Review archive

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 […]

Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2012. 603 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 74565 615 1. ‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking?’ Despite post-structuralist philosophies’ association with Beckettian questions such as these, they remain surprisingly bound to what Foucault called that ‘singular relationship […]

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 […]

Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, trans. Daniel Ross, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011. 200 pp., £55.00 hb., £16.99 pb., 978 0 74564 809 5 hb., 978 0 74564 810 1 pb. Bernard Stiegler’s work addresses the relationship between philosophy, technology and culture. This combination has proved popular, and has been furthered by Stiegler’s impressive output: […]

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 […]

Ben Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, Unkant, London, 2011. 217 pp., £10.99 pb., 978 0 95681 760 0. David Cunningham In a much-cited March 1936 letter to Walter Benjamin, Adorno famously remarks of the separation between autonomous art and mass culture that, while both ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism’, and ‘both contain elements of change’, they […]

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 Biopolitics: Theory, Violence and Horror […]

Fredric Jameson, Representing ‘Capital’: A Reading of Volume One, Verso, London and New York, 2011. 158pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 84467 454 1. John Kraniauskas Fredric Jameson’s latest book, published hot on the heels of a monograph on Hegel’s Phenomenology (The Hegel Variations, 2010) and a large collection of essays on the dialectic (Valences of […]

Michael Bailey and Des Freedman, eds, The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance, Pluto Press, London, 2011. 200 pp., £14.99 pb., 978 0 74533 191 1. Matthew Charles The conceptual poles that orient the collection of essays edited by Des Freedman and Michael Bailey in The Assault on Universities are, on the one hand, […]

Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2011. 258 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 0 30016 943 0. Paul Mattick, Business As Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism, Reaktion Books, London, 2011. 126 pp. £12.95 pb., 978 1 86189 801 2. Stephen Harper In 2008, as journalists and pundits struggled to account for […]

Gerhard Richter: Panorama, Tate Modern, London, 6 October 2011–8 January 2012. John Timberlake The only comic moment in Gerhard Richter: Panorama comes in the form of a double portrait of the artist with his long-term friend and interlocutor Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, outside the doors of an art school, but titled as if emerging from a […]

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2011. 215 pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 74564 531 5 hb., 978 0 74564 530 8 pb. David Cunningham The ongoing role played by French philosophy in underwriting the contemporaneity of anglophone theory has entailed, since the 1970s, the […]

Jon Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011. 376 pp., £56.00 hb., £15.50 pb., 978 0 81664 714 9 hb., 978 0 81664 715 6 pb. Philip Derbyshire Posthegemony is an ambitious and often pugnacious project, which, as its title indicates, seeks to go beyond neo-Gramscian accounts of the […]

Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. 300pp., £25.95 hb., 978 0 26202 650 5. Owen Hatherley One of the more interesting recent Russian blockbusters, Valeriy Todorovskys 2008 Stilyagi, is a musical set in 1950s’ Moscow. The historical Stilyagi were the Soviet Union’s beatniks, enthusiasts for modern jazz and […]

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. Michael Halewood To state that ‘reality is a construction’ might elicit two opposed responses. Certain philosophers and social theorists would welcome the claim, in so far as it appears […]

Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2010. 196 pp.,£60.00 hb., 978 0 74863 863 5. Knox Peden There’s an old Ziggy cartoon that finds the eponymous misanthrope standing waist-deep in water in a flooded basement, remarking to nobody in particular: ‘I wonder if this […]

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 […]