Monthly Archives: August 2023

Andy Merrifield, John Berger and Gramsci in Rome I’m sitting at the bar of Blackmarket Hall in Rome, a trendy food and drink hang out not far from my new home in Monti. It’s Friday night and the joint is … Continue reading →

Trenton Holliday, Cro-Magnon: The Story of the Last Ice Age People of Europe – Columbia University Press, July 2023 During the Last Ice Age, Europe was a cold, dry place teeming with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, bison, cave bears, cave … Continue reading →

Maria Stavrinaki, Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time, trans. Jane Marie Todd – Zone Books, May 2022 Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production … Continue reading →

Heinrich Meier, Nietzsche’s Legacy: Ecce Homo and The Antichrist, Two Books on Nature and Politics – University of Chicago Press, trans. Justin Gottschalk, March 2024 [update 15 October 2024: the book is reviewed by Joshua Fox at NDPR] A reappraisal … Continue reading →

Laleh Khalili, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring – Discourse 013, November 2023 The body of the seafarer is a fulcrum upon which global systems of power, longstanding maritime traditions, and gendered and racialised pressures all rest. In this vital new … Continue reading →

Jamie Peck, Variegated Economies – Oxford University Press, July 2023 The culmination of more than two decades of work on the spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, Variegated Economies tackles the question of how to approach, conceptualize, and analyze economies as … Continue reading →

Andrew Feenberg, The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis – Verso, February 2023 For several years after 1968, Herbert Marcuse was one of the most famous philosophers in the world. He became the … Continue reading →

Robert T. Tally Jr., For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism – Zer0 books, June 2022 For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists takes as its point of departure two profound … Continue reading →

Shellen Xiao Wu, Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China – Stanford University Press, September 2023 From the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources … Continue reading →

Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History – Stanford University Press, January 2024 In this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin’s entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning … Continue reading →