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]
If the Frankfurt School is properly thought of as maintaining a profoundly critical stance towards the media of mass communication alongside which it developed in the first half of the 20th century, it is equally fair to say that its approach was full of ambivalence. Theodor Adorno famously held radio responsible for 'the regression of listening', in which a studiously contemplative attitude to grown-up music was replaced by the less onerous passive reception of its classics in broadcast form,... [read more]
The middle-aged, middle-class white man in a state of crisis – this is a familiar enough literary theme. Its central figure has been especially prominent in 20th-century literature – from J. Alfred Prufrock to Leopold Bloom, from Jean-Baptiste Clamence to Humbert Humbert. Out of time and place, these essentially romantic characters struggle to align themselves with modern values, signalling the paradigmatic shifts that they bestride. As Hermann Hesse wrote of his own such creation, Harry... [read more]
Fuck Israel. Fuck Hamas. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNRWA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, Fatah, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community … History is repeating itself in its most cruel way and nobody seems to care. We are scared. Here in Gaza we are scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed, killed. We are afraid of living, because every single step we take has to be... [read more]
The Intervals of Cinema is the latest in a series of translations published by Verso of works by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. The book was originally published in French in 2011 and can be seen as a companion volume to Rancière’s previous book, Film Fables (2001), which discusses various aspects of contradiction surrounding the notion of narrative in film. Contradiction is again the name of the game in The Intervals of Cinema as Rancière examines, across six essays, cinema’s... [read more]
Klaske Havik, Urban Literacy: Reading and Writing Architecture
reviewed by Rosa Ainley
The motif of dotted and dashed lines on the matte blue of the cover immediately presents the idea of a series of paths and routes and penetrable borders, crossing and overlapping each other. We’re going somewhere. In modern times everything’s a journey it seems, whether or not tickets are involved. Here this is explicit, and fittingly the journey starts on a bridge, with its suggestion of linkage, separation and connection, departure and arrival. Between these points, the first and last... [read more]
