Tag: Politics
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Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature by Kojin Karatani is a work of such immense theoretical rigor and historical complexity that to engage with it is to confront not merely the history of modern Japanese literature, but the very processes by which modernity itself, both in the East and West, has been constituted. This volume occupies…
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Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History
To describe Frederick M. Barnard’s Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History is to chart a work that treats Johann Gottfried Herder not merely as a source of quotable slogans about Volk, language, and culture, but as an architect of a supple vision in which the formative powers of a people’s speech, memory, and art are…
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Žižek’s Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future
Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future is Žižek at his most distilled and unflinching: a diagnosis of the present whose wager is that we can only act if we renounce the narcotic hope that action will preserve the continuity of how we live now. From the opening pages he…
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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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Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social
Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social by Sevgi Doğan is a philosophically rigorous, politically charged, and historically grounded study that embarks on a systematic reconstruction of one of modernity’s most vexing and fundamental questions: the nature and role of the individual within the social totality. Rooted in the dialectical…
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Žižek’s Living in the End Times
In Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek plunges us into the vertiginous space where the collapse of global capitalism converges with the apocalypse of our collective imagination. From the first pages, Žižek insists that there can be no more illusions: the “four riders of the apocalypse”—the ecological meltdown, the internal imbalances of the market…
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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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Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and the Hope for Its Future
In Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and the Hope for Its Future, Ami Ayalon’s deeply personal reflections combine with the political realities, strategic conundrums, and psychological evolutions that have shaped both his own life and the state he has served so profoundly. The book’s pages carry the weight of his vast…
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Welt und Zeit—From Zizians to Zizekians, 22:39—5. March 2025
From the earliest rumblings of philosophical rumination on the nature of being, there has always dwelled a fascination with the exchanges between ruptures in social order and the structures of thought that attempt to subdue or master them. Yet in an era where so many convictions claim to grasp the meaning of world and time,…
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Welt und Zeit—With Us, Capitalism is Genocide, 21:44—5. March 2025
World and time, as an unfolding of existential and historical questioning, compels us to confront the fundamental structures of being-in-the-world. Yet the gravity of our historical moment demands that we focus our reflections upon capitalism as a manifestation of an ever-unfolding logic of annihilation. This annihilation, hidden beneath the veneer of progress and technological advancement,…
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Welt und Zeit—The Micropolitics of Borders, 18:07—27. February 2025
In the aftermath of our collective reflections, it becomes necessary to redirect our gaze toward an investigation of those subtle thresholds that so often remain invisible yet determine the structure of political existence. In this, the analysis delves into what Michel Foucault famously labeled the micropolitics of power, but here specifically applied to borders, their…
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Eraserhead, The David Lynch Files: Volume 1: The Full Story of One of the Strangest Films Ever Made.
A mesmerizing portrait of artistic perseverance and cinematic innovation, Eraserhead, The David Lynch Files: Volume 1 by Kenneth George Godwin unfolds as a strikingly thorough account of one of cinema’s most confounding and compelling debuts. Written at a time when the film was still a fresh wound in the collective imagination, it combines rigorous journalistic…
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Welt und Zeit—The End of a War, 21:00—24. February 2025
In the wake of my previous contemplations and explorations in In the Wake of Thought, where the stirring question of thought’s perpetual unfolding demanded ever deeper considerations of human agency and temporal unfolding, it becomes necessary now to gather the threads of ontology, history, and politics in a new tapestry titled Welt und Zeit (World…
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Whispered Legacies: Unraveling Rumors, Subjectivity, and Political Enigma in Lacanian Thought
Mladen Dolar is often seen as a towering figure in contemporary psychoanalytic philosophy, whose intellectual trajectory merges Lacanian thought with critical reflections on politics and cultural dynamics. His journey, marked by formative years in Paris studying with Lacan, is deeply embedded in the historical and political ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s—a period…
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Welt und Zeit—Censorship, 18:01—12. Februar 2025
Censorship is the strategic suppression of expression, a force that operates in the intercourse of power and knowledge, visibility and invisibility, silence and speech. It is at once an act of negation—the erasure of words, ideas, and images from the public sphere—and an act of production, shaping what can be thought, said, and ultimately, what…
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The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism
In an era where chaos reigns and disasters unfold with alarming frequency, Naomi Klein’s seminal work, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, emerged as an unsettling exploration of how power is wielded amidst turmoil. Heralded by luminaries such as John le Carré, who described it as “impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary…
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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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Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918
Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871–1918 by Katja Hoyer offers an intensely detailed analysis of a pivotal epoch in European history, where the relentless currents of power, identity, and realpolitik converged to shape the German Empire from its inception in 1871 to its demise amidst the chaos of the…
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A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms
Giampaolo Conte’s A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms is an exhaustive exploration of the structural mechanisms that have historically underpinned and perpetuated the liberal-capitalist world order. The book scrutinizes the ideological and material frameworks that have defined capitalist expansion from the onset of the Industrial Revolution to the neoliberal reforms of…
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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…
Simon Gros 