Fear death by drowning – an extreme unction – an atheistic, watery reminder of one’s life, no oily, priestly redemption at the end, all one’s life, every sordid detail revealed, purposeless, without reason. If the whirlpool miraculously pops me back up for air, should I share my life review? And why? And how?
As soon as she’s born, Eimear McBride’s ‘half-formed girl’ knows dying – her brother, three years older than her, has a brain tumour. Attention is on him, and on her... [read more]
Angelos Koutsourakis, Politics as Form in Lars von Trier: A Post-Brechtian Reading
reviewed by Andrew Marzoni
‘What can I say? I understand Hitler,’ said Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, at a press conference during the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where his film Melancholia was screened for competition. As he stutters on, describing how he can ‘see Hitler in his bunker’ despite his having done ‘some wrong things,’ identifying himself as a Nazi while insisting that he is ‘not against Jews,’ Melancholia’s star, Kirsten Dunst, shifts uncomfortably in her chair, rolling her eyes, laughing... [read more]
In ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (1958), a short essay which was to become tremendously influential in the development of cultural studies, Raymond Williams wrote:
There is a distinct working-class way of life, which I for one value - not only because I was bred in it, for I now, in certain respects, live differently. I think this way of life, with its emphases of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as expressed in the great working-class political and industrial... [read more]
Vic Gatrell, The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age
reviewed by Nell Stevens
In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), Michel de Certeau ruminates on the significance of footsteps. Gazing down at 1970s Manhattan from the World Trade Center, de Certeau sees how ‘their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces,’ and ‘weave places together.’ It’s an image that returned to my mind as I read Vic Gatrell’s The First Bohemians, an account of 18th-century Covent Garden, where artists, thieves and prostitutes intermingled, created, drank and died. Gatrell’s... [read more]
Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class: And Other Writings
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Ben Davis is a New York art critic who has written for Village Voice and Slate, and is currently executive editor of artinfo.com. His most striking contribution to the debate about the role of the visual arts in the age of neoliberalism has been a pamphlet of 2010 that forms the title piece of this debut publication. Written in tabular form, like Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it sets out a series of back-to-basics propositions about the social role of art and artists from a... [read more]
David Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame
reviewed by Calum Watt
Last November saw the coalition government privatise almost £900 million of student debt. The debt comprised loans taken out during the 1990s, and so represents only a small portion of the total value of student loans. This total is estimated at £40 billion, all of which the government has indicated it plans to sell off. If you think this is just another innocuous step in the government’s project of ‘reducing the deficit’, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame may be... [read more]
In Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy Andrew Bowie attempts several, equally ambitious things. Firstly, a synoptic reading of the state of contemporary philosophy details the ways in which the idealist traditions Theodor Adorno spent his writing life attacking have suffered a radical narrowing of perspective in recent decades. Bowie’s central claim is that aspects of Adorno’s work deemed too difficult or exaggerated to implement practically in philosophical debates, might be reclaimed to... [read more]
Graham Harman, Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism
reviewed by Sarah De Sanctis
The title chosen by Graham Harman for his latest book couldn't have been more appropriate. It is a collection of 16 essays, blog pieces, interviews and lectures that constitute (I quote from the Oxford English Dictionary) 'attractive additional features' to his theory. What you get, in short, is precisely more speculative realism, so if you're new to the subject this is probably not the right place to start. The title also refers to the different kinds of writings included in the book: bells... [read more]
Look around you and, according to Jane Forsey, you’ll see three different sorts of made things: art, craft, and design. Forsey’s contention in The Aesthetics of Design is that ‘design’ – as a class of things in the world – does not get the philosophic attention it warrants and her goal is to make design visible to philosophy through understanding our aesthetic interest in it. So, for example, she sees an original painting, a gift from the artist; a hand-made desk by a craftsman; and... [read more]
Josh Cohen, The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark
reviewed by Helen Tyson
‘Privacy is for paedos,’ announced the former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan in November 2011. Giving evidence before the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press, McMullan captured what seemed to be the driving force behind tabloid and celebrity culture. ‘Fundamentally,’ he insisted, ‘no one else needs it. Privacy is evil … it brings out hypocrisy.’ The private life, according to McMullan, is a dark shelter for the worst imaginable criminal... [read more]
