By Paul Ardoin
Brian Massumi. Politics of Affect. Polity Press, 2015. 228 pp.
Let’s start—as remains the apparent necessity in every discussion of affect, despite these years since the so-called affective turn—with the definition of “affect” at the center of Brian Massumi’s Politics of Affect volume.
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By Nandini Thiyagarajan
Brian Massumi. What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Duke University Press, 2014. 137 pp.
“We will see what the birds and the beasts have instinctively to say about this.” — Brian Massumi
At one point or another, we have all found ourselves watching animals play.
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By Joshua Synenko
Boris Groys. On The New. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Verso, 2014. 208 pp.
It may seem contradictory to release a translation of a work which questions ideas of “the new” some twenty-two years after the German original. Yet the belated English publication of Boris Groys’s On The New (2014), demonstrates the text’s endurance according to the very means encouraged by Groys himself: by crossing the threshold into “valorized” culture.
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By Jason Michelakos
Lindon Barrett. Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity. University of Illinois Press, 2014. 264 pp.
Lindon Barrett (1961-2008) was a Professor of English and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine from 1990 to 2007 before moving to the University of California, Riverside. He was a distinguished scholar and the author of Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (2009), published by Cambridge University Press.
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By Viren Murthy
Etienne Balibar. Equaliberty: Political Essays. Duke University Press, 2014. 365 pp.
The concepts of equality and liberty form the core of modern political culture. And yet, the definition of these terms changes depending on the qualifiers that are attached to them. For example, political theorists have long debated distinctions of positive or negative liberty, formal or real equality.
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By Miriam Tola
Antonio Negri. Spinoza for Our Time. Columbia University Press, 2013. xix + 125 pp
Hasana Sharp. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. University of Chicago Press, 2011. xii + 241 pp.
Nowhere has the capacity of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy to enable radical politics been asserted more forcefully than in Antonio Negri’s The Savage Anomaly. Published in 1981, the book marked a turning point in Spinoza scholarship by establishing Spinoza as a thinker of revolutionary immanence.
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By Julian Jason Haladyn
Rebecca Comay. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Stanford University Press [Cultural Memory in the Present Series], 2010. 224 pp.
Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution begins with the question of the cultural disenchantment facing Germany in the aftermath of the French Revolution, an historical condition that, following Marx and Engels, came to be called the “German misery.” This disenchanted position results from the awkward acknowledgment that “Germany’s experience of modernity is a missed experience,” the trauma of which Rebecca Comay uses as a category of history, with the “German misery” being an exemplary model of her approach and Hegel representing “its most lucid theorist” (3-4).
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By Sam Han
Peter Sloterdijk. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 2011. 664pp.
For anyone even remotely interested in philosophy, when a figure sets out to “correct” Heidegger, you want to pay attention. This is not necessarily out of admiration for the author of Being and Time, or his ideas, but rather out of a genuine curiosity made up of equal parts amazement and horror.
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By Alan R. Van Wyk
Martha Nussbaum. The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. 285 pp.
Religion has become a problem. Or rather, religion has been made a problem. Reduced to being a maker of meaning and marker of identity, it has become a maker and marker of difference, a difference that, in the North Atlantic world, against a normative Christianity, is often the difference of Islam.
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By Marc James LÉger
Bruno Bosteels. Badiou and Politics. Duke University Press, 2011. 436 pp.
Tom Eyers begins his review of Bruno Bosteels’ Badiou and Politics by addressing the relevance of critical theory to the current political conjuncture in which the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, the anti-austerity demonstrations in Europe, and the Occupy movements have inaugurated a new era of revolt.
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By Jeff Heydon
Alberto Toscano. Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. Verso, 2010. 277 pp.
A quick Google search using ‘Kim Jong Il’ and ‘fanatic’ as the terms brings up the following results: “Kim Jong Il: The Movie Fanatic”; “Kim Jong Il’s golfing accomplishments will never be repeated”; and “Farewell to a Fanatic.” The search also brings up a number of references to websites that include the word ‘fanatic’ in the title, more often than not in a positive context.
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By Liam Mitchell
David Wills. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 280 pp.
In Dorsality, David Wills offers a linguistic reading of the technological, a technological reading of the linguistic, and a re-conception of the human on the basis of this relationship. Because Wills is a translator and former friend of Jacques Derrida, the appearance of deconstructive influences in the book's methodology is unsurprising.
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By David Lawrimore
John Michael. Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 320 pp.
At its heart, John Michael’s Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror is about the conflict between a national identity that promises justice to all and the various identities that have experienced America’s failure to make good on that promise.
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By Randall K. Cohn
John Keane. The Life and Death of Democracy. Norton, 2009.
In John Keane’s introduction to his sweeping new survey history, The Life and Death of Democracy, he lays out a promising—and ambitious—task for the project. “With an even hand,” he writes, “and one eye constantly on the past, the book tries to expose the worrying lack of clarity about what democracy means today” (xxxiii).
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