Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts
reviewed by Simi Freund
For many years Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was an unfashionable figure within philosophy, known either as a brilliant British mathematician who co-authored the seminal Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) with Bertrand Russell, or as an obscure metaphysician whose ‘process philosophy’ gave birth to ‘process theology.’ He was perhaps best known for declaring all of western thought to be a ‘series of footnotes to Plato.’ Whitehead came to philosophy relatively late in his career,... [read more]
Barry Reay, Nina Attwood & Claire Gooder (eds.), Sex Addiction: A Critical History
reviewed by Francis O'Gorman
How far are we in pathologising human personality? It's not unfamiliar to hear the scientific existence of, say, autism or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder disputed. These are not, the argument runs, clinically diagnosed states but simply part of the continuum of that multiply diverse unknown quantity: human nature. To turn them into 'disorders' is to use a supposedly medical diagnosis as a tool to impose a rigid sense of what is 'normal' or properly ‘ordered.'
I remember as a child hearing... [read more]
Umberto Eco, trans. Caterina Mongiat Farina & Geoff Farina, How to Write a Thesis
reviewed by Andre van Loon
If you Google search ‘how to write a thesis,’ an array of information from universities and academic sites appears. In the United Kingdom, for example, Oxford University’s Learning Institute offers guidance through its ‘Stages of the Doctorate’ site, which has a 1,500-word guide tailored specifically to writing a thesis. It advises researchers that they are not alone if they are experiencing anxiety, writer’s block, or procrastination. The website tries to demystify the writing... [read more]
Iain Sinclair, London Overground: A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line
reviewed by David Anderson
Iain Sinclair's London Overground, in crisp orange hardback, is subtitled ‘A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line’. That's 34 miles. In one day. Incredulous readers are many. And those who took the time to peruse an excerpt published in the Guardian weren't slow to ask questions. Yet suspicions about the book's logistical likelihood were among the mildest criticisms levelled at the piece. ‘Absurd twaddle’ said one reader, in a symptomatic comment. Sinclair, said another, ‘needs a... [read more]
Timothy Secret, The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning: On Responsibility in Eulogy
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The valiant attempt by Epicurus to dismiss death as a philosophical concept barely survived the third century BC. Its ringing simplicity – there is no point in maundering on about death if you are still alive, and no possibility of maundering about it after you have departed – sought only to remove the fear of it, but death has always been about much more than fear. The ways in which people die, the influence they continue to exert over their successors, the correct attitude to... [read more]
Edouard Levé, trans. Jan Steyn & Caite Dolan-Leach, Newspaper
reviewed by Dominic Jaeckle
I would like to make [literature] out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste - a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. [...] But things decay, reason argues. Real things become garbage. The piece of lemon you shellac to the canvas begins to develop a mold, the newspaper tells of incredibly ancient events in forgotten slang, the boy becomes a grandfather. Yes, but the garbage of the real still reaches out into the current... [read more]
Tim Jordan, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society
reviewed by Dominic Fox
In 1979, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard submitted to the Quebec government a document that would later be published as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Lyotard’s report closed with a call for the opening of public access to the databases and knowledge banks on which future decision making would depend. If knowing things was increasingly the function of the research and development wings of giant corporations such as IBM, Lyotard’s concern was that capitalist... [read more]
Culture as garbage, garbage as culture – such is one formulation of the modernist conundrum. Beckett's much-abused comment that '[e]very word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness' – given, lest we forget, not in some carefully preserved high-cultural despatch, but in a 1969 interview for Vogue – rather than implying a quasi-Buddhist contempt for the merely existent acknowledges that words are a substance that requires order, patterning, against the impossible purity of... [read more]
‘Before you become a writer,’ says Robert Macfarlane in Landmarks, ‘you must first become a reader.’ Macfarlane is an attentive, empathetic reader of texts and landscapes. These dual literacies inform each other in Landmarks, creating a book that invites its own readers to be enriched by its language and turn their gaze outwards, to the grammar of the natural world. The book is a record of Macfarlane’s ‘pupillage, if the word may be allowed to carry its senses both of “tuition”... [read more]
Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton et al., Women in Clothes: Why We Wear What We Wear
reviewed by Amber Jane Butchart
‘The commodity is not one kind of thing rather than another, but one phase in the life of some things,’ wrote the cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in his book, The Social Life of Things (1988). It is the life of things – specifically clothing – and our relationships with those things that are the driving force behind Women in Clothes. Refreshingly unconcerned with the commodity phase, unlike much fashion reportage, this is a book that documents the power of clothing to share in... [read more]
