Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Haseeb Ahmed
FOR YEARS Theodor Adorno’s theoretical work has suffered from either neglect or semi-hostile “interpretation.” It is therefore refreshing to see Detlev Claussen, who studied under Adorno at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt from 1966 to 1971, take a more sympathetic approach to the study of Adorno’s philosophy [...]
All Posts Tagged With: "Reviews"
Book Review: Detlev Claussen. Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius.
Book Review: Randi Storch. Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928-35.
Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Ashley Weger
“It was not the economics of Communism, nor the great power of trade unions, nor the excitement of underground politics that claimed me; my attention was caught by the similarity of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred peoples into a whole.”
— Richard [...]
Book Review: Michael Rudolph West. The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Greg Gabrellas
IF THE COLOR LINE WAS THE PROBLEM of the American 20th century, then the 20th century did not manage to solve it. De jure segregation ended some forty years ago, and American social norms mostly bar the public expression of racist sentiment or stereotype. Yet by any measure—access to [...]
September 30th, 2009 | PR web editor | 0 comments | Continued
Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy
Chris Cutrone
KARL KORSCH’S SEMINAL ESSAY on “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923) is a historical treatment of the problem from Marx and Engels’s time through the 2nd International to the crisis of Marxism and the revolutions of 1917–19 in Russia, Germany and beyond. More specifically, Korsch took up the development and vicissitudes of the relation between theory and practice in the history of Marxism, which he considered the “philosophical” problem of Marxism. Korsch, like Georg Lukács and the thinkers in Frankfurt School critical theory, was inspired by the “subjective” aspect of Marxism exemplified by Lenin’s irreducible role in the October Revolution. Korsch was subsequently denounced as a “professor” in the Communist International and quit the movement, embracing council communism and shunning Marxian theory, writing an “Anti-Critique” in 1930 that critiqued Marxism as such, and by 1950 actively seeking to liquidate the difference between Marxian and anarchist approaches. In so doing, Korsch succumbed to what Adorno termed “identity thinking.” By assuming the identity of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness in the workers’ movement, Korsch abandoned his prior discernment and critical grasp of their persistent antagonism in any purported politics of emancipation.
September 3rd, 2009 | admin | 5 comments | Continued
Film Review: Che
Ryan Hardy
THE STORY ITSELF IS WELL KNOWN: Originally trained as a physician, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was an Argentine revolutionary who played a significant part in the Cuban Revolution. Later, Che tried to help incite revolution in the modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Bolivia, where he was eventually killed in 1967. In [...]
July 6th, 2009 | Platypus Review editor | 1 comment | Continued
Book Review: Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.
Soren Whited
SUSAN BUCK-MORSS‘S RECENT OFFERING, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, takes critical aim at two targets: what she identifies as Eurocentric models of universal history, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rejection of any notion of universality whatsoever in favor of the postmodernist “plurality of alternative models” (ix). [...]
July 1st, 2009 | Platypus Review editor | 0 comments | Continued
Film review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex
Sunit Singh
DER BAADER-MEINHOF KOMPLEX (2008) dramatizes the violence that the Leftist group the Rote Armee Fraktion (“Red Army Faction” [RAF] aka the Baader-Meinhof) wreaked across West German cities in the 1970s. The film documents, or, rather, reenacts their streak of violence that started with petty vandalism against storefronts in Frankfurt but that soon escalated into more serious acts.
Going it Alone: Christopher Hitchens and the death of the Left
Book Review: Cottee, Simon and Thomas Cushman (eds.). Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Spencer A. Leonard
If History did not, as the conservative critic Francis Fukuyama pronounced, come to end in 1989, this is because, in the sense of being the self-realization of freedom, History [...]
Nothing Left to say: a critique of the Guardian’s coverage of the 2008 Mumbai attacks
Spencer A. Leonard
[This article has been reprinted in Mainstream Weekly]
Deep historical precedents
However sincere its backers or belligerent its enemies, the “War on Terror” is not and cannot become anti-Islamist. This is not because, as some think, there is no Islamist or Taliban-style fascism on the receiving end of America’s War on Terror. Far from it. [...]
History’s forgotten dreams and nightmares: Jeff Koons at Versailles
Laurie Rojas
Let’s begin with Peter Schjeldahl in the June issue of the New Yorker: “There is something nightmarish about Jeff Koons.”
In a recent exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA), Jeff Koons received a well-attended mid-career survey of his work. Surrounded by two-story high white walls, the twenty-eight years of Koons’s art [...]
