Symbolic glue

Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, eds., Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilising Against Equality (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 302pp., £85.00 hb., £27.95 pb., 978 1 78348 999 2 hb., 978 1 78660 000 4 pb. What fuels the success of authoritarian populism around the globe and how does the extreme right manage to hijack public […]

Anthropology beginning again

Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon and Peter Skafish, eds, Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 364pp., £95.00 hb., £31.95 pb., 978 1 78348 857 5 hb., 978 1 78348 858 2 pb. ‘Sometimes one feels like one has nothing “new” to say,’ writes Eduardo Vivieros de Castro in his contribution to Comparative […]

Against goody two-shoes feminism

Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 280pp., £74.95 hb., £24.95 pb., £24.95 eb., 978 0 23117 640 8 hb., 978 0 23117 641 5 pb., 978 0 23154 455 9 eb. A recurring theme within feminist philosophy has been the association of a feminine maternal principle […]

Fall of philosophicus erectus

Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, trans. Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 208pp., £58.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 978 0 80479 218 9 hb., 978 1 50360 040 9 pb. At first glance one has the impression that Adriana Cavarero’s fascinating critique of verticality in Inclinations is a genealogical investigation […]

Everybody out!

Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 304pp., £16.99 hb., £12.99 pb., 978 1 78478 188 0 hb., 978 1 78478 681 6 pb. Yates McKee’s book is concerned with the power of the strike under contemporary conditions. What he understands by ‘strike’ incorporates, however, a […]

Between visible and undetectable violence

Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, Zone Books, New York, 2017. 368pp., £32.95 hb., 978 1 93540 886 4 Unequal access to visibility, along with the erasure of traces, determine the partial undetectability of various events of violence, crimes and human rights violations. Such thresholds of detectability consist, according to Eyal […]

Unusual alliances?

Victoria Browne and Daniel Whistler, eds., On the Feminist Philosophy of Gillian Howie: Materialism and Mortality (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 304pp.,, £85.00 hb., 978 1 47425 412 0 In conversations with students feeling overwhelmed by their studies, I sometimes use the phrase, ‘remember that studying is part of life, not the other way around.’ While this […]

The wrong couple

Gregor Moder, Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). 200pp., £110.00 hb., £37.50 pb., 978 0 81013 542 0 hb., 978 0 81013 541 3 pb. Gregor Moder’s work contributes to a recent trend in continental philosophy: the reconciliation of Spinoza and Hegel. For generations, the continental field has been […]