Review of Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History Hannah Proctor The second volume of Peter Weiss’s epic historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance opens in Paris in 1938. Recently defeated international brigade fighters in the Spanish Civil War, the unnamed narrator and his dejected comrades have taken up temporary residence in a grand building made available by its …
Review of Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in light of notions of form and individuation Gus Hewlett Simondon’s longest and most philosophically ambitious text has finally arrived in English, in a fine translation by Taylor Adkins. Individuation in light of notions of form and information was originally submitted in 1958 as Simondon’s thèse principale, alongside his thèse secondaire, On the mode of existence of …
Review of Martin Jay, Genesis and ValidityMimi Howard Can ideas transcend the context of their appearance? Can concepts depose the particularity of their origin to achieve validity? In the opening pages to a new collection of essays on the theory and practice of intellectual history, Martin Jay argues that such questions have been around ‘at …
Review of Sebastian Truskolaski, Adorno and the Ban on Images Hedy Cohen These notes are from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C Minor, written between 1804 and 1808. Even listeners who do not read music can easily recognise the melody. It is so easy to understand and memorable, that, as a joke, in a season 16 episode …
Review of Jack Z. Bratich, On Microfascism: Gender, War, and DeathTakin Raisifard Unacquainted readers may think that ‘microfascism’ is perhaps analogous to contemporary terms such as ‘microaggression’: the prefix ‘micro’ implying a simple reduction in scale and scope for actions representing larger systems. But microfascism is not just small fascism. If fascism is a certain arrangement …
Review of Thomas Lemke, The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms Deren Ertas Cars that measure and signal fuel efficiency, expanding markets for weather derivatives, and ‘vital systems security’ infrastructures, among other similar developments, indicate significant transformations in contemporary governmentality at varying scales. New materialist strands of thought have been developing novel understandings of …
The experience of the Popular Unity government in Chile During the twentieth century, the concept of development galvanised a wide variety of popular struggles for democratisation, agrarian reform, socialism, and economic sovereignty across the global South. In social theory, the question of development also sparked major intellectual debates that shed new light on the nature …
What makes a good parent? Most would say a good parent loves and nurtures their child with the ultimate aim of helping them flourish – now and into the future. A good parent will feed their child, give them space to play and time to use their imagination, make sure they get an education and …
Slavoj Žižek on Wittgenstein and Cancel Culture. “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”(‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’)Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921 In this final proposition of his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein prohibits the impossible. But why should one prohibit something that is already in itself impossible? The answer is relatively easy: if …
Anarchism has long been ignored or misunderstood. Academics routinely make factual errors about anarchism, like claiming that all anarchists reject organisation, that anarchists care only about state oppression, or that anarchists have never organised any major social movements. More than a few throw out all pretensions of charity, or even commitment to doing the reading, …