Reviews archive

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 […]