Review of Fredric Jameson, Allegory and IdeologyStephen Morton A concern with allegory as a mode of interpretation rather than as a literary historical description of a moribund genre has been a leitmotif in Fredric Jameson’s thought from Fables of Aggression (1979) and The Political Unconscious (1981) to Brecht and Method (1998) and A Singular Modernity (2002). In Allegory and Ideology – announced as the second …
Review of Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown, eds., Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism Senka Anastasova Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-1987) was a Marxist, humanist, feminist and revolutionary thinker, neglected in both Marxist and feminist traditions. This collection presents Dunayevskaya as a strong Hegelian-Marxist philosopher, focusing on her novel interpretations of Hegel on absolute negativity as …
Review of Dario Gentili, The Age of Precarity: Endless Crisis as an Art of GovernmentFrancois Zammit This is the new English translation of a book first published in Italian in 2018. In a world that is still struggling with the crisis of the pandemic and its aftershocks, the 2018 Italian edition feels prescient and the …
Review of Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside ItselfNicolas Helm-Grovas Tom Holert remarks near the beginning of Knowledge Beside Itself that art has traditionally been defined in contradistinction to knowledge, at least scientific or systematic knowledge. How then to understand the proliferation of discourses of ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’ in contemporary art? This is visible, Holert indicates, in ‘curatorial statements, …
Nancy Cartwright, Jeremy Hardie, Eleonora Montuschi, Matthew Soleiman, and Ann C. Thresher, The Tangle of Science: Reliability Beyond Method, Rigour, and Objectivity, Oxford University Press, 2023, 272pp., $41.99 (hbk), ISBN 9780198866343. Reviewed by Lydia Patton, Virginia Tech The value of science is difficult to pin down. Two competing strands of philosophy do this work. One is the …
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Katharine Jenkins, Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality, Oxford University Press, 2023, 268pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780197666784. Reviewed by Charlotte Witt, University of New Hampshire Katharine Jenkins has artfully stitched together a radically pluralist account of human social kinds using materials drawn from recent work in analytic feminist metaphysics. If the reader is interested in …
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Review of Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class WarCasey Williams The US Congress passed its largest ever investment in clean energy in August – the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – and yet it remains impossible to shake the feeling that, as Matthew T. Huber puts it, ‘the climate movement is losing’ in both the …
Roger Caldwell considers the quest of anthropologists. When the young Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), then a bored teacher of philosophy in Paris, received an offer to work in Brazil, he embraced the opportunity to remake himself as an anthropologist, conducting fieldwork among the remote tribes of the Mato Grosso. He thus exchanged what he saw as ‘the …
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Chad Trainer hunts for a lost thinker. In the mid-fourth century BCE, Athens was between its peak as an imperial power and its decline into one more of Alexander the Great’s colonies. The prosperity of Athens’ Periclean age was a century in the past, and had been followed by a twenty-five years war with Sparta, resulting …
Ian James Kidd responds to rejections of humanity. Adam Kirsch is an American poet, biographer, literary critic, a faculty member at Columbia University, and a widely-published public intellectual. The Revolt Against Humanity (2022) appears in the Columbia Global Reports series of well-produced, novella-length essays on contemporary political and cultural themes. The theme of this book is the dispiriting …