Reviews archive

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 […]

Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2018). 236pp., £11.99 pb., 978 1 68237 220 4 In his most recent book, apparently meant for a general audience and made up of essays previously appearing in non-scholarly publications, Galen Strawson has provided a nice recap […]

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetics, ed. Eberhard Ortland, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). 376pp., £55.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 978 0 74567 939 6 hb., 978 0 74567 940 2 pb. Amongst the writings of canonised thinkers, there often exist ambiguous yet generative gaps between those works published during their lifetime and those made posthumously […]

Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 304 pp., £24.95 hb., £20.00 pb., 978 0 52028 191 2 hb., 978 0 52029 994 8 pb. The shift to neoliberalism is rarely narrated from the vantage point of the household, but it […]

François Cusset, Le déchaînement du monde. Logique nouvelle de la violence (Paris: La Découverte, 2018). 240pp., 20.00 euro pb., 978 2 70719 815 0 Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre. Une philosophie de la violence (Paris: Zones, 2017). 200pp., 18.00 euro pb., 978 2 35522 1103 Just over two years ago, on 19 July 2016, Adama Traoré […]

Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, eds., Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilising Against Equality (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 302pp., £85.00 hb., £27.95 pb., 978 1 78348 999 2 hb., 978 1 78660 000 4 pb. What fuels the success of authoritarian populism around the globe and how does the extreme right manage to hijack public […]

Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 296pp., £76.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 0 82236 892 2 hb., 978 0 82236 918 9 pb. On March 30th 2018, Palestinian activists in Gaza began what they called The Great March of Return. Throughout a period beginning on […]

Clare Hemmings, Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 304pp., £80.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 0 82236 998 1 hb., 978 0 82237 003 1 pb. Clare Hemmings is one of the most innovative and original voices in contemporary feminist theory. Her work cuts across disciplinary […]