A few books bought recently, mostly second-hand; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Cristina Chimisso, Hélène Metzger, Historian and Historiographer of the Sciences, Ingrid Medley, Arctic State Identity and Claire Blencowe, Spirits of Extraction, in recompense for review work; and Foucault’s Binswanger and Existential Analysis, sent by Columbia University Press.
Cyanne E. Loyle, Escaping Justice: Impunity for State Crimes in the Age of Accountability – Cambridge, October 2025 (print and open access)
Now more than ever the international community plays a central role in pressing governments to hold their own to account. Despite pressure to adhere to global human rights norms, governments continue to benefit from impunity for their past crimes. In an age of accountability, how do states continue to escape justice? This book presents a theory of strategic adaptation which explains the conditions under which governments adopt transitional justice without a genuine commitment to holding state forces to account. Cyanne E. Loyle develops this theory through in-depth fieldwork from Rwanda, Uganda, and Northern Ireland conducted over the last ten years. Research in each of these cases reveals a unique strategy of adaption: coercion, containment, and concession. Using evidence from these cases, Loyle traces the conditions under which a government pursues its chosen strategies and the resulting transitional justice outcomes. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Iftekhar Iqbal, The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia – Stanford University Press, December 2025
Spanning nearly 4 million square kilometers, the Tibetan river system—including the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Red, and Yangzi—forms the largest contiguous network of rivers on the planet, stretching across eastern South Asia, mainland Southeast Asia, and southern China. The Range of the River uncovers the entwined histories of these vast waterways and the empires, human actors, and other-than-human forces that have shaped Asia since the 1850s. Both ethnodiverse and biodiverse, these rivers were more than contested imperial spaces—they were also channels of communal and material exchange, linking near and distant contact zones. They fostered connections across Asia, driving commerce, mobility, and cultural encounters that transformed them into shared, living commons bridging societies, political powers, and economic interests.
Tracing six major rivers across eight countries, Iftekhar Iqbal argues that these river systems formed the core of a discursive space where empires, regional political forces, ethnic groups, boaters, peddlers, explorers, merchants, and mules encountered each other in layered meanings and movements. This groundbreaking book reimagines the river not as merely a tool of empire but as a dynamic force in itself, shaping a truly transregional Asia. By weaving together diverse riverine life-worlds, The Range of the River invites us to rethink Asia’s spatial history.
Sebastian Truskolaski, Adorno and the Ban on Images – Bloomsbury, December 2020
New Books discussion with Lukas Hoffman – thanks to dmf for the link
This book upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism.
Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno’s writings allow us to address what is arguably the central challenge of modern philosophy: how to picture a world beyond suffering and injustice without, at the same time, betraying its vital impulse. By re-appraising Adorno’s writings on politics, philosophy, and art, this book reconstructs this notoriously difficult author’s overall project from a radically new perspective (Adorno’s famous ‘standpoint of redemption’), and brings his central concerns to bear on the problems of today.
On the one hand, this means reading Adorno alongside his principal interlocutors (including Kant, Marx and Benjamin). On the other hand, it means asking how his secular brand of social criticism can serve to safeguard the image of a better world – above all, when the invocation of this image occurs alongside Adorno’s recurrent reference to the Old Testament ban on making images of God.
By reading Adorno in this iconoclastic way, Adorno and the Ban on Imagescontributes to current debates about Utopia that have come to define political visions across the political spectrum.
Joel Wainwright, The End: Marx, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis – Verso, November 2025
How Marx provides new insights into our environmental crisis when read alongside Darwin
In this pathbreaking study, Joel Wainwright shows how deeply Darwin influenced Capital. Marx’s thinking about history and nature changed, generating a distinctive ecological critique of capitalism as a social formation. Marx even called Capital a study of natural history.
Federico Marcon, Fascism: The History of a Word – University of Chicago Press, June 2025
I’ve shared news of the book before, now there is a two-part interview at the Journal of the History of Ideas blog (part I; part II) with Jonathon Catlin
A wide-ranging history of the term “fascism,” what it has meant, and what it means today.
The rise and popular support for authoritarianism around the world and within traditional democracies have spurred debates over the meaning of the term “fascist” and when and whether it is appropriate to use it. The landmark study Fascism: The History of a Word takes this debate further by tackling its most fundamental questions: How did the terms “fascism” and “fascist” come to be in the first place? How and in what circumstances have they been used? How can they be understood today? And what are the advantages (or disadvantages) of using “fascism” to make sense of interwar authoritarianism as well as contemporary politics?
