In 2015, Purvi Patel became the first person in the US to be charged, convicted and sentenced for ‘feticide’ in relation to her own pregnancy. In 2013, she had been admitted to an emergency room in Indiana after turning up with heavy bleeding and a severed umbilical cord. She claimed to have suffered a miscarriage […]
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 […]
Harry Harootunian, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism, Columbia University Press, New York, 2015. xiv + 292 pp., £20.67 hb., 978 0 231 17480 0. The study of Marx in the anglophone academy – established during the boom years of sociological theory in the 1970s, when sociology was de facto […]
In her 1984 article ‘Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation’, Iris Marion Young contended that ‘pregnancy does not belong to the woman herself’ within patriarchal Western institutions of modern medicine. ‘It is a state of the developing fetus, for which the woman is a container; or it is an objective, observable process coming under scientific scrutiny; […]
REViEWS Beneath the soviets the beach McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Verso, London, 2015. xxii + 280 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78168 827 4. Geological time is long; the lifespan of critical terms is decidedly shorter. The sedimentary record of buzz words logs the granulated residue of terms that were snuffed […]
The persistence of patriarchy Operation Yewtree and the return to 1970s feminism Victoria browne On 30 May 2014 a conference was held in London to discuss the work and legacy of Kate Millett, an American feminist who rose to prominence following the publication of Sexual Politics in 1970, and her appearance on the cover of Time magazine […]
RE V IE WSA new quarrel of universals Étienne Balibar, Saeculum. Culture, religion, idéologie, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 2012. 118 pp., €22.00, 978 2 71860 874 7. The new millennium has not been kind to the partisans of a radical Enlightenment. The sundering of temporal and spiritual authority, the suspicion of piety, the virtues of profanation, […]
Reviews Conditions of the universityAndrew McGettigan, The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Education, Pluto Press, London, 2013. 232 pp., £54.00 hb., £15.00 pb., 978 0 74533 294 9 hb., 978 0 74533 293 2 pb. In an interview with Giovanna Borradori given after 9/11, Jacques Derrida said: ‘I am incapable of […]
Reviews The future is subhumanMalcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche, Verso, London & New York, 2011. 256 pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 85984 574 5. This is an intriguing book, and its principal thesis is highly provocative. My reaction to it is an ambivalent one: there are aspects of the book that are to be greatly welcomed, such […]