Reviews archive

Reviews Uncle Joe Slavoj Ziek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Four Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion, Verso, London and New York, 2000. 160 pp., £16.00 hb., 1 85984 792 7. A well-known Slovenian philosopher and a British Army officer walk into a bar. One says to the other, ʻYou are just a product of […]

The ethical dimension of Adornoʼs work is elusive and gestural, but it is an ineliminable part of his philosophy. Jay Bernstein attempts to do justice to what he terms the ʻethical intensityʼ of Adornoʼs writing by reconstructing the ethical content and premisses of his philosophical output. However, this book is not only a mining of […]

The thingRudi Visker, Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht/Boston/ London, hb. 1999; pb. 2001. 399 pp., £110.00 hb., £29.00 pb., 0 7923 5985 2 hb., 0 7923 6397 3 pb.by some “thing” that refuses to become part of the order of meaning (signification).ʼ My ʻthingʼ is thus something to which I […]

Reviews In 1971, Bryan Magee published a book of conversations with British philosophers under the title Modern British Philosophy. Originating in a series of radio broadcasts and appearing under the imprint of Secker & Warburg, it was intended as a ʻlively introductionʼ to the philosophy of the day. The list of contributors included most of […]

Revolution is ordinaryJohn Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, Pluto Press, London and Sterling, 2002. viii + 237 pp., £50.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 0 7453 1864 9 hb., 0 7453 1863 0 pb. Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London and Sterling, Pluto Press, 2002. ix + 257 […]

Born in the Ukraine in 1910, Raya Dunayesvskaya emigrated to the United States in her teens. By the age of twenty she was active on the American Left, her ability to read Russian giving her an advantage in interpreting the contradictory messages emerging from revolutionary Russia. She served as Trotskyʼs secretary when the exiled Bolshevik […]

When Hermann Mörchen was accumulating materials for his massive study Adorno and Heidegger: An Investigation of a Philosophical Refusal to Communicate (1981), he asked Heidegger whether he had ever met his persistent antagonist. Heidegger recalled that he had been introduced to Adorno after Heidegger had delivered a paper on ʻPhilosophical Anthropology and Metaphysics of Daseinʼ […]

Reviews Revenge or revival? Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, London and New York, 2002. xvii + 392 pp., £20.00 hb., 1 85984 712 9. ^ The translation of Marx for Our Times presents to an Anglophone readership one of the more ambitious and, in […]

Kristin Rossʼs lucidly written book on the ʻsurvivals of May ʼ68ʼ tackles the ʻmemorial management of Mayʼ, those games of memory and forgetting that make the event a prisoner of its successive representations. This book has the great merit of dismantling, with the utmost clarity, the laborious exercise of ideological mine-clearing which in thirty years […]

In Friedrich Schlegelʼs famous fragment, the philosophical radicalism of Fichteʼs system is compared to both the artistic experimentalism of Goetheʼs Wilhelm Meister and the politically emancipatory force of the French Revolution. The Romantic project as a whole was prototypical for Benjamin in its willingness to align just such political, historical and aesthetic phenomena with the […]

Reviews Dead in AmericaJacques Derrida, Without Alibi, edited, translated and with an introduction by Peggy Kamuf, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2002. 304 pp., £37.95 hb., £17.95 pb., 0 8047 4400 6 hb., 0 8047 4411 4 pb. There is a mordant untimeliness to this new collection of translations of Derridaʼs occasional pieces. The dateline of […]

in Vaneigemʼs expressionist polemic. Here, you suffer jolt after jolt, as intriguing commentaries on particular rights finish, and another right is bannered in capitals across the page (in this, it recalls the experience of Hegelʼs Logic, where the expositions in smaller type – oral improvisations transcribed by his students – are more accessible than the […]

In his introduction to Latin American Philosophy, Eduardo Mendieta complains that ʻone of the most amazing things about the bibliographical work on philosophy in English over the last decade or so is its utter silence about Latin American philosophy and philosophersʼ. Surveying the encyclopaedias and dictionaries of the discipline, he suggests that ʻas if by […]

Reviews ‘Human’Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London and New York, 2003. lxii + 318 pp., £40.00 hb., £15.00 pb., 1 85984 507 X hb., 1 85984 408 1 pb. Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2003. 233 pp., […]

Reviews AfterwardsGilbert Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder, trans. Peter Drucker, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2002. 128 pp., $15.95 pb., $55.00 hb., 1 58367 081 5 pb., 1 58367 082 3 hb. Verna V. Gehring, ed., War after September 11, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD, […]

Reviews Our images, their humanityCharles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2004. 232 pp., £57.00 hb., £10.99 pb., 0 8223 3255 8 hb., 0 8223 3293 0 pb. Ted Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy, Pluto Press, London, 2003. 232 pp., £50.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 0 74532 134 8 hb., […]

Reviews Let’s talk about sexLuciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, Continuum, London/New York, 2004. x + 227 pp., £60.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 0 8264 6989 2 hb., 0 8264 6990 6 pb. Mario Perniola, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World, trans. Massimo Verdicchio, […]

News It could have been worse Walter Benjamin as operaBrian Ferneyhough/Charles Bernstein, Shadowtime, Prinzregententheater, Munich, 25 May 2004. Something about Walter Benjamin − the life, his theory − makes him an obvious candidate for representation or fictionalization. He has been the subject of one novel and has played a walk-on part in a couple more. […]

Reviews ‘To be matter’Claudine Frank, ed., The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2003. 416 pp., £17.95 pb., 0 82233 068 7. ^ In 1934 two men in Paris contemplated something new and wonderful. They had obtained a pair of Mexican jumping beans. The younger of the two wanted […]

Reviews The hesitation waltzIan H. Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism, Berghahn, New York and London, 2004. xiii + 242 pp., £47.00 hb., £14.95 pb., 1 57181 621 6 hb., 1 57181 542 2 pb. As the adolescentʼs entrée into the world of ideas, existentialism has probably diminished a little since the Cureʼs 1978 ʻKilling an Arabʼ, […]

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life John Kraniauskas Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice Françoise Vergès Alessandra […]