DON DELILLO BEGINS a short story from 2002 with a woman in a New York museum staring at a painting of Ulrike Meinhof after her suicide. He writes, “She thought of Meinhof, she saw Meinhof as first name only, Ulrike.” Who is this “Ulrike” that the Left has known?
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Book Review: Sherry Wolf, Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation.
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IN A STRANGE WAY, the debate over whether the American left should support the Green Movement in Iran resembles the arguments that took place in progressive circles before the 2008 presidential elections in the United States, and that reemerged in the recent midterm elections. Those in the Obama camp either believed him to be their savior, taking his every word as gospel, or, if they had a more sober political outlook, simply resorted to some version of the tired “lesser of two evils” argument.
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ALAIN BADIOU'S RECENT BOOK (2010) is titled with the phrase promoted by his and Slavoj Žižek’s work for the last few years, “the communist hypothesis.” This is also the title of Badiou’s 2008 essay in New Left Review on the historical significance of the 2007 election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French Presidency
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IN WALTER BENJAMIN’S MAGNUM OPUS, The Arcades Project, capitalist modernity is in several instances depicted as a “hellish” existence. He describes this condition as history continuing to truck along in its course, but only doing so regressively. Hell, in short, is “transiency without progress.” Here, Benjamin is not voicing a Romantic sensibility; he does not bemoan modernity for having trampled over the once “harmonious” and organic way of life supposedly experienced in premodern times.
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