Book Reviews
Critics suggest that G. W. Bush’s presidency may well be the most important fact misshaping the 21st century; the long-term consequences may endure for generations. His less than compassionate conservatism has seen massive retrenchments from already niggardly social programs, and his disregard of the environment accelerated global warming. His economic policies created the largest budget…
Read Full Article...Conservative commentators howled when, in 1998, Princeton University named Peter Singer DeCamp Professor in its Center for Human Values. This bioethicist takes nothing as sacred or tabooed-not the distinction of humans and animals or the sacredness of all forms of human life. He examines our assumptions about such matters and disturbs their unchallenged roots. Singer…
Read Full Article...“Who is middle class?” I ask. Ninety-five percent of all my students-undergraduate and graduate-inevitably raise their hands high in the air. “Who works?” They stay raised. “Who carries credit card or other kinds of dept?” Hands, unanimously, reach for the heavens. “Who has control over her/his work and her/his workplace?” Every arm goes limp, mirroring…
Read Full Article...Michael Walzer’s new book assembles eleven articles published over the last 25 years, the latest in November 2003. The philosophical stances he devised and defended in Just and Unjust Wars are applied to the first Gulf War, Kosovo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 9/11, the “war on terror” and the Iraq War. His consistency is, to say…
Read Full Article...If two books constitute a trend, then these two announce a shift toward a new political style on the American left: a style that is simultaneously lively and lonely, furious and vacuous. This style has precedents, but it is unique in the way it synthesizes existing themes, and it marks a break with the approaches…
Read Full Article...New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (after)life of Erica Garner is an urgent and cogent addition to the literature about protest and movement generally and Black mobilizing and resistance specifically. Joy James harnesses the tragic story of Erica Garner’s death from a broken heart – a heart that could not withstand the unequal…
Read Full Article...Few thinkers in the radical left have had a more sustained and creative engagement with the thought of Rosa Luxemburg than Michael Löwy. After encountering several of her works as a teenager in Brazil in the mid-1950s, he arrived in France in the early 1960s with the “conscious and deliberate objective”[1] of providing a “Luxemburgist”…
Read Full Article...Early in the volume of Fred Camper’s collected writings on the films of Stan Brakhage, an essay appears titled “Senses Working Overtime.” Published shortly after Brakhage’s death, Camper’s essay presents testimonials and anecdotes from students and filmmakers who knew him. As the flaws of Brakhage the human are shared alongside moments of awe, present-day readers…
Read Full Article...“The offshore accounts for the archipelagos of legal pluralism, extraterritoriality, and supposed exception forged by colonial powers and redefined in the context of contemporary capitalism to reproduce wealth. Even as these spaces appear as expectations, they are, in fact, intimately imbricated in and make possible their seemingly anti-theses: the ‘normal’ business of onshore capitalism and…
Read Full Article...Standing as one of the most powerful works of twentieth-century philosophy, Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time is a text that fundamentally shatters the metaphysical tradition since Plato by reposing the question of Being itself, a question that, Heidegger claims, has been forgotten by philosophy since the pre-Socratics. Moving from an interpretation of Dasein in its…
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Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 3
Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 3
Between The Issues
