Review archive

Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History (London: Verso, 2021). 480 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 1 83976 333 5 The second volume of Peter Weiss’s epic historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance opens in Paris in 1938. Recently defeated international brigade fighters in the Spanish Civil War, the unnamed narrator and his dejected comrades have taken […]

Seb Franklin, The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2021). 254pp., £86.00 hb., £19.00 pb., 978 1 51790 714 3 hb., 978 1 51790 715 0 pb. As our tech overlords flee a blighted planet, a scholarly consensus is taking shape around the fallout of unchecked innovation and […]

Avery F. Gordon, The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 472pp., £87.00 hb., £33.00 pb., 978 0 82327 631 8 hb., 978 0 82327 632 5 pb. In discussing with Avery F. Gordon his video installation, The Beginning. Living Figures Dying (2013), a project focused ‘on the relationship […]

John Molyneux, The Dialectics of Art (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020). 300pp., £17.99 pb., 978 1 64259 131 6 This book is a significant contribution to the Marxist reflection on art. This is not a ‘Marxist history of art’, but a Marxist book about art, composed of various essays, some of a general theoretical character, and […]

Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). 312pp., £87.00 hb., £21.99 pb., 978 1 47800 767 8 hb., 978 1 47800 802 6 pb. In 2001 the United Nations enacted an International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict (it’s on […]

Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, eds, Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought (London: Verso, 2020). 240 pp., £17.99 pb., 978 1 78873 776 0 In striving towards revolutionary feminisms against a backdrop of world-changing events, the need for collective solidarity has never been more important. Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah’s book begins […]

Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 432pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 69116 308 6 In 1952, a young American philosopher named John Rawls arrived in Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. Fresh from military service in the Pacific that had diverted his […]

Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso, 2020). 224pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 78873 276 5. Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified? (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). 140pp., £35.00 hb., £9.99 pb., 978 1 50952 920 9 hb., 978 1 50952 921 6 pb.. Adriana Cavarero with Judith […]

Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (London: Verso, 2020). 160pp., £12.99 hb., 978 1 83976 129 4 Jason E. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation (London: Reaktion, 2020). 160pp., £14.95 hb., 978 1 78914 318 8 Is a future where jobs currently done by humans are carried […]

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, translated by Bridget McDonald, Foreword by Peter Fenves, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993. xxxi + 210 pp., £25.00 hb., £9.95 pb., 0 8047 2175 0 hb., 0 8047 2190 4 pb. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, translated by Brian Holmes and others, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993. x […]

Jean-Luc Nancy, Identité: Fragments, franchises, Galilée, Paris, 2010. 69 pp., €14.00 pb., 978 2 71860 820 4. One of the ironies of the ‘debate’ launched in late 2009 by the French government on national identity is that it has been ‘French thought’ that has done so much to call the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘identity’ […]

Vittorio Morfino and Peter D. Thomas, eds, The Government of Time: Theories of Multiple Temporality in the Marxist Tradition (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017). 306pp., £91.00 hb., 978 9 00429 119 5 A sense of impending collapse is a fixture of the present. Signs abound of the limits of a worldview of infinite accumulation in […]

Alison Mountz, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 304pp., £81.00 hb., £20.27 pb., 978 0 81669 710 6 hb., 978 0 81669 711 3 pb. The implementation of the EU Pact on Migration in September 2020 has marked a further step in the sheer politics […]

Tina Managhan, Unknowing the ‘War on Terror’: The Pleasures of Risk (London: Routledge, 2020). 132pp., £120.00 hb., 978 1 35104 860 6 It is a wild adventure we are on. Here, as we are rushing along through the darkness, with the cold from the river seeming to rise up and strike us; with all the […]

Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2020). 145pp., £11.55 hb., 978 1 62963 706 8 Silvia Federici is one of contemporary feminism’s celebrity thinkers, and with good reason. Her work since the 1970s on capitalism and gender has been of […]

Philipp Ekardt, Benjamin on Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 256pp., £74.59 hb., 978 1 35007 599 3 In Daniel Mourenza’s Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film (2020), we learn that Walter Benjamin, in the summer of 1938, went to see a Katharine Hepburn film at the cinema — it might have been Holiday, it might […]

Christopher Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 376pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 69119 866 8 Christopher Tomlins is not the first historian to have focused on the Nat Turner rebellion. In 1831, the slave Nat Turner led a group of blacks in an insurrection in St. […]

Angela Mitropoulos, Pandemonium: Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve (London: Pluto Press, 2020). 132pp., £14.99 pb., 978 0 74534 330 3 ‘When every home becomes a quarantine zone, and every epidemiological map is mistaken for an accurate representation of molecular spread, the convergence of neoliberalism and fascism around an oikonomic understanding of health […]

Kate Soper, Post Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism (London: Verso, 2020). 240pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78873 887 3 Kate Soper has made some vitally important contributions to ecosocialist and feminist political theory over the last four decades and more. Her interventions around ‘troubled pleasures’, humanism and its discontents, realism/constructionism, and more, have often […]

Elleni Centime Zeleke, Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 (Leiden and Boston: Brill/Haymarket, 2019/2020). 281pp., £135 hb., £20 pb., 978 9 00441 475 4 hb., 978 1 64259 341 9 pb. One objective of Elleni Centime Zeleke’s Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 is to trace the contours of the nationalities […]

Miguel de Beistegui, The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ix+295pp., £34.00 hb., 978 0 22654 737 4 Miguel de Beistegui’s new book is one of the most important contributions to the study of desire since the publication of René Girard’s Things Hidden Since […]