pp., £19.99 pb., 978 1 84467 755 9. Bruno Bosteels is probably best known to readers of Radical Philosophy as translator of and commentator on the work of Alain Badiou – most […]

Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines, Semiotext(e), Intervention series 12, Los Angeles, 2012. 144 pp., £9.95 pb., 978 1 58435 108 5. How best to describe the colonization of the body at this particular juncture of capitalist life? Much recent theorizing has focused on a kind of war of […]

Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, Verso, London and New York, 2012. 302 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 84467 737 5. ‘A sustained and fascinating reflection on the place of religion in political discourse’ – as per the review by Rev. Giles Fraser over at the New Statesman – this […]