Tuesday, Feb 7th 2012
Book Review: Britain’s Empire, Richard Gott (Verso 2011)
Hegel’s metaphor about the awareness that comes only after the event – ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk’ - might encourage the thought that finally we are able to look back at the British empire and draw some [...]
Book Review: Embassytown, China Miéville (Pan MacMillan) and Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, Alain Badiou (Verso)
Words are a funny old kettle of fish and good sci fi has always been alert to this. In Heinlein’s novel The Whipping Star, what engages the reader’s attention throughout is the difficulty the central character has in communicating with Fannie [...]
Book Review: New Finnish Grammar, Diego Marani (Dedalus Books)
A man is found battered and close to death on the quayside in Trieste during World War II. His identity is unknown and the man himself has completely lost his memory. Who he is and why he was so violently attacked remains unknown. Is he Sampo Karjalainen, [...]
Book Review: Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge & London: MIT Press. 2003
Žižek & Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ. Cambridge & London : MIT Press. 2009
Leibnitz famously posed the fundamental ontological question when he said we have a right to ask why there is something rather than nothing [...]
Book Review: What Ever Happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici (Yale University Press 2010)
When a dreadful book like Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question can win a major literary award against a novel like Tom McCarthy’s C, this is a question well worth posing and not just in relation to 2010’s Booker prize winner. Think of some [...]
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, edited by Slavoj Žižek (Verso)
Hitchcock, piece by piece, by Laurent Bouzereau (Abrams)
Alfred Hitchcock Masters of the Cinema, by Krohn (Phaidon)
Hitchcock 14-Disc Box Set (Universal Pcitures)
Like a biro that leaks into a valued item of dress, some things [...]
Book Review:Yeats and Violence: Michael Wood (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Violence moves restlessly through Yeats’ poetry. It is there in ‘The Magi‘ (written in 1913) with its Three Kings who ‘Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied’ wait for something more, another disturbance of the world order, a revelation of sorts, intimating an appetite for violence.
The violence in [...]
The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou (Verso 2010)
Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, edited by A.J. Bartlett & Justin Clemens (Acumen Publishing, 2010)
Badiou’s Being and Event, Christopher Norris (Continuum 2009)
Alain Badiou could be the most important philosopher alive today - time will tell - and his work is gradually reaching English-speaking readers. His magnum opus, Being [...]
Book Review: Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2010)
Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in [...]
