Reviews archive

Reviews Post-genomic interventionsEugene Thacker, Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2006. 464 pp., £25.95 hb., £12.95 pb., 0 2622 0155 0 hb., 0 2627 0116 2 pb. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed., Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005. 384 pp., £24.95 hb., £12.95 pb., 0 2620 […]

Reviews Analogical nostalgiasAntonio Negri, The Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, trans. Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano, Verso, London and New York, 2007. 344 pp., £6.99 pb., 1 84667 582 3. Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes presents two thinkers at pains to make nostalgia productive. First there is Descartes, who, following an explosion of […]

Reviews There is no science of languageJean-Jacques Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, trans. Gregory Elliott, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2006. vii + 240 pp., €113.00 hb., 9 00414 751 9. ^ Marxism, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle concedes in this clever, incisive and witty book, has made few sustained contributions to the philosophy of language. Despite […]

One of Bruce Robbins’s epigraphs is from Irving Howe, lamenting that ‘the welfare state does not seem able to arouse strong loyalties’ and can draw on ‘no encompassing mystique’. Certainly it would be daunting, not to say quixotic, to look back at the literary record of the liberal democracies Robbins focuses on (France, Britain and […]

Reviews BioaestheticsGerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. A. Derieg, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2007. 320 pp. £11.95 pb., 978 158435 046 0. This book offers a clear yet complex analysis of the conditions under which art (and indeed politics) could be understood as revolutionary. Yet it posits a distinction […]

Reviews The Maoist march through the institutionsJulian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May ’68 and Contemporary French Thought, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal and London, 2007. 488 pp., £19.99 hb., 978 0 77353 199 4. ^ Julian Bourg’s rich study of the fallout from May ’68 in French political and intellectual life seeks to move beyond […]

Reviews Future presentGiovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, Verso, London and New York, 2007. xiii + 418 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 1 84467 104 5. The concept of development in history has been mainly understood in two ways. In the historicist philosophical tradition, it refers to the concrete spatio-temporal shapes […]

Reviews The zero of real conflictMonique David-Ménard, Deleuze et la psychanalyse: L’altercation, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2005. 186 pp., €22.00 pb., 2 13 055081 9. As its subtitle indicates, this book stages an ‘altercation’ between Deleuze and psychoanalysis. The psychoanalysis in question is that of Freud and Lacan. Monique David-Ménard’s first book, L’hystérique entre […]

Reviews Anything is possibleQuentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, preface by Alain Badiou, trans. Ray Brassier, Continuum, London and New York, 2008. viii + 148 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 0 826 49674 4. ^ Philosophical speculation can regain determinate knowledge of absolute reality. We can think the nature of things […]

Reviews AlterliberalismMichel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Col ège de France 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2008. 368 pp., £20.99 hb., 978 1 403 98654 2. Six of Foucault’s thirteen annual Collège de France lecture series have now appeared in English translation in the space of five […]

Whole film festivals could be programmed on the decade of German political unrest from the riotous demonstrations of the late 1960s to the emergency measures of the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1977. From the beginning, film was inseparable from the movement. None more than Harun Farocki’s agitprop film from 1968, On Some Problems of the Anti-authoritarian […]

Reviews To live without an ideaMartin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2008. 255 pp., £55.50 hb., £21.50 pb., 978 0 804 70077 1 hb., 978 0 804 70078 8 pb. In lieu of either consensus or real antagonism, assessments of deconstruction since the mid-1990s have tended to […]

Reviews Laboratory Latin AmericaPatrick Barrett, Daniel Chavez and César Rodríguez-Garavito, eds, The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn, Pluto Press, London, 2008. 320 pp., £19.99 pb., 978 0 745 32677 1. There is widespread agreement that Latin America is currently the site of the most promising experiments in political organization and creativity to be found […]

Reviews An omelette of men Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008, viii + 231 pp., £21.50 hb., 978 0 231 14526 8. What forms can collective political action take today? As it works through its long, hesitant goodbye to the working class and grapples with […]

Reviews Disposable timeIstván Mészáros, The Chal enge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2008. 479 pp., £16.95 pb., 978 1 58367 169 6. In recent years there has been a surprisingly steady growth of interest in the status of time and temporality and the role accorded […]

It is perhaps appropriate that this collection of political writings by Maurice Blanchot is marked by a troubling absence. Yet it is hard to join the editor and publisher of this translation in respecting the decision of the editors of the French collections to begin their coverage in the 1950s: the first edition published in […]

Reviews Of princes and principlesGraham Harman Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Re.Press, Melbourne, 2009. 247 pp. £16.00 pb., 978 0 9805440 6 0. Unlike those of some of his compatriots, the name of Bruno Latour is not one to have graced the pages of Radical Philosophy with much frequency. It is not just […]

Reviews Trend lines and frontlines Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War, Verso, London and New York, 2009. xiv + 290 pp., £14.99 pb., 978 1 84467 269 1. ^ Geopolitics and political economy are registers that the recent revival in the fortunes of radical political thought has largely evaded or […]

Reviews Remake, the sequelMichael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2009. xiv + 434 pp., £25.95 hb., 978 0 674 03511 9. With Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri bring to a conclusion the trilogy they began a decade ago with the publication of Empire in 2000. Multitude, […]

In 1982 a wall divided Berlin and made two Germanies. Berlin, unloved and redundant seat of power, more than anywhere was further chipped and scarred by a million traces of the Nazi regime and war. Graffiti snarled out from walls pockmarked by Nazi and Soviet bullets. The wall that cut up the city was a […]

Reviews World enough? David Chandler, Hol ow Hegemony: Rethinking Global Politics, Power and Resistance, Pluto Press, London, 2009. 272 pp., £60.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 0 74532 921 5 hb., 978 0 74532 920 8 pb. Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2009. 304 pp., £46.50 […]