Ordoliberal orthodoxy?

Reivew of Raphaël Fèvre, A Political Economy of Power
Raphaël Fèvre, A Political Economy of Power: Ordoliberalism in Context, 1932-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 280pp., £64.00 hb., 978 0 19760 780 0 George Monbiot’s statement in a 2016 Guardian article that neoliberalism is the ‘ideology at the root of all our problems’ still resonates today. A huge body of literature has been dedicated […]

Containing Russia

Reivew of Alexander Kluge, Russia Container
Alexander Kluge, Russia Container, trans. Alexander Booth (Chicago: Seagull Books, 2022). 392pp., £27.50 hb., 978 1 80309 065 8 Russia Container is not a book about Russia. It’s about the images and stories that East Germans had of Soviet Russia before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and after. Alexander Kluge wrote it […]

Black anarchism’s history and future

Reivew of Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2021). 224pp., £85.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 0 74534 580 2 hb., 978 0 74534 581 9 pb. Should the state be the source of freedom? Should it be a wellspring for the affirmation of humanism? The modern anarchist tradition has […]

Symptoms of the image

Reivew of Emmanuel Alloa, Looking Through Images
Emmanuel Alloa, Looking Through Images. A Phenomenology of Visual Media, trans. Nils F. Schott (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). 391pp., £121.00 hb., £30.00 pb., 978 0 23118 792 3 hb., 978 0 23118 793 0 pb. Emmanuel Alloa’s Looking Through Images is an exceptionally ambitious book that attempts nothing less than rethinking the fundamental […]

Existential crisis

Reivew of Terry Pinkard, Practice, Power, and Forms of Life
Terry Pinkard, Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 200pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 22681 324 0 In the space of just three chapters and a ‘dénouement,’ Terry Pinkard’s Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx explicates Jean-Paul Sartre’s […]

Law’s violence

Reivew of Oishik Sircar, Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India
Oishik Sircar, Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021). 370pp., £40.99 hb., 978 0 19012 792 3 This is a book that resists easy categorisation and, as a result, also resists the typical review process. 1 I could, for example, note that the book consists of […]

Vital institutions

Reivew of Roberto Esposito, Institution
Roberto Esposito, Institution (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022). 160pp., £40.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 978 1 50955 155 2 hb., 978 1 50955 156 9 pb. The Covid-19 pandemic had the curious result of simultaneously legitimising and de-legitimising discourses of the biopolitical. The longstanding claim of biopolitical theorists that politics and biological life have become inextricable within […]

Accumulating extinctions

Reivew of Mark Bould, The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture The Salvage Collective, The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene
Mark Bould, The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (London and New York: Verso, 2021). 176pp., £12.99 pb., 978 1 83976 047 1 The Salvage Collective, The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene (London and New York: Verso, 2021). 104pp., £8.99 pb., 978 1 83976 294 9 Catastrophe is inevitably attracting much discussion in relation […]

Platforming new conspiracism

Reivew of Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, eds., A Lot of People are Saying
Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, eds., A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 211pp., £20.00 hb., 978 0 69118 883 6. One thing a lot of people are saying right now – especially after the events of January 6th 2021 – is […]

Transformed formalisms

Reivew of Nathan Brown, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique
Nathan Brown, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2021). 272pp., £39.00 pb., 978 0 82329 001 7 Describing the general course of twentieth-century French philosophy, Alain Badiou distinguishes between two major, divergent orientations of thought: a rationalist orientation that promotes a ‘philosophy of the concept’, following from the works […]

International law and capitalism

Reivew of Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law
Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 276pp., £85.00 hb., £22.99 pb., 978 1 10849 718 3 hb., 978 1 10873 955 9 pb. At the heart of the post-World War II international order was a legitimating narrative premised on the idea that the world system was […]

Thought without thinkers

Reivew of Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age
Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 336pp., £28.00 pb., 978 0 23119 2972 A bold question motivates Timothy Bewes’ Free Indirect: Is a non-subjective thought possible? Bewes looks for an answer in recent developments in the novel. His contention is that the novel is a […]

The hidden abode of digital production

Reivew of Moritz Altenried, The Digital Factory: The Human Labour of Automation
Moritz Altenried, The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 217pp., £76.00 hb., £22.00 pb., 978 0 22681 549 7 hb., 978 0 22681 548 0 pb. Since the beginning of spring 2022, many countries have witnessed the return to supposedly ‘normal’ rhythms of life after the closures and […]

Subversive agency

Reivew of Jill Godmilow, Kill The Documentary
Jill Godmilow, Kill The Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 224pp., £94.00 hb., £25.00 pb., 978 0 23120 276 3 hb., 978 0 23120 277 0 pb. Jill Godmilow’s Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars is a curious object. Although published by Columbia […]

Art’s social forms

Reivew of Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2021). 857pp., £30.00 hb., 978 0 37415 845 3 During the past decade there has been an intensified debate in mainstream art criticism about the tension between art’s freedom and free speech. In this debate art’s freedom […]

Who cares?

Reivew of Boris Groys, Philosophy of Care
Boris Groys, Philosophy of Care (London and New York: Verso, 2022). 106pp., £9.99 hb., 978 1 83976 492 9 Boris Groys’ Philosophy of Care is comprised of twelve short, pithy sections that plot an abbreviated history of mainly Western philosophy from ancient to modern times. Also included are two diversions into Russian intellectual thought, Groys […]

Governing the non-human

Reivew of Thomas Lemke, The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms
Thomas Lemke, The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms (New York: New York University Press, 2021). 299pp., £80.00 hb., £25.00 pb., 978 1 47980 881 6 hb., 978 1 47982 993 4 pb. Cars that measure and signal fuel efficiency, expanding markets for weather derivatives, and ‘vital systems security’ infrastructures, among other similar […]

Witchcraft as praxis

Reivew of Jack Z. Bratich, On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death
Jack Z. Bratich, On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death (Philadelphia: Common Notions, 2022). 240pp., $20 pb., 978 1 94217 349 6 Unacquainted readers may think that ‘microfascism’ is perhaps analogous to contemporary terms such as ‘microaggression’: the prefix ‘micro’ implying a simple reduction in scale and scope for actions representing larger systems. But microfascism is […]
Yellow ladder, old statue

Cracks and crevices

Reivew of Sebastian Truskolaski, Adorno and the Ban on Images
Sebastian Truskolaski, Adorno and the Ban on Images (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 232pp., £85.00 hb., £28.99 pb., 978 1 35012 920 7 hb., 978 1 35012 9 221 pb. These notes are from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C Minor, written between 1804 and 1808. Even listeners who do not read music can easily recognise the melody. […]
Musical notation

Countering populism

Reivew of Paul K. Jones, Critical Theory and Demagogic Populism
Paul K. Jones, Critical Theory and Demagogic Populism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 288pp., £85.00 hb., £25.00 pb., 978 1 52612 343 5 hb., 978 1 52616 373 8 pb. Jeremiah Morelock, ed, How to Critique Authoritarian Populism: Methodologies of the Frankfurt School (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022). 502pp., £25.99 pb., 978 1 64259 767 7 […]
Graffi which reads "FEED THE HUNGRY"

Sunstruck

Reivew of Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022). 140pp., £9.99 pb., 978 1 50954 965 8 Since Antiquity, the sun has been tied up with earthly and divine authority. The solar god Sūrya, a Hindu deity, was worshipped in sun temples across India. In the fourth century, under Roman Emperor Julian’s rule, the ancient Helios, […]
Design of woman looking towards the sun with hands clasped