Category: Politics
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The Outside Within: Kant’s Unjust Enemy as an Institution of Peace Through Exclusion
Petar Bojanić’s lecture intervenes in a persistent fault-line of modern practical philosophy: the way juridical language, political theology, and strategic reasoning converge upon a figure—the “unjust enemy”—that promises to secure peace by authorizing destruction. Its distinctive scholarly contribution lies in a reconstruction that is simultaneously genealogical and diagnostic: it treats hostis iniustus less as a…
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‘America Against America’ by Wang Huning
In 1988, a young Chinese scholar undertook a research trip to the United States at a moment when the world was undergoing profound political and economic realignments. Over the course of six months, he traveled through 30 cities and visited 20 universities, observing not only institutions of learning and government, but the texture of everyday…
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The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism
The distinctive contribution of Andrew Arato and Paul Breines’s The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism lies in its rigorous reconstruction of a problem: how a singular, crisis-formed synthesis of German idealism and revolutionary Marxism emerged, condensed, and fractured in and around History and Class Consciousness, and how that synthesis founded an intellectual…
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The Dark Enlightenment
Nick Land’s The Dark Enlightenment enters the scene as a document of cold lucidity and nocturnal exactness, neither sermon nor simple polemic, but a protracted autopsy of the Enlightenment’s living corpus carried out under artificial light. What appears at first as a blog-born accumulation of interventions arranges itself—once read with patience and method—into a single,…
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Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
Slavoj Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce appears, on first approach, to be a slender intervention into the disorientation of the first post–Cold War decade, yet it insists on staging a wholesale rectification of how that decade should be named, remembered, and used. It is a book anchored in the shock of two emblematic…
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Žižek’s Heaven in Disorder | 天上大乱
Comrades of the interval—neither before nor after, but in the thickening middle—what follows keeps faith with a specifically 2021 mood: an in-between composition framed by emergency, written when vaccination queues braided with border queues, when lockdown routines folded into supply-chain algorithms, and when a pathogen taught political economy at scale. The temporal setting matters. Numbers,…
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The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right
In The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right, Paul Gottfried analyses the ideological evolution of the American conservative movement in the post-World War II era, examining an often unacknowledged debt to Hegelian philosophy within the conservative thought of key intellectual figures. Gottfried’s exploration seeks to uncover how thinkers like Will Herberg,…
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Slavoj Žižek: Rethinking the Left and Reclaiming Education in the Age of Trump
Slavoj Žižek, in his characteristically confrontational and dialectical manner, asserts that the political left has long been in a state of decline, tracing its terminal crisis to the aftermath of the events of 1968, which he provocatively labels a false liberation. Rather than achieving genuine emancipation, Žižek argues that the cultural and political upheavals of…
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Slavoj Žižek on Trump, the Collapse of the Left, and the Transformation of American Politics
Slavoj Žižek, in his analysis of the global political situation offers a sweeping and unflinchingly critical diagnosis of the contemporary geopolitical order, locating the rise of Donald Trump not as a deviation or historical anomaly but rather as a concentrated symptom of broader, long-developing systemic failures. According to Žižek, Trump’s emergence on the political stage…
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Žižek on Trump: The Rise of a Post-Normative Political Figure and the Crisis of Liberal Authority
Slavoj Žižek’s extended critique of Donald Trump, presented through a philosophical and psychoanalytic lens, transcends superficial political commentary and ventures into the structural and libidinal economies of contemporary liberalism. The argument Žižek builds does not merely rest upon the observation of Trump’s obscenity or populist tactics; rather, it positions Trump as the symptomatic revelation of…
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Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson
In the tumultuous landscape of neoliberal post-modernity, few intellectual figures have ignited as much fervent debate and polarized discourse as Jordan Peterson. Rising to prominence in the 2010s, Peterson’s meteoric ascent was fuelled by his contentious stance against what he terms “postmodern neo-Marxism,” alongside his forays into a diverse array of subjects ranging from lobster…
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Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990
Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990 is a monumental work of historical excavation, an incisive and deeply textured reconstruction of a state that vanished yet lingers in memory, myth, and the fault lines of German identity. This extraordinary book offers nothing less than the definitive account of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), navigating…
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‘For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor’ by Slavoj Žižek
For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor by Slavoj Žižek is a dazzling interrogation of ideology, enjoyment, and the political deadlocks of modernity. In this monumental work, Žižek builds upon a provocative premise: the combination of ignorance and enjoyment is not merely incidental to ideological discourse but is foundational to…
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‘Ukraine, Palestine, and Other Troubles’ by Slavoj Žižek
