To a growing and often fanatical readership, Marilynne Summers Robinson is unrivalled as a writer of American prose. The author first rose to prominence when her second novel, Gilead, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005, and by the time President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal in 2010 Robinson was literary fiction’s worst kept secret, wildly popular amongst book groups, journalists, literary critics and, indeed, the President.
'I feel like I know y’all,' Obama... [read more]
Richard Marshall, Philosophy at 3:AM: Questions and Answers with 25 Top Philosophers
reviewed by Jeffrey Petts
The day I first looked at 3:AM the latest End Times interview by Richard Marshall shared the website’s homepage with a review of Russell Brand’s Revolution, a juxtaposition worthy of Marshall’s concern: ‘where have all the philosophers gone?’ Marshall describes 3:AM as ‘a self-proclaimed underground mag’, essentially iconoclastic rather than philosophical, often anti-academia, and generally publishing in areas related to fiction and the arts. His series of interviews began as an... [read more]
CLR James, The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies, with the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government
reviewed by Christian Høgsbjerg
In his classic cultural history of cricket and civilisation, Beyond a Boundary (1963) the great Trinidadian Marxist CLR James recalled the time when ‘the Trinidad workers in the oilfields moved’ during the mass strike of 1937. ‘They were followed by masses of people in all the other islands, closing one epoch in West Indian history and opening another. One Government commentator, in reviewing the causes, was kind enough to refer to the writings of CLR James as helping to stir up the... [read more]
Peter Wolfendale, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes
reviewed by Dominic Fox
An alternative title for Pete Wolfendale’s Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes might have been A Defence of Philosophy; for what Wolfendale has written, in the form of a polemic against the ‘Object-Oriented Philosophy’ of Graham Harman, is a repudiation that unfolds into a systematic explication of Wolfendale’s own philosophical commitments. It is ultimately a defence of philosophical seriousness, of a particular way of holding such commitments and consenting to be... [read more]
Yasushi Inoue, trans. Michael Emmerich, Life of a Counterfeiter
reviewed by Dan Bradley
The title story in this collection opens with the writer's admission of failure: 'Nearly a decade has passed since the Ōnuki family first asked me to compile a biography of the painter Ōnuki Keigaku, and I have yet to complete it.' The biographer soon abandons his fruitless work and sets off into the countryside to investigate forgeries created by a mysterious painter named Shinozaki, mentioned in Keigaku's diary. And though the title leads us to believe that the life of Shinozaki – forger,... [read more]
Jason Holt (ed.), Leonard Cohen and Philosophy: Various Positions
reviewed by Andrew Marzoni
It’s hard to know whether Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer could have imagined that their brand of ideology critique would one day be subsumed by the very ‘culture industry’ it was designed to confront, but one must look no further than Open Court’s Popular Culture and Philosophy® series to see the dollars that can be squeezed out of a rudimentary understanding of Hegel and Kant. Since this catalog of academic anthologies was inaugurated with the inevitable Seinfeld and Philosophy: A... [read more]
Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara
reviewed by Ian Birchall
‘Total pandemonium. The people around us are shouting, laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos, and miaowing of medieval Bruitists. Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky... [read more]
The ‘history’ of writing, Martin Heidegger would claim in his late study on Parmenidean thought, is one of the main reasons for the increasing destruction of the word: ‘(t)he typewriter tears the word itself from something “typed.” […] Mechanical writing provides this “advantage,” that it conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same.’ The problems surrounding this inculcation of technology within a reading of a unanimist... [read more]
Jeffrey Reid, The Anti-Romantic: Hegel Against Ironic Romanticism
reviewed by Alex Fletcher
The trope of irony, it is easy to forget – especially after several decades of a particular form of postmodern irony and its new incarnation in the completely vacuous form of hipster irony – used to carry a significant socio-political, aesthetic and philosophical weight. Marx dispatched countless opponents through his masterly deployment of it and Socrates was obliged to sip hemlock because of its corrupting and corroding force. ‘Drinking the Kool-Aid’, was how Hal Foster referred to... [read more]
Emmanuel Carrère’s novel Limonov was first published in French in 2011. Recently (and impeccably) translated by John Lambert, it has had an oddly muted reception. In the London Review of Books, Gary Indiana quoted the term ‘pseudo-biography’ that appears on the book’s US dust-jacket, before sliding smoothly towards the judgement that ‘Limonov’s real life, as it happens, is particularly resistant to the kind of heroic narrative Carrère wishes to mould it into.’ In the Guardian,... [read more]
