Christopher Partridge, The Lyre of Orpheus: Popular Music, The Sacred and The Profane
reviewed by Eugene Brennan
Despite – or perhaps because of – the ubiquity of online cultural studies commentary, popular music’s place in contemporary culture seems to be particularly susceptible to being fetishised as a space of purity, not to be contaminated by intellectual inquiry. The popular success of Slavoj Zizek’s documentaries comprising Lacanian demystifications of Hollywood films, for example, didn’t seem to meet with defensive reactions along the lines of ‘It’s just about the movies, man.’... [read more]
Agata Pyzik, Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West
reviewed by Sebastian Truskolaski
Agata Pyzik’s Poor But Sexy is a timely and personal rumination on the explosive culture clashes between Eastern and Western Europe. Over the course of five thematically arranged chapters, the author discusses a wide range of examples from art and popular culture, prodding at the fault-lines on the European map left by the dismantling of the ‘iron curtain’. The overall sentiment of the book points in two directions: on the one hand, it expresses the pervasive sense that, after 1989, the... [read more]
In Arthur C. Clarke’s Hugo Award-winning 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama, scientists discover an alien spacecraft careening towards our solar system, just beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Upon entering the ship, however, they find it abandoned by its presumed masters and the astronauts are left to glean what information they can about the absentee extraterrestrials from the way they have designed their tools. Slowly, patiently, the human explorers construct an image of the alien others by... [read more]
Monique Roelofs, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic
reviewed by Chris Law
The premise of Monique Roelofs’ The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic is that notions of the promise, bound up with ideas of relationality and address, are central to the functioning and failures of the aesthetic. Roelofs proposes that ‘the aesthetic’ is enjoying a renaissance, following a period of disdain and critique. Contemporary invocations of ‘the aesthetic’, Roelofs tells us, span ‘academic disciplines, bodily regimes, commemorative projects, archival collections, methods of... [read more]
If we are to believe the McKinsey Institute, ‘the growth of cities in emerging markets is driving the most significant economic transformation in history.’ A growing ‘consuming class’, especially to be found in the cities of China and India, are the drivers of future economic growth. Over the course of the next 15 years, cities in the USA alone will contribute fully 10% of global GDP growth, though that fact might be met with some disbelief by the people of Detroit in particular. 600... [read more]
Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf, The Death Penalty, Volume I
reviewed by Niall Gildea
The Death Penalty, Volume I is the third of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, or ‘teaching lectures’, to be translated into English, following Volumes I and II of The Beast and the Sovereign (the seminar series which directly followed Derrida’s Death Penalty seminar) in 2011 and 2012, respectively. In all cases, these translations have arrived very shortly after the publications of the French volumes. The present text records the first year of Derrida’s seminar on the Death Penalty at the... [read more]
Thomas Piketty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
reviewed by John P. Merrick
In May 1968, graffiti on the walls of Paris held the now famous declaration ‘BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE.’ Fast forward nearly 50 years and a new book has taken the English speaking world by storm (written by a ‘Balzac-loving French intellectual,’ as every major newspaper has yet to tire of declaiming), which seems to have taken the opposite route in offering what seem to be rather timid, liberal, and realistic proposals which, it constantly states, are in fact ‘utopian’... [read more]
Mark D. White, The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons from a World War II Superhero
reviewed by Jeffrey Petts
You can’t help but like a man who punched Hitler in the face. That was Captain America, right from the start (Volume 1, No.1, 1941). But two things made it easy for frail, young Steve Rogers to be transformed into the moral saint, ‘Cap’: Professor Reinstein had injected him with superhero serum, and the enemy was Nazism. As thought experiments in ethics go, it doesn’t reveal much, if anything, about human moral character and the problems of choosing the right thing to do. But the Cap... [read more]
Steven Fielding, A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It
reviewed by Alexis Forss
The third series of The Thick of It aired late in 2009, as Twitter neared its fourth birthday. Notice how, in the third episode, when Malcolm Tucker broaches the matter of another character’s ‘tweets ... on Twitter’ as the potential source of a leak, it sounds like he’s talking Estonian (earlier in the episode, Nicola Murray also needed to have the microblogging service explained to her). Nearly five years later Tucker’s bemusement threatens to date the show. At the time of writing... [read more]
Inequality kills.
With these two powerful words, Göran Therborn opens his latest contribution to the equality debate. What follows is an avalanche of statistics from all corners of the globe, detailing the ways in which millions of people’s lives are stunted, damaged and prematurely ended by the crushing effects of inequality.
To pluck a few from the huge number offered: life expectancy is 46 years longer in Japan than in Sierra Leone; a college-educated 50-year-old white man has 6... [read more]
