'Mark Neocleous' tag archive

‘Living in the camp you are restricted. You need at least six months to two years to learn the language, to get the permit … You have no control’, says Abu Tahrir, one of the many Syrian refugees seeking asylum in Greece. His comment was made in September 2015, a month of unprecedented refugee entrance […]

REViEWS The cunning of capital explained? Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2012, xxi + 812 pp., £22.99 pb., 978 1 60846 067 0. In ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’ (1976) Perry Anderson wrote: ‘Among the concepts traditionally associated with historical materialism, few have been so problematic and contested as that […]

As the editor of the new journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, published by Taylor & Francis, I am pleased to have a chance to respond to the ‘pre-emptive strike’ launched against the journal as a neoliberal ‘corporate-cum-academic dream’ in Mark Neocleous’s piece ‘Resisting Resilience’ (RP 178). First, it seems to be self-defeating to […]

Commentary Resisting resilience Mark neocleous I’m 24, in a horrible relationship, feeling stuck and alone. I met my boyfriend three years ago while I was struggling to find work after graduating. He was not only charismatic, ambitious and gorgeous, but supportive, too. I became infatuated. By the time I found out about his angry rages […]

Reviews The future is subhumanMalcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche, Verso, London & New York, 2011. 256 pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 85984 574 5. This is an intriguing book, and its principal thesis is highly provocative. My reaction to it is an ambivalent one: there are aspects of the book that are to be greatly welcomed, such […]

REVIEWS EVERYTHING IS DANGEROUS John Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics, London, Routledge, 1991. 155 pp., £30.00 hb, £10.99 pb., 04:15 90379 3 hb., 0415 903807 pb. Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body, London, Routledge, 1991. 130pp., £30.00 hb., £8.99 pb., 0 415 90187 1 hb., 0415 […]

Philosophy of Mind is presently regarded as one of the most productive areas of comtemporary analytic philosophy. A number of recent introductory works (here those by Jackson and Braddon Mitchell, Crane, Kim and Rey) give us a chance to reflect on the dominant paradigms in terms of which the subject is taught. These texts display […]

Jane Gallop is an American academic whose writings on psychoanalysis, feminism and related topics are as dazzling in their intelligence as they are scintillating in their wit. Their humour is part of the thought processes embodied in her texts. A careful argument, proceeding by tentative steps, will finally reach an explosive and paradoxical conclusion, inducing […]

Umberto Eco once defined a sign as ʻanything we can use to lie withʼ, though exactly what lying consists in he failed to make clear. To lie is not of course just to state an untruth, since I may believe my statement to be true; but nor is it just to state an untruth knowing […]

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 […]

Reviews I want to tell you a story Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, translated and with an introduction by Paul A. Kottman, Routledge, London and New York, 2000. 176 pp., £47.50 hb., £13.99 pb., 0 415 20058 X hb., 0 415 20057 1 pb. What happens if you Just Say No to the […]

Reviews The tale of TedTed Honderich, Philosopher: A Kind of Life, Routledge, London, 2001. x + 441 pp., £20.00 hb., 0 415 23697 5. There has been a surprisingly close relationship between philosophy and autobiography ever since Augustine. Indeed, it could plausibly be argued that modern European philosophy begins with Descartesʼ first-hand account of how […]

Kristin Rossʼs lucidly written book on the ʻsurvivals of May ʼ68ʼ tackles the ʻmemorial management of Mayʼ, those games of memory and forgetting that make the event a prisoner of its successive representations. This book has the great merit of dismantling, with the utmost clarity, the laborious exercise of ideological mine-clearing which in thirty years […]

Reviews ‘Human’Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London and New York, 2003. lxii + 318 pp., £40.00 hb., £15.00 pb., 1 85984 507 X hb., 1 85984 408 1 pb. Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2003. 233 pp., […]

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life John Kraniauskas Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice Françoise Vergès Alessandra […]

Reviews Culs-de-sacJacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum Press, London and New York, 2005. x + 116 pp., £14.99 hb., 0 8264 7067 X. Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005. xi + 148 pp., £29.95 hb., £12.50 pb., 0 80474408 […]

Reviews MathematiquerieEllie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic, eds, Lacan: Topologically Speaking, The Other Press, New York, 2004. 350 pp., £19.50 pb., 1 892746 76 X. Late in her biography of Lacan, Elisabeth Roudinesco gives us the quietly moving image of Lacan in his dotage, playing with pieces of string and seemingly drifting further into some private […]

Some spasm of the Zeitgeist (or was it an astrological conjunction?) in the 1990s gave birth to an extraordinary rash of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies and assorted mutants, as though a whole culture had fallen in love with the undead, those monstrous, liminal figures which hover between life and death as surely as the […]

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 […]

On 8 July 2005, the day after the London bombings, the International Association of Chiefs of Police issued its new guidelines on the detection and prevention of suicide bombings. The IACP is the primary organization through which senior police executives across the globe try to coordinate their powers and practices, and it does this through […]