Reviews archive

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 […]

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 […]

Many reviews of books on or by Walter Benjamin begin with a capsule description of the key events in his life. It goes something like this. Born in 1892 into a well-off assimilated German Jewish family in Berlin, Walter Benjamin failed to gain an academic career, just about getting by, instead, through journalism and handouts […]

Standing before a firing squad, in Margarethe von Trotta’s 1986 biopic Rosa Luxemburg, Luxemburg is taken in flashback to an image of herself as a child refusing to go to bed, intent on seeing the petals of a rose unfurl before her. A gun cracks, but no bullets are fired. It is when death is […]

ExHiBiTiON Institutional dissonance Tate Britain, BP and Socialist–Feminist HistoryDave Beech’s review of Tate Liverpool’s exhibition Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013 (‘A Blockbuster for the Left’, RP 184) assessed the usefulness of the exhibition form for presenting the complex histories of left-wing politics and their intersections within art practice. Two concurrent exhibitions at […]

that Kristeva cannot escape the confusion that surrounds the entire French debate about citizenship and nationality. All too often, it is forgotten by politicians, journalists and cultural critics alike that in many cases the offensive ʻMuslim woman in a headscarfʼ is, and has from birth been, a French citizen. Very few of the defenders of […]

RE V IE WSA new quarrel of universals Étienne Balibar, Saeculum. Culture, religion, idéologie, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 2012. 118 pp., €22.00, 978 2 71860 874 7. The new millennium has not been kind to the partisans of a radical Enlightenment. The sundering of temporal and spiritual authority, the suspicion of piety, the virtues of profanation, […]

RE V IE WSA new quarrel of universals Étienne Balibar, Saeculum. Culture, religion, idéologie, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 2012. 118 pp., €22.00, 978 2 71860 874 7. The new millennium has not been kind to the partisans of a radical Enlightenment. The sundering of temporal and spiritual authority, the suspicion of piety, the virtues of profanation, […]

he often does, inadvertently, the words uttered by Samuel Fuller (playing himself) in Godard’s Pierrot le fou: ‘The ilm is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death.’ Above all, and to judge from the introductory interview, Badiou appears simply to be pleased with the fact that the compiler of these diverse texts, Antoine de […]

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 […]