Reviews archive

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 […]

Reviews Culs-de-sacJacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum Press, London and New York, 2005. x + 116 pp., £14.99 hb., 0 8264 7067 X. Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005. xi + 148 pp., £29.95 hb., £12.50 pb., 0 80474408 […]

News Art in the age of its political reproductionPopulism, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 8 April–4 June 2005; National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, 15 April–2 September 2005; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 29 April–28 August 2005; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, 10 May–4 September 2005, www.poppulism2005.com [archive] START KAPITAL, STANDARD (OSLO), 14 April–22 May 2005, […]

Reviews ‘The man hit the woman’Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley, The Force of Language, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004. vii + 186 pp., £50.00 hb., 1 4039 4248 X. Carol Sanders, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. xii + 303 pp., £45.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 0521 80051 X hb., 0521 80486 […]

News Art in the age of its political reproductionPopulism, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 8 April–4 June 2005; National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, 15 April–2 September 2005; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 29 April–28 August 2005; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, 10 May–4 September 2005, www.poppulism2005.com [archive] START KAPITAL, STANDARD (OSLO), 14 April–22 May 2005, […]

For more than a decade much of the anglophone literature on Simone de Beauvoir has been preoccupied with the question of her intellectual status, attacking the still prevailing presumptions that her work is not philosophical or that it is philosophically wholly indebted to Sartre. The publication of this volume – the first in the Beauvoir […]

Reviews God squaddyHent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 2005. 760 pp. £46.50 hb., £18.00 pb., 0 8018 8016 5 hb., 0 8018 8017 3 pb. Religion is back. This seems to be true not only in politics, where […]

Reviews MathematiquerieEllie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic, eds, Lacan: Topologically Speaking, The Other Press, New York, 2004. 350 pp., £19.50 pb., 1 892746 76 X. Late in her biography of Lacan, Elisabeth Roudinesco gives us the quietly moving image of Lacan in his dotage, playing with pieces of string and seemingly drifting further into some private […]

When, in 1973, the Bulgarian-born Julia Kristeva published her vast Revolution in Poetic Language, she had already been a highly significant figure on the Parisian scene for some years. Her earliest work had helped to make Bakhtinʼs dialogism and theory of the carnivalesque familiar to a French audience, whilst the closely related concept of intertextuality […]

Some spasm of the Zeitgeist (or was it an astrological conjunction?) in the 1990s gave birth to an extraordinary rash of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies and assorted mutants, as though a whole culture had fallen in love with the undead, those monstrous, liminal figures which hover between life and death as surely as the […]

Reviews October’s tombHal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004. 704 pp., 637 illustrations, 413 in colour, £45.00 hb., 0 500 23818 9. ^ For nearly thirty years the journal October has provided the most significant platform for addressing twentieth-century art. Art Since […]

Reviews Critique of loveWendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2005. x + 159 pp., £35.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 691 12360 8 hb., 0 691 12361 6 pb. At the beginning of a new millennium this is a book full of melancholy. Written between 1998 and […]

News War Machine‘Undercover Surrealism: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the Vision of Georges Bataille’, Hayward Gallery, London, 11 May–30 July 2006 Undercover Surrealism is misleadingly titled. It is actually dedicated to the journal Documents, which published fifteen issues between 1929 and 1931 under the de facto editorship of Georges Bataille. For Batailleʼs friend Michel Leiris Documents […]

Reviews The liberal internationalDavid Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005. 256 pp., £14.99 hb., 0 19 928326 5. ^ 1917–21. 1944–48. 1968–72. Any accounting of the twentieth century worth its salt will hinge around the events – and ultimate defeats – of these pivotal years. No easy task, and one […]

Reviews Bluffer’s guideTimothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005. 360 pp., £19.00 hb., 0 231 13730 3. Itʼs the evening of 8 August 1974, and Iʼm watching Richard Nixon resign from the US presidency with the lack of grace that distinguished his entire political […]

Reviews Althusser after AlthusserLouis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, ed. François Matheron and Olivier Corpet, trans. and introduced by G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London and New York, 2006. 300 pp. £50.00 hb., £16.99 pb., 1 84467 069 4 hb., 1 84467 553 X pb. ʻI am looking, in the history of philosophy, for […]

The reception of Adorno in Britain and America has largely focused on Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, late works which accepted the tragedy of an ongoing betrayal of Marxism in the Soviet Union and an ongoing capitalism in the West. Hence those Adornoites who emphasize optimism of the will rather than pessimism of the intellect […]