Soap and bones

Reivew of Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals
Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (London: Reaktion, 2016). 288pp., £25.00 hb., 978 1 78023 645 2 When viewed on a hot plate under a polarising microscope, liquid crystals appear as a fluctuating kaleidoscope of colour: swirling, as Esther Leslie describes them, like ‘twisting lines of silks’, ‘pearlescent baubles’ […]

Art, documentary and the essay film

Dossier: Philosophy of the Essay Film

Dossier PHILOSOPHY OF tHE ESSAY FILM Art, documentary and the essay film Esther LeslieFilm as document The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960.1 Kracauer recalls watching a […]

186 Reviews

Many reviews of books on or by Walter Benjamin begin with a capsule description of the key events in his life. It goes something like this. Born in 1892 into a well-off assimilated German Jewish family in Berlin, Walter Benjamin failed to gain an academic career, just about getting by, instead, through journalism and handouts […]

Look at his marvellous hands!

Reviews Look at his marvellous hands! Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2013. 336 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 30015 193 0. Yvonne Sherratt’s book on the response of philosophers to the Third Reich is written in the style of a docudrama. There are colourful descriptions of foliage in […]

Architecture or art? (Response to Leslie); War between philosophy and art (Response to Bernstein); Frank significance (Response to Orozco)

~’, LETTERS Architecture or art? Esther Leslie’s sour dismissal of the wrapping of the Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude (RP 77) contains a number of doubtful and contradictory arguments. Permission to wrap the building required a parliamentary vote; approval was by 295 votes to 226. This democratic act by an institution of the state is […]

99 Reviews

Reviews Appreciating our beginningsRachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, eds, The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Womenʼs Liberation, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1998. xii + 531 pp., $20.00 pb., 0 609 80384 0. Sheila Rowbotham, Threads Through Time: Writings on History and Autobiography, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1999. 432 pp., £8.99 pb., 0 1402 275541. The […]

104 Reviews

Reviews Whatever happened to analytical Marxism? G.A. Cohen, If Youʼre an Egalitarian, How Come Youʼre So Rich?, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000. xii + 233 pp., £30.95 hb., 0 674 00152 2. This is a strange and disappointing book. The jokey and populist title is misleading. In fact the book contains the […]

113 Reviews

The thingRudi Visker, Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht/Boston/ London, hb. 1999; pb. 2001. 399 pp., £110.00 hb., £29.00 pb., 0 7923 5985 2 hb., 0 7923 6397 3 pb.by some “thing” that refuses to become part of the order of meaning (signification).ʼ My ʻthingʼ is thus something to which I […]

120 Reviews

In Friedrich Schlegelʼs famous fragment, the philosophical radicalism of Fichteʼs system is compared to both the artistic experimentalism of Goetheʼs Wilhelm Meister and the politically emancipatory force of the French Revolution. The Romantic project as a whole was prototypical for Benjamin in its willingness to align just such political, historical and aesthetic phenomena with the […]

140 Reviews

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 […]

149 Reviews

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 […]