Review of Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International LawAziz Rana At the heart of the post-World War II international order was a legitimating narrative premised on the idea that the world system was no longer imperial; it had now become a community of equal states. This meant that international law established a …
Review of Nathan Brown, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative CritiqueDaniel Sacilotto Describing the general course of twentieth-century French philosophy, Alain Badiou distinguishes between two major, divergent orientations of thought: a rationalist orientation that promotes a ‘philosophy of the concept’, following from the works of Léon Brunschvicg, and a vitalist-existentialist orientation that promotes a ‘philosophy …
Review of Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, eds., A Lot of People are Saying Michael F. Miller One thing a lot of people are saying right now – especially after the events of January 6th 2021 – is that the supercharged forces of conspiracy theory and digital communication platforms have reshaped social norms and the …
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 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 »