Wishful thinking

For more than a decade much of the anglophone literature on Simone de Beauvoir has been preoccupied with the question of her intellectual status, attacking the still prevailing presumptions that her work is not philosophical or that it is philosophically wholly indebted to Sartre. The publication of this volume – the first in the Beauvoir […]

The dream is a fragment: Freud, transdisciplinarity and early German Romanticism

Dossier: Romantic Transdisciplinarity 2

An appreciation and practice of the fragment is a feature of all European Romanticism, but it was in early German (or ‘Jena’) Romanticism, and most of all in the work of Friedrich Schlegel, that the concept of ‘the fragment’ was philosophically determined. Indeed, the fragment has been called ‘the central philosophical concept of early German […]

193 reviews

Beneath the soviets the beach McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Verso, London, 2015. xxii + 280 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78168 827 4. Geological time is long; the lifespan of critical terms is decidedly shorter. The sedimentary record of buzz words logs the granulated residue of terms that were snuffed out […]

Spontaneous generation: The fantasy of the birth of concepts in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Spontaneous generation The fantasy of the birth of concepts in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Stella sandford In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, at the end of the transcendental deduction of the categories, Kant distinguishes the doctrine of transcendental idealism from competing theories of knowledge – or, more specifically, theories of […]

176 Reviews: Books Reviewed:Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A BiographySimon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political TheologyClaudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster, Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the UnknownStuart Price, Worst Case Scenario? Governance, Mediation and the Security RegimeMartin Breaugh, L’Expérience PlébéienneTina Chanter, Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of SlaveryStella Sandford, Plato and SexAlain Badiou, with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of LoveYehoshua Yakhot, The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR: The 1920s & 1930sJay Lampert, Simultaneity and Delay: A Dialectical Theory of Staggered Time

Reviews Grande biogBenoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2012. 603 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 74565 615 1.‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking?’ Despite post-structuralist philosophies’ association with Beckettian questions such as these, they remain surprisingly bound to what Foucault called that ‘singular […]

Shulamith Firestone, 1945–2012

Shulamith Firestone was perhaps the most infamous radical feminist theorist of the twentieth century. As a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, she became an early activist in the women’s movement, founding (with Jo Freeman) the Westside Group in 1967, in large part in response to the patronizing sexism of left politics at the […]

171 Reviews: Books Reviewed:Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall, eds, Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, LiteratureMichael J. Thompson, ed.,Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical EssaysHans-Jörg Rheinberger,On Historicising Epistemology: An EssayHans-Jörg Rheinberger, An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-Century Histories of LifeTerry Eagleton, Why Marx Was RightPaul Mattick, Business As Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of CapitalismFrank Furedi, On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral IndependencePeter John et al., Nudge, Nudge, Think, ThinkGilles Saint-Paul, The Tyranny of UtilityMandy Merck and Stella Sandford, eds, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of SexBruno Bosteels, The Actuality of CommunismColin Cremin, Capitalism’s New ClothesGerhard Richter: Panorama

Reviews Hegelian Leninism today! Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall, eds, Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence. Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, Continuum, London and New York, 2011. 256 pp., £60.00 hb., 978 1 44115 790 4. ^ Michael J. Thompson, ed., Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics, Continuum, London and New York, […]

80 Reviews

REVIEWS A paradigm too far? Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, translated by Joel Anderson, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995. xxi + 215 pp., £39.95 hb., 0 7456 1160 5. Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, edited by Charles W. Wright, State […]

81 Reviews

REVIEWS Capital futures István Mészáros, Beyond Capital, The Merlin Press, London, 1995. xxvi + 994 pp., £45.00 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 85036 454 X hb., 0 85036 432 9 pb. It is now a quarter of a century since István Mészáros had his first big success in Britain with Marxʼs Theory of Alienation. In the […]

87 Reviews

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 […]

‘Affectivity’, British Society for Phenomenology Conference,British Society for Phenomenology Conference, 3–5 April 1998, Oxford; John Macmurray 6–9 April 1998, Aberdeen;

News Affectivity British Society for Phenomenology Conference, 3–5 April 1998, OxfordWebbʼs critical questioning focused on the issue of whether Heidegger is able to think radically enough the differentiation – which occurs in and through the saying of language – between a thing and its horizon of givenness, which is thereby the dimension of the thingʼs […]

103 Reviews

To see clearly requires distance, but during the last century Western intellectuals were too close to psychoanalysis to get a good view. Insider accounts, both friendly and antagonistic, predominated. The decline in analytic fortunes since the 1960s, along with the general shift in the Zeitgeist, has opened a path for historical perspective. Cassandraʼs Daughter is […]

109 Reviews

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 […]

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 […]

133 Reviews

For more than a decade much of the anglophone literature on Simone de Beauvoir has been preoccupied with the question of her intellectual status, attacking the still prevailing presumptions that her work is not philosophical or that it is philosophically wholly indebted to Sartre. The publication of this volume – the first in the Beauvoir […]