Philosophy and critical theory 

At first blush, what all this tends to suggest, at the very least, is that trends in the humanities are underdetermined by the rational adequacy of the theories at the centre of them. But to say – as I did above – that intellectual fashion reflects ‘cool’ obliges us to specify a little more what that might mean. What exactly is ‘intellectual cool’?

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.

Much of what I read in the field of criticism these days is not purely literary criticism… but essays which are also fictions, perhaps referring to literary works in passing, in order to reference, interrogate and explore culture: its fashions, its trends, its past and future.