Ordoliberal orthodoxy?

Reivew of Raphaël Fèvre, A Political Economy of Power
Raphaël Fèvre, A Political Economy of Power: Ordoliberalism in Context, 1932-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 280pp., £64.00 hb., 978 0 19760 780 0 George Monbiot’s statement in a 2016 Guardian article that neoliberalism is the ‘ideology at the root of all our problems’ still resonates today. A huge body of literature has been dedicated […]

Containing Russia

Reivew of Alexander Kluge, Russia Container
Alexander Kluge, Russia Container, trans. Alexander Booth (Chicago: Seagull Books, 2022). 392pp., £27.50 hb., 978 1 80309 065 8 Russia Container is not a book about Russia. It’s about the images and stories that East Germans had of Soviet Russia before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and after. Alexander Kluge wrote it […]

God’s away

Reivew of Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World
Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 2019). 306pp., £112.00 hb., £32.00 pb., 978 1 50173 099 3 hb., 978 1 50173 100 6 pb. Willem Styfhals’ new book offers a conceptual history of Gnosticism within a deceptively narrow discursive field. Though Gnosticism re-emerged and become […]
Lift on the end of a bridge

Wounds of Democracy: Adorno’s Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism and the German antisemitism debate

Scholars of European history and critical theory observing American politics in recent years have often found themselves experiencing déjà vu. History, the truism goes, does not repeat itself, but last summer, with calls for ‘law and order’ and armed right-wing militias clashing with anti-racist protestors across America, many asked, what more are you waiting for? […]
Outside of a UKIP MEP's office in the European Parliament, with flags of Israel, Tenessee and Gadsden tacked onto the wall.

A new world art?: Documenting Documenta 11

Documenta 11 was one of the most radically conceived events in the history of postcolonial art practice. It is exemplary of the influence of postcolonial discourses on critical art practice over the last twenty years in breaking profoundly with the colonial presuppositions of the nineteenth-century tradition of ethnographic or anthropological exhibitions of non-Western art as […]