Philosophy and critical theory 

‘Fruitful misunderstandings’ strikes me as a good way to think about the blogosphere — and, actually, as a good way of describing what interesting criticism does, in so far as you never really ‘understand’ a work you’re responding to in any transparent, straightforward sense.

For me, the easiest way to demonstrate the uniqueness of the blog medium is to think about why the k-punk book instantly and overwhelmingly prompts that question of its migration across media, a question which would not even arise for an anthology of newspaper or journal articles.

This book puts Carby’s brilliant scholarship on display. Imperial Intimacies is highly readable, a memoir of her youth in the UK, as the daughter of a mixed-race couple – a Welsh mother and a Jamaican father – who married after World War II. The book not only contains meticulous archival research on the imperial relationship between the UK and its crown colony Jamaica. It is also a race-cognizant history of life in post–World War II Britain, reflecting on the historical spectrum of ideas about race and so much more.

There’s been a lot written already about the work of the late English writer, blogger and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who died in 2017. Last year, a substantial anthology of Mark’s blog writing — together with interviews, reviews, and an unfinished manuscript fragment — was published as k-punk (Repeater Books), which was also the name of his highly influential blog.

‘We all know this to some degree; certain thinkers are in and certain thinkers aren’t.’

I shall begin my exploration of this new book about one of modern poetry’s most emblematic figures by referring to…

Despite the title, The Age of the Poets is not a dedicated treatise on poetry or its history, but a collection of occasional essays on various aspects of the literary process from Badiou’s philosophical point of view.

Walter Benjamin was born on 15 July 1892, mere hours after the commemoration of Bastille Day. It is hard to avoid making something allegorical of this insignificant contingency, given that for the rest of his relatively brief life Benjamin would almost invariably arrive a little too soon or a little too late.

Albert Camus’ reputation, for good or bad, has been built upon cliché. This has resulted, for generations of readers, in a curious blindness when approaching his books. It seems simpler to repeat the cliché than to consent to what is actually spelled out on the page.

According to Rancière, modern democratic politics and modern non-classical arts are two manifestations of the same new, revolutionary social space. In this space, sensibility or sense perception (aisthesis in Greek: the origin of the word aesthetics) is shared and distributed across social divides, providing the impetus for both a new egalitarian politics and a new democratic regime of artistic appreciation and practice, which Rancière has called the aesthetic regime of art.