Jeff Mitscherling, The Image of a Second Sun: Plato on Poetry, Rhetoric, and the Technē of Mimēsis. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2009; 468 pages. ISBN: 978-1591024316.
Review by Aaron Landry, York University. Forthcoming in Symposium.
This book engages one of the perennial topics of Platonic scholarship—the presence (or absence) of poetry in the ideal city as constructed in the Republic … Read More …
Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; xxiv + 159 pages. ISBN: 978-0230237629.
Review by Nikolay Karkov, Lebanon Valley College, PA. Forthcoming in Symposium.
The last decade or so has seen an efflorescence of anti-capitalist critiques. After the relative lull of the 1990s, provoked by the collapse of real socialism and … Read More …
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010; xxi + 803 pages. ISBN 978-0307265562.
Review by Emily Anne Parker, Santa Clara University and Kristin Rodier, University of Alberta. Forthcoming in Symposium.
A new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark feminist philosophical work of 1949, Le deuxième sexe, appeared … Read More …
Simon Morgan Wortham, The Derrida Dictionary. London: Continuum, 2010; 264 pages. ISBN: 978-1847065261.
Review by Steven Sych, McGill University. Forthcoming in Symposium.
There is, as Simon Wortham points out in his introduction to The Derrida Dictionary, a danger inherent in his project. The dictionary form is, after all, an attempt to present language in a systematic manner by … Read More …
François Raffoul, The Origins of Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010; 341 pages. ISBN: 978-0253221735.
Review by Yasemin Sari, University of Alberta. Forthcoming in Symposium.
Raffoul’s work is the culmination of a kind of questioning that poses as philosophy’s task the task of rethinking the ethicality of ethics itself. Formulated in this way, the work falls far from the … Read More …
Miguel Abensour, Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment. Trans. Max Blechman and Martin Breaugh. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011; 149 pages. ISBN: 978-0745650104.
Review by Devin Zane Shaw, University of Ottawa. Forthcoming in Symposium.
It is taken for granted today that calling a political practice utopian is synonymous with saying that it is impossible. Miguel Abensour … Read More …
Marc Crépon and Bernard Stiegler, De la démocratie participative: Fondements et limites. Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2007; 118 pages. ISBN: 978-2755500332.
Review by Travis Holloway, SUNY Stony Brook/NYU. Forthcoming in Symposium.
This year’s presidential elections in France, Russia, the United States, Yemen and elsewhere will happen at a time when protests in these countries and around the … Read More …
Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009; 420 pages. ISBN: 978-0253220639.
Review by Anna Carastathis, California State University, Los Angeles.
For those familiar with McWhorter’s work, the publication of Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America was long awaited.1 I had encountered an early form of the argument McWhorter rehearses in this book … Read More …