Knox Peden
Knox Peden is Senior Lecturer in Continental Philosophy at Flinders University. He is the author of Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (2014) and, with Stephen Gaukroger, French Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2020).
All essays by Knox Peden
Philosophy in Troublous Times
I started composing this review during the peak of the bushfires in January. I returned to complete it as the coronavirus pandemic settled into its critical phase. The globalising, unifying elements of such crises are palpable, and resonate with Hägglund’s focus on fragility as an ineliminable element of political effort, just as it is for life as such. And yet his universal philosophy betrays a startling parochialism in the way it apportions which routes of anti-capitalism are viable and which aren’t.
Mushburgers: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
‘The wonder of Barbarian Days is to provide us with a literary experience that is not a stand in for other experiences, that is not an allegory of effort and victory and disappointment and loss that memoir culture has conditioned us to expect.’
The abstractions of history: Capital in the Twenty-First Century
The twin pillars of Piketty’s return to political economy are articulated as a pair of twin needs: the need for big data and for the long view. Zeitgeist or conjuncture, take your pick: Capital in the Twenty-First Century is central to it. But it is, of course, not alone. The 2008 financial crisis and the seemingly interminable effort to consign the period it inaugurated to the past has led to a new hearing for a variety of works not simply in political economy, but within an avowedly Marxist tradition.