Reviews archive

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 […]

It’s hard to know exactly who the audience is for this small book, the fifth in Semiotext(e)’s Intervention Series, and an uneasy bedfellow with its immediate predecessor in the series, Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War. Taken broadly, it’s an overview of the concept of the machine/machinic as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari, combined with post-autonomist […]

Reviews FlexploitationBrett de Bary, ed., Universities in Translation: The Mental Labor of Globalisation, Traces, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2010. 408 pp., £56.50 hb., £28.50 pb., 978 962 209 991 3 hb., 978 962 209 992 0 pb. Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, New […]

Reviews He preferred not to…Rob Chapman, Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head, Faber & Faber, London 2010. 441 pp., £14.99 pb., 978 0 571 23854 5. ^ Julian Palacios, Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe, Plexus Publishing, London 2010. 448 pp., £14.99 pb., 13 978 085965 431 9. ^ Michele Mari, Rosso Floyd, Giulio […]

This thirteen-chapter volume claims to be the first book-length analysis, from a philosophical point of view, of the trend towards the commodification of higher education, combining philosophical analysis with empirical accounts of the current realities facing universities and academics. No longer do philosophers have the luxury of pretending that there might still be time to […]