Review of Mark Bould, The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture The Salvage Collective, The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene Chris Wilbert Catastrophe is inevitably attracting much discussion in relation to film, books, and other entertainment these days, though it is far from a new theme in philosophy. Even in tourism the theme of catastrophe has been …
Review of Roberto Esposito, Institution Matt Phull The Covid-19 pandemic had the curious result of simultaneously legitimising and de-legitimising discourses of the biopolitical. The longstanding claim of biopolitical theorists that politics and biological life have become inextricable within medicalised forms of governance has become increasingly undeniable. However, the negative construal of that entanglement within dominant accounts …
Review of Oishik Sircar, Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New IndiaNtina Tzouvala This is a book that resists easy categorisation and, as a result, also resists the typical review process. 1 I could, for example, note that the book consists of seven essays written as standalone pieces, which address a wide range of topics. …
Review of Terry Pinkard, Practice, Power, and Forms of LifeEthan Linehan In the space of just three chapters and a ‘dénouement,’ Terry Pinkard’s Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx explicates Jean-Paul Sartre’s late work, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), and along the way enters into the most controversial of the debates surrounding the Critique’s …
Review of Emmanuel Alloa, Looking Through ImagesTullio Viola Emmanuel Alloa’s Looking Through Images is an exceptionally ambitious book that attempts nothing less than rethinking the fundamental questions of image theory. Originally published in German more than a decade ago, the book weaves together two very different strands of thought. It is primarily a ‘phenomenology of visual media’, …
Review of Raphaël Fèvre, A Political Economy of PowerIsabel Oakes 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 to exploring how neoliberalism has influenced our economic, political and social lives – ranging from Michel …
Review of Alexander Kluge, Russia Container Marina Gerber 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 ‘on commission’ by his sister Alexandra Kluge, who, unlike her brother, lived in …
The concept of the concrete carries a lot of weight in critical theory. Travelling as it has from Hegel through Marx to Adorno’s derision of those who would arbitrarily divide the concrete and the abstract. But despite his noted value iconoclasm, it was Althusser who wrote in his infamous Preface to Capital Volume I of what it …
William S. Lewis Concrete Critical Theory: Althusser’s Marxism Read More »
In this, according to the blurb, ‘groundbreaking’ study, written by one of the most prominent representants of current critical theory, Christoph Menke, professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, promises nothing less than to develop a completely new conception of liberation which would resolve the problems of the traditional ‘Western’ idea. The book’s starting …