Exploring the writings and deeds of political leaders, activists, artists, authors, and philosophers, Federico Marcon traces the history of the term’s use (and usefulness) in relation to Mussolini’s political regime, antifascist resistance, and the quest of postwar historians to develop a definition of a “fascist minimum.” This investigation of the semiotics of “fascism” also aims to inquire about people’s voluntary renunciation of the modern emancipatory ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity.
Elena Del Rio, Techno-Ecologies of Bill Viola and Gilbert Simondon: The Birth of Form – Edinburgh University Press, November 2025
Jointly explores Bill Viola’s video art and Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation through their shared understanding of the interpenetration of nature and technology
- Expands the study of Viola’s art beyond aesthetics and beyond representation
- Situates Viola’s aesthetic practice in relation to Simondon’s theory of individuation, and his philosophy of nature and technology
- Emphasises the dimension of Viola as technical innovator – the artist-technician
- Provides a thorough analysis of 18 major Viola works and discusses the cinematic significance of his art
- Makes Simondon’s philosophy accessible by reference to the specific analysis of Viola’s art
Both Viola and Simondon prioritise a techno-aesthetic experience that reveals a consistent pattern of interdependence between form and matter, nature and culture, human and nonhuman. Inspired by Simondon’s ideas on individuation as process, and by other major figures of process philosophy such as Raymond Ruyer, Deleuze and Guattari, and Brian Massumi, Elena del Río delves deep into Viola’s art and finds a politics of nature that is also a politics of the affects. In taking full account of the interrelation between collective affects and living milieus, this politics exceeds the still anthropocentric project of a politics reductively focused on environmental degradation.
The book works with a broad concept of ecology that encompasses a nature-culture continuum – from Simondon’s associated milieu to Guattari’s tripartite ecological praxis, from Deleuze and Guattari’s existential territories to Massumi’s affective events. Attending to this nature-culture continuum and activating our collective energies are prime strategies in tackling the overwhelming psycho-social and environmental crises we face.
Daniel Frost and Evan Smith eds., In solidarity, under suspicion: The British far left from 1956 – Manchester University Press, November 2025
In solidarity, under suspicion is the successor volume to Against the grain (2014) and Waiting for the revolution (2017), complementing analysis of the far left in Britain from 1956 until the present. In addition to new scholarship on hitherto under-researched groups and movements, the volume explores recent findings from the Undercover Policing Inquiry and provides historical context for developments in the British left during and after ‘Corbynism’. Chapters consider the far left’s relationship to the state as well as to the Labour Party, and highlights attempts by far-left groups and activists both to intervene internationally and to transform themselves. With a range of different perspectives – activist and academic – In solidarity, under suspicion draws out the distinct ways that different far left groups and movements have responded to problems which remain salient today.
Only an expensive hardback listed at the moment, unfortunately.
Renaud Lariagon and Simon Le Roulley eds. Henri Lefebvre: Actualités – Éditions Grevis, December 2025
Henri Lefebvre : actualités défend l’actualisation de la pensée de Lefebvre (1901-1991) à travers des contributions d’auteurs d’Amérique latine et d’Europe. Ce recueil met en lumière ses concepts clés — production de l’espace, droit à la ville, urbanisation, quotidienneté — et leur pertinence pour l’analyse des dynamiques urbaines et sociales contemporaines. En croisant des perspectives épistémologiques, sociologique, géographique et historique, l’ouvrage illustre la vitalité de son œuvre face à la prédation capitaliste et une urbanisation qui défie les limites planétaires, affirmant ainsi son influence toujours vivante tant pour les sciences humaines que pour les mouvements sociaux.
Thanks again to John Raimo for the link.
Marc Bloch, Carnets Inédits 1917-1943 – Éditions Amsterdam, October 2025
Le « laboratoire » de Marc Bloch enfin accessible au grand public.
Les deux carnets de Marc Bloch réunis dans cet ouvrage – « Quelques notes de lecture » et « Mea » – constituent une « anthologie personnelle » de notes et de citations. Si leur publication représente en soi un événement, ce sont bien plus que de simples documents historiques que l’on met ici à disposition du public. Ces carnets nous donnent en effet accès au laboratoire du savant, ainsi qu’à l’expérience morale, politique et civique de l’homme, jusqu’à présent inaccessible aux regards indiscrets, car la prose scientifique du grand historien ne concédait rien, ou presque, à la confession, à l’autobiographie, au détail intime. Ils nous font voir un Bloch lecteur passionné, curieux de tout, aux prises avec les débats et les tourments de son époque.
En marge de de cette édition, Massimo Mastrogregori, spécialiste mondialement reconnu de l’œuvre de Bloch, replace les carnets dans leur contexte, analyse l’évolution des Annales et la trajectoire de l’historien tout en mettant en évidence l’actualité de son expérience politique et de la question qui n’a cessé de le hanter: celle des usages publics de l’histoire.
