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 …
In January 2024, a comedy routine was released onto the internet produced by an artificial intelligence that had digested thousands of hours of material by the late George Carlin and then attempted to mimic his style and wit while commenting upon present-day issues. This, of course, made headlines across the world, and resulted in a …
Review of Keti Chukhrov, Practicing the Good Sascha Freyberg and Lukas Meisner Spinoza’s dictum that we ought to understand first – not ridicule, not cry, nor detest – is ignored surprisingly often, even in philosophical scholarship, when it comes to revising and appropriating intellectual labour from the context of ‘real existing socialism’ (RES). Such dismissal is usually not …
Review of Natalia Romé, For Theory: Althusser and the Politics of TimeTill Hahn Although Natalia Romé’s book For Theory: Althusser and the Politics of Time comes in the disguise of humble secondary literature, it is not just an account of Althusser’s theory of temporality but also makes a claim for the power of theory in political struggle. …