The contours of life are not the contours of art: the former coils, the latter arrows. We wend our way forwards with caducuous dreams, stop-start careers and capricious slews, whereas (successful) fictional characters follow a lodestar – their motivations fixed, their attachments delineated, their nadirs and their peaks manifest. For this is what lures us to films and novels: definiteness, the placement of pattern.
So. What then of the autobiography? Well, the salient lure is... [read more]
EDA Collective, Why Are Animals Funny? Everyday Analysis: Volume 1
reviewed by Jamie Mackay
Research culture in the humanities has always been elitist, but never has it been so cut-throat and drained of vitality. While established thinkers cling to their hard-earned brands a new generation of dialecticians fight tooth and nail over raw morsels of funding, their self-esteem secured only by conservative dreams of more bloody and radical days. The university is a depressing place to do theory. So often friendships are left to a series of ‘what if’s as groups are torn apart by... [read more]
Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism
reviewed by Maya Osborne
The late and great critic Edward Said is aptly evoked in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism when Judith Butler writes that ‘Since there is no self without a boundary, and that boundary is always a site of multiple relations, there is no self without its relations.’ This proposition forms part of Butler’s critique of Zionism, and it levels with the possibility that if we deny this necessarily multiple relation to boundaries, we are dangerously placing ourselves in a world... [read more]
Leaving The Sea is only the third offering of Ben Marcus’s fiction we have seen in the UK. 2012 saw the publication of his masterpiece The Flame Alphabet by Granta, who have also had the good sense to republish his earlier work The Age of Wire and String with beautiful illustrations by Catrin Morgan. Given the outstanding quality of his writing, I can only assume that plans are in place to bring Notable American Women to UK readers without forcing them onto the internet and the custom of... [read more]
Christopher Hale, Massacre in Malaya: Exposing Britain’s My Lai
reviewed by John Newsinger
For many years the British Army had a reputation as experts in counterinsurgency. Whereas both the French and the Americans had suffered humiliating defeats in Indo-China, Algeria and Vietnam, the British had not only successfully crushed insurgencies in Malaya, Kenya and elsewhere, but also managed the task without resorting to the brutality, torture and overkill that discredited other counterinsurgency campaigns. In the 1990s, this reputation was reinforced by the British performance in... [read more]
Peter Sloterdijk's Nietzsche, celebrated here in the transcript of a talk given in Weimar on the centenary in 2000 of the German philosopher's death, is first and foremost the iconoclast of language, which is to say of classical philosophical discourse. Standing at the dawn of humanity's plunge into irrationality, he is also the end-result of a tradition of self-assertion that expressed itself through the hubris of nations with regard to their own cultures, and their belligerent intentions... [read more]
This February, HarperCollins US published a new edition of Jane Bowles’ 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies. If you’ve never read the book before, I hope this news might prompt you to do so - but please don’t judge it by its cover. The design features an illustration of two young women in 1940s dresses. It’s nice, in its way: pretty, a bit kooky, cute. The thing is, Two Serious Ladies isn’t.
The two ladies on the cover (described as being ‘like an ad for Daria’ by the women’s... [read more]
Robert B. Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism
reviewed by Tom Hastings
If Art really can embody intelligible relations (love, friendship, citizenry) between subjects (you, me, them) and objects (you, me, this) in a way that Philosophy desires to but can’t, how can this mode of comportment be represented? And if we follow the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in recognising art and philosophy as communicating one recognisably ‘same content’ to a greater or lesser extent, what criteria are available to the enquirer to test this out? Hegel’s... [read more]
In a 1929 essay, Walter Benjamin writes that ‘the nineteenth century did not reveal itself to Zola or Anatole France, but to the young Proust, the insignificant snob, the playboy and socialite who snatched in passing the most astounding confidences from a declining age... It took Proust to make the nineteenth century ripe for memoirs.’ The reigning peace and ignorance of the aristocratic and bourgeois interiors of the 19th century – the condition, sketched by Benjamin four years later in... [read more]
Gillian Darley and David McKie, Ian Nairn: Words in Place
reviewed by Pete Maxwell
There is a scene from the television series Ian Nairn’s Journeys, the episode where he takes the Orient Express through Europe to its terminus in Istanbul, that everyone familiar with the architecture critic recalls. Nairn has arrived at his first stop, Munich, where he delivers a succinct interpretation of the city from atop the town hall. The camera then switches to a night shot of a fairground ride, a gentle German ballad playing in the background, then to Nairn on the ground, trapped in... [read more]
