My Google news feed is often set as to prioritise news stories that emerge from the socialist wasteland that is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea as we refer to it in the West. The slow trickle of internal news and rumour, that comes sourced via China and South Korea's gossip bloggers, and from more serious academics, can last for months at a time and provoke bursts of laughter at the absurdity of some of the content (a recent example, the discovery of a unicorn... [read more]
Andrew Benjamin, Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy
reviewed by Joel White
Already in 2000, with the second publication of the co-edited Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, Peter Osborne wittingly remarks that ‘Benjamin’s prose breeds commentary like vaccine in a lab.’ Despite the incessant and industrial abundance of this commentary, the pile of books still grows. The ‘Benjamin Industry’, as it has aptly been called, shows no sign of halting. The only difference at present is that the commentary of yesterday is now the blotting paper... [read more]
The American scholar, Barbara Johnson, once said of the philosopher Jacques Derrida that his writing traces the movement of desire without reaching its fulfilment. In contrast, Slavoj Zizek’s notoriously joke-laden prose fails to even hint at the possibility of seduction, and generally prefers instead to prance out of the dark like a molesting arm, punch you in the genitals and scuttle away. Zizek’s Jokes is overly brimming with examples of these peculiar verbal grope attacks (‘nicely... [read more]
Andrés Neuman, trans. Lorenzo Garcia & Nick Caistor, Talking to Ourselves
reviewed by Matt Lewis
One critique often made of postmodern fiction is that it lacks heart. As if by appealing to the brain and intellect of the reader, the visceral emotions are somehow overlooked; it is one academic making another academic smile wryly over a demitasse of espresso. However flawed or short-sighted that logic may be, the power to move people is, at least in the reviews one finds in the pages of the NYRB, TLS and LRB, an oft-overlooked skill in fiction writing. Well, literary-fiction writing anyway.... [read more]
Jen Hadfield's latest collection, Byssus, takes its name from a mussel's 'beard', the fibres that anchor it to the seabed. As with her previous collections, much of Byssus is principally concerned with Shetland's landscape, although 'nature poetry' is too neat a term to describe it. Gorgeously realised and replete with original, peculiar images, Hadfield creates poems that hint at a kind of Wordsworthian sublime, yet without lapsing into romanticism, and meditations on home that are resolutely... [read more]
‘I was recently denied a writing prize because, they said, I was lazy. What they meant by lazy was that I used too many contractions: for instance I would not write out in full the words cannot or will not, but instead contracted them to can’t and won’t.’
So goes Lydia Davis’ two-sentence story ‘Can’t and Won’t’, from which her latest collection takes its title. On the first read, the piece seems uncomfortably self-effacing. But as soon as the words have sunk in they start... [read more]
Brian Unwin, A Tale in Two Cities: Fanny Burney and Adèle, Comtesse de Boigne
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The novelist Fanny Burney was the second daughter of the musicologist Charles Burney. Born in 1752, she had a typical Georgian upbringing, with virtually nothing in the way of an education, muddling her way through in later life to an appetite for literature and the ambition to write. Her father’s connections to the metropolitan theatre world of Drury Lane, where he moved the family after inauspicious beginnings in King’s Lynn, introduced her to the cultural luminaries of Hanoverian London... [read more]
Jenny Doussan, Time, Language, and Visuality in Agamben’s Philosophy
reviewed by Alex Fletcher
To borrow Foucault’s quip that this century would become known as ‘Deleuzian’, one could argue that the last few years – or decade, perhaps – would in fact be better titled Agambanien. Both celebrated and reviled, Giorgio Agamben’s prominence in contemporary philosophy and political theory cannot be denied. Although often (uncritically) cited in fields such as aesthetics, art theory/history, and visual culture, there is little sustained critical engagement with the philosopher’s... [read more]
Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran & Frederic J. Schwartz (eds.), ReNew Marxist Art History
reviewed by Tom Hastings
ReNew Marxist Art History comprises a collection of new essays by scholars at work in the expanded field of Art History. Its title presents the reader with a body of writing and a choice. Either one traces a specific way of thinking about art’s relation to history and criticism from its base in Marx, through the development of a ‘School’ during the Interwar period, to its fragmentation under the energetic promise of the New Left and total subsumption under explosive currents of strong... [read more]
Jonathan Cott, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview
reviewed by Marika Lysandrou
Against being ‘ghettoized’ as a female writer; against demagogic interpretations; against ‘digging’ behind works of art to find their true meaning; against viewing the act of taking a photograph as innocent of its didactic purpose – Susan Sontag certainly expressed formidable ideas in her various critical works. The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, which is a transcription of over three hours’ of conversation between Jonathan Cott, editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and Susan... [read more]
