Reviews archive

David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 448pp., £74.00 hb., £23.99 pb., 978 0 80479 870 9 hb., 978 1 50360 572 5 pb. Freedom is a difficult matter because sometimes we cannot separate what liberates us from what imprisons us, and sometimes, despite our conscious protestations […]

Alexi Kukuljevic, Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017). 152pp., £11.99 pb., 978 0 26253 419 2 When Gilles Deleuze described his work on the history of philosophy as an act of buggery, and showed how Kant and his likenesses could be made the fathers of monsters each […]

Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 160pp., £58.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 1 50360 202 1 hb., 978 1 50360 585 5 pb. During a public discussion to mark a 2018 career retrospective show at The New Museum in New York, John Akomfrah was asked a […]

C. Heike Schotten, Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 241pp., £81.00 hb., £27.00 pb., 978 0 23118 746 6 hb., 978 0 23118 747 3 pb. When George W. Bush threw down his infamous gauntlet in the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001 […]

Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 288pp., £80.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 0 82236 245 6 hb., 978 0 8223 6260 9 pb. The title of Jaleh Mansoor’s Marshall Plan Modernism provides a number of clues about the author’s methodological ambitions. The juxtaposition […]

Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 239pp., £19.99 hb., 978 0 19090 122 6 It is the best of times and it is the worst of times to declare oneself a feminist today. Presentations of that creature have been shape shifting for decades, though right now she suddenly seems […]

Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value in Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 254pp., £120.00 hb., 978 9 00429 137 9 When the Swedish artists Goldin+Senneby’s Eternal Employment was chosen as one of the main public art works to feature in the massive rebuilding of the […]

Laurent De Sutter, Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). 140pp., £41.50 hb., £9.99 pb., 978 1 50950 683 5 hb., 978 1 50950 684 2 pb. In A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Marx remarked that religious devotion performed a fundamental role in the reproduction of […]

Saul Newman, Political Theology: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press 2019), 180pp., £15.99 pb., 978 1 50952 840 0 pb. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, first published in the midst of political turmoil in Weimar era Germany, Carl Schmitt attempted a theoretical amputation of liberal parliamentarianism from democracy by excavating the contradictory principles on […]

Chris Hesketh, Spaces of Capital/Spaces of Resistance: Mexico and the Global Political Economy (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 240pp., £76.95 hb., £23.95 pb., 978 0 82035 174 2 hb., 978 0 82035 284 8 pb.. In Spaces of Capital/Spaces of Resistance, Chris Hesketh provides an overview of the possibilities and challenges for anti-capitalist […]

Pascal Chabot, Global Burnout, trans. Aliza Krefetz (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 144 pp., £96 hb., £23.99 pb., £25 eb., 978 1 50133 438 2 hb., 978 1 50133 447 4 pb., 9 781 501 33439 9 eb. Philosophers have often described society as being either physically sick or mentally ill, but the diagnoses differ. Metaphors proliferate […]

Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (London and New York: Verso, 2018). 144pp., £10.99 pb., 978 1 78663 376 In an editorial in the New York Times written ten days after the 2016 presidential election, Mark Lilla (Professor of Humanities at Columbia University) challenged the so-called ‘Whitelash’ thesis, arguing […]

Giorgio Agamben, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 114 pp., $55.00 hb., $18.95 pb., 978 1 50360 220 5 hb., 978 1 50360 221 2 pb. Giorgio Agamben, Taste, trans. Cooper Francis (London and New York: Seagull Books, 2017). 90 pp., £14.99 hb., 978 0 85742 436 5 In seminars […]

Nathan Brown, The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 296pp., £32.00 hb., 978 0 82327 299 0 As its starting point, Nathan Brown’s excellent new book The Limits of Fabrication asks disarmingly simple questions: how are poems made, and what are poems made of? He takes these questions […]

Janina Wellmann, The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830, trans. Kate Sturge (New York: Zone Books, 2017). 424pp., £27.00 hb., 978 1 93540 876 5 Janina Wellmann’s ambitious, cross-disciplinary book, first published in German in 2010, sets out to achieve two main aims. First, it attempts to retell and reframe the […]

Jeff Love, The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 376pp, £30.00 hb., 978 0 23118 656 8 In the notebooks Alexandre Kojève wrote on his way to Germany, he sketched a structure of all relevant fields of knowledge, with each field labelled ‘bolshevism in …’: ‘politics’, ‘religion’, and […]

David Sosa (ed.) Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 256pp., $60 hb., 978 01 98758 655. ‘Slurs’ – understood here to be particular words designed by convention to derogate targeted individuals or groups – are a puzzling category of speech, which raise a variety of philosophical questions pertaining to their […]

Stefanie R. Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 144pp. £86.00 hb., £21.00 pb., 978 1 51790 012 0 hb., 978 1 51790 013 7 pb. Taking to task the metaphor of the body politic that she claims is central to the concept of the state […]

Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). 140pp., £40.00 hb., £9.99 pb., 978 1 50951 802 9 hb., 978 1 50951 803 6 pb. We are fast approaching a point where one third of the global population will play video games on a regular basis. As such, video gaming ought to become a […]

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds, Veer Ecology: Companion for Environmental Thinking (Minneapolis; London: University Of Minnesota Press, 2017). 536pp., £83.72 hb., £20.93 pb., 978 1 5179 0076 2 hb., 978 1 51790 077 9 pb. The resource depletion, environmental degradation and global climate change that characterise our present time warrant an urgent questioning […]

Tom Bunyard, Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018). 430pp., £123.00 hb., 978 9 00435 602 3 Amid the copious notes taken by Guy Debord on the philosophy of Hegel, the following extract from the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit appears repeatedly: ‘By the little which satisfies […]