Reviews archive

On the menu, but not at the table Susanne Lettow, ed., Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 2014. vi + 294 pp., £52.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 43844 949 4 hb., 978 1 43844 948 7 pb. This collection contributes to an increasingly important issue […]

REVIEWS Operation Adorno The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, ed. and trans. Susan H. Gil espie, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2015. 248 pp., £63.38 hb., £18.16 pb., 978 0 81665 616 5 hb., 978 0 81665 617 2 pb. At the beginning of a talk on ‘Critical […]

REVIEWS Operation Adorno The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, ed. and trans. Susan H. Gil espie, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2015. 248 pp., £63.38 hb., £18.16 pb., 978 0 81665 616 5 hb., 978 0 81665 617 2 pb. At the beginning of a talk on ‘Critical […]

Anthropology becoming philosophy Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology, trans. Peter Skafish, Univocal, Minneapolis, 2014. 229 pp., £20.00 pb., 978 1 93756 121 5. While the debates and provocations of sixties France in the texts that make up post-structuralism, or, perhaps more accurately, ‘la pensée 68’, continue to influence contemporary philosophy […]

Beneath the soviets the beach McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Verso, London, 2015. xxii + 280 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78168 827 4. Geological time is long; the lifespan of critical terms is decidedly shorter. The sedimentary record of buzz words logs the granulated residue of terms that were snuffed out […]

Beneath the soviets the beach McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Verso, London, 2015. xxii + 280 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78168 827 4. Geological time is long; the lifespan of critical terms is decidedly shorter. The sedimentary record of buzz words logs the granulated residue of terms that were snuffed out […]

Are you now or have you ever been a bourgeois philosopher? Michael Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique, Bloomsbury, London, 2014. 226 pp., £65.00 hb., 978 1 47251 134 8. This book intends to proffer a Marxist or, more specifically, ‘anti-bourgeois’ reading of Kant’s critical project and the third Critique in particular, and […]

REVIEWS Universalizing the ayllu José Aricó, Marx and Latin America, trans. David Broder, Haymarket, Chicago, 2015. lii + 152 pp., £20.00 pb., 978 16 08 46411 1; Álvaro García Linera, Plebeian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, Working-Class and Popular Identities in Bolivia, selection and introduction by Pablo Stefanoni, trans. Shana Yael Shubs et al., Haymarket, […]

REVIEWS Universalizing the ayllu José Aricó, Marx and Latin America, trans. David Broder, Haymarket, Chicago, 2015. lii + 152 pp., £20.00 pb., 978 16 08 46411 1; Álvaro García Linera, Plebeian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, Working-Class and Popular Identities in Bolivia, selection and introduction by Pablo Stefanoni, trans. Shana Yael Shubs et al., Haymarket, […]

at stake, it is claimed, was ‘an experience of the unknowable – or, at least, the discursively unknowable … a way of undergoing, a giving of self and a completion of thought.’ He quotes a fragment of Aristotle that distinguishes between two types of knowing, the didactic (or discursive) and the initiatory (Kerényi refers to […]

REVIEWSAriel on the border Alejandro Arturo Vil ega, Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianopolis, 2014. 284 pp., £62.00 hb., £22.99 pb., 978 0 25301 248 7 hb., 978 0 25301 257 9 pb. Alejandro Villega’s new book is a philosophical interpretation of the philosophy emerging from Latin […]

REVIEWSAriel on the border Alejandro Arturo Vil ega, Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianopolis, 2014. 284 pp., £62.00 hb., £22.99 pb., 978 0 25301 248 7 hb., 978 0 25301 257 9 pb. Alejandro Villega’s new book is a philosophical interpretation of the philosophy emerging from Latin […]

Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2012. 248 pp., £27.95 hb., 978 0 26201 773 2. Contemporary art from its inception has been framed by two mutually constitutive crises: an identity crisis and a legitimacy crisis. The implicit periodization of contemporary art commences roughly in 1970; that is, when Adorno […]

REVIEWSNew forms, old problems Colin Mooers, Imperial Subjects: Citizenship in an Age of Crisis and Empire, Bloomsbury, London, 2014. 152 pp., £14.99 pb., 978 1 44116 493 3. This is a small book on the inner connections of global capitalism, the imperial system, and the form and content of contemporary liberal citizenship. Through the prism […]

Colin Mooers, Imperial Subjects: Citizenship in an Age of Crisis and Empire Jeffery R. Webber Gabriel Rockhill, Radical History and the Politics of Art Andrew Stefan Weiner Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World Marina Vishmidt Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School Konstantinos Kavoulakos Fred Moseley and Tony Smith, […]

REViEWS Heaven knows I’m miserable now Pier Paolo Pasolini, St Paul: A Screenplay, translated and introduced by Elizabeth A. Castelli, with a Foreword by Alain Badiou and an Afterword by Ward Blanton, Verso, London and New York, 2014. 240 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78168 288 3. There are many reasons to welcome this translation […]

A is for apocalypseDavid J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, Zero Books, Winchester and Washington DC, 2013. 319 pp., £15.99 pb., 978 1 78099 578 6. Amidst the recent flood of lachrymose reports on the neoliberal assault upon education, this book stands out for its unflinching survey of the extent […]

REVIEWS Speculation at the crossroads Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, trans. Mark Al an Ohm and Jon Cogburn, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2014. 488 pp., £85.00 hb., £24.99 pb., 978 0 74868 149 5 hb., 978 0 74868 150 1 pb. In 2011, the publication of The Speculative Turn drew together […]

REVIEWS Speculation at the crossroads Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, trans. Mark Al an Ohm and Jon Cogburn, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2014. 488 pp., £85.00 hb., £24.99 pb., 978 0 74868 149 5 hb., 978 0 74868 150 1 pb. In 2011, the publication of The Speculative Turn drew together […]

epigenesis’ may actually be better considered a theory of preformation. This raises the unsettling suspicion that, for all Mensch’s admirable archaeological investigation into the roots of ‘epigenesis’ in sixteenthand seventeenth-century biology, we are left little the wiser as to Kant’s own understanding of the term. Kant appears to be one of the first of the […]

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in questioning the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy. Although there are many different components to emerging post-analytical and post-continental philosophies, there are two dominant and overlapping themes that return time and again. On the one hand, there are investigations into what Livingstone, in The […]