Richard Bernstein, Violence: Thinking Without Banisters
reviewed by Matt Ellison
Hannah Arendt used the expression ‘thinking without banisters [denken ohne Geländer]’ to describe a way of thinking and judging without recourse to transcendental grounds. Writing in response to world wars and mass executions, Arendt believed that the standards handed down by tradition were no longer adequate to the demands placed upon thinking in the modern age. What was required was not the reproduction of tired philosophical categories, but a new way of thinking (which she distinguished... [read more]
Diane Frost & Peter North, Militant Liverpool: A City on the Edge
reviewed by David Renton
For supporters of today’s Socialist Party (previously ‘Militant Labour’, or just ‘Militant’) the Militant-led Labour council of 1983-1987 is one of the proudest moments in the whole history of the British working class. It was a ‘historic event’ on the scale of Chartism or the Paris Commune. It was one of just two occasions when Margaret Thatcher’s government suffered a setback: ‘No other section of the British working class, apart from the miners in 1981, humbled the... [read more]
Tom Burns, Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry
reviewed by Luke Brunning
Oncologists are rarely derided. Hospital wards are rarely shadowed by the taint of the discipline’s gamut of spurious interventions, mistakes, and oddities. Similarly, we seldom interrogate the motivations of orthopaedic surgeons. Nor do crowds gather on the streets to protest under the banners of the ‘anti-obstetrics’ movement.
Psychiatry, on the other hand, remains a source of fear, suspicion, and hostility – not to mention a source of colourful reformist advocates like the... [read more]
For a start, the title of Sam Lipsyte’s new short fiction collection, The Fun Parts, niggled me throughout a first reading. All fun? Surely not?
Like most of the male protagonists in these thirteen stories – and even when given ladybits and called Tovah, as in ‘The Climber Room’, they are men – Mr Lipsyte seems to have had a troubled history, especially publishing wise. One of his novels, he claims, was rejected 30 times. Now, though, he’s been lionised as the new Joseph Heller,... [read more]
In 2009 Tao Lin told Michael Silverblatt, ‘I want to do the purest form of a certain style.’ They were discussing his recently published novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, but the purity of style he described to Silverblatt has found full manifestation in Taipei, published this June. Taipei is Tao Lin’s third novel. After publishing two novels (Eeeee Eee Eeee and Richard Yates), a short story collection (Bed), two collections of poetry (you are a little bit happier than i am and... [read more]
Slavoj Žižek (ed.), The Idea of Communism 2: The New York Conference
reviewed by Luke Davies
Alain Badiou's contribution to this collection of papers (from a 2011 New York conference entitled, 'Communism: A New Beginning') straight away deals with the difficult subject of communism's shady past. Writing on its relation with terror, he argues for the need of a new 'historical sequence' in which 'the absolute necessity for the communist Idea in opposition to the unbounded barbarism of capitalism' can be realised alongside an acceptance of 'the undeniably terroristic nature of the... [read more]
Marie Calloway, What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life
reviewed by Alexis Forss
What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life, the debut work of blogger Marie Calloway, is a work that is formally distinguished and thematically urgent in ways that both belie and betoken the author’s 21 years, but that’s not what’s really at stake here. Indeed, reviewing this book has made me guilty of a number of things, among them two minor infractions of Anthony Lane’s maxims for critics:
1) never read the publicity material, and
2) whenever possible, pass sentence on the day after... [read more]
Towards the end of the 1984 mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, the band look back on their career. Although the American tour they’ve just finished has been an unmitigated disaster — they’ve lost their lead guitarist, been overshadowed by miniature scenery and played support to a puppet act — guitarist David St Hubbins and bassist Derek Smalls are in good spirits.
‘We’re lucky you know,’ says Smalls, ‘people should be envying us.’
‘I envy us,’ muses St.... [read more]
Finn Brunton, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet
reviewed by Robert Barry
Two weeks ago, I received an email from a Mr Zaheya E. Attar, Secretary to the Internal Auditor of the General National Bank of Dubai, containing the promise of ‘a very confidential and profitable business proposal.’ It would seem that a consultant for Chevron, Mr. Richard Burson, having deposited $10million in Attar's branch, had had the misfortune to perish in a plane crash in 1999. ‘The most astonishing of my discovery,’ Mr Attar informed me, employing a grammar unique to the... [read more]
It is a rare event that a 254-page book on narrative morphology hits high street bookshops as part of a ‘double-release’. But then, Franco Moretti has always worked hard to bypass the closed-circuit hubris of academic publishing. This is the same author, of course, who with the charismatic flair of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra has periodically descended from his world-famous tenure at Stanford University’s ‘Literary Lab’ to proclaim certain millenarian truths: the advent of a digital... [read more]