Ukraine, Palestine, and Other Troubles by Slavoj Žižek is a searing exploration of the apocalyptic tenor of our times, a work that takes as its subject the crises defining our global moment. Žižek, with his inimitable combination of philosophical rigor, psychoanalytic insight, and political audacity, offers nothing less than an intellectual intervention into the madness…
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Capitalism in the Age of Catastrophe: The Newest Developments of Financial Capital in Times of Polycrisis
Achim Szepanski’s Capitalism in the Age of Catastrophe: The Newest Developments of Financial Capital in Times of Polycrisis is a searing philosophical interrogation of the late-capitalist world system as it collides with an era of unprecedented crises. Rooted in an intricate synthesis of Marxist economic analysis and the radical critiques of Georges Bataille and Jean…
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Tariq Ali’s The Lenin Scenario
Within the pages of The Lenin Scenario, Tariq Ali ventures into historical imagination with extraordinary rigor, constructing a scenario as lucid in its detail as it is alive in its philosophical implications. What we encounter here is no mere screenplay, no ordinary chronology of events, but a painstakingly accurate dramatic blueprint for the cinematic interpretation…
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Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study
This book is an inquiry into the development between Lenin’s wartime philosophical notebooks on Hegel and the broader trajectory of Marxist thought, stretching from the crisis of the Second International through to debates in Western Marxism that reached well beyond Lenin’s own historical moment. In Kevin Anderson’s Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study,…
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The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World
In The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, Antony Loewenstein presents a searing, unflinching, and extraordinary portrait of a modern state’s well-honed machinery of violence and surveillance, grown and cultivated through decades of controlling and subjugating the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, and then refashioned, rebranded, and sold…
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I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv
I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv by Illia Ponomarenko is a sprawling, unflinchingly intimate immersion into a conflict that most would prefer to keep at arm’s length. It is the book that punctures the neat categories of “us and them,” “invader and invaded,” and “hero and villain,” forcing readers…
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Slavoj Žižek’s address to the Oxford Union
In his address at the Oxford Union, Slavoj Žižek explores the evolution of modern political dynamics, focusing on what he terms “soft fascism” and the alarming rise of shamelessness in public life. Žižek describes soft fascism as a political phenomenon where capitalist development is maintained by a strong state apparatus, legitimized by traditional or ideological…
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Sigmund Freud Lecture by Slavoj Žižek: Theology, Negativity, and the Death-Drive
In his Sigmund Freud Lecture delivered in Vienna, Slavoj Žižek engages with themes at the intersection of psychoanalysis, theology, and the death drive. Žižek deconstructs common misconceptions about psychoanalysis, critiques contemporary ideologies, and explores existential voids inherent in the human condition. Žižek begins by challenging the notion that psychoanalysis seeks coherent self-knowledge or alleviation of…
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Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism
Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism by Timothy Naftali is a presentation of the often tumultuous history of the United States’ efforts to combat terrorism from the aftermath of World War II up to the harrowing events of September 11, 2001. Naftali, a distinguished national security historian, goes deep into the clandestine world…
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Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It
Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It by Jon Clifton is an analysis of a critical yet overlooked phenomenon shaping the contemporary world: the escalating unhappiness among global citizens and the consequential blind spot that has afflicted world leaders. Clifton, the CEO of Gallup and a visionary dedicated to amplifying…
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Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle
Alan Shandro’s Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony is a work of great philosophical and historical significance, boldly reinterpreting Lenin’s contributions to Marxist thought through the lens of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. In this ambitious study, Shandro confronts the entrenched caricatures of Lenin as a mere political tactician or authoritarian figurehead, proposing instead a reading…
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Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence
In Yaroslav Trofimov’s chronicle, Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence, the veil of geopolitical abstraction is lifted to reveal the visceral human drama of Ukraine’s struggle for sovereignty in the face of Russia’s unrelenting aggression. Trofimov, the Ukrainian chief foreign-affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, offers a deeply…
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In Search of Wagner
Inside In Search of Wagner, Theodor Adorno undertakes an incisive exploration of Richard Wagner’s musical and ideological landscape, achieving a synthesis of musical critique and socio-political analysis that remains unparalleled in the field of Wagner studies. Written during Adorno’s exile in the late 1930s, this work dissects Wagner’s operatic corpus through the lens of Frankfurt…
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‘Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays’ by Louis Althusser
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays by Louis Althusser stands as a monumental contribution to Marxist theory and philosophy. Louis Althusser, a preeminent figure in Western Marxism post-World War II, combined a series of profound essays that have reshaped contemporary understanding of Marxist philosophy. A defector from his Catholic upbringing, Althusser’s intellectual journey led him…
Simon Gros 