New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, John Luther Adams
The neoliberal jackboot stamping on a human face
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds an analysis of culture that explains why political conflicts today are focused more on values and identity than the economy and social questions
SHORT-LIVED AUTONOMY: Thousands of hippies gather on ‘Hippy Hill’ in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, April 2010
[Dan Schooling/SanctusAbMortis/CC]
Banksy’s identity may have been published – but was the investigation in the public interest, asks PETER BENGTSEN
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
SYLVIA HIKINS welcomes a survey of successful contemporary worker co-operatives and economy-based co-operative systems
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends the staging of this Wagnerian classic minus one or two insignificant quibbles
The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms
Olivier Roy, translated by Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous
Hurst, £20
IN 1992 when the New Right’s neoliberal revolution was still in full flood, the Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton wrote an essay in which, with great prescience, he foretold a crisis of contemporary culture.
Taking the English literary canon as an example, he argued that right-wing intellectuals were turning literary theory — and by extension the canons of high culture — into an arena of intensive political contestation.
Eagleton wrote: “It is no doubt for this reason that the infighting over something as apparently abstruse as literary theory has been so symptomatically virulent; for what we are really speaking of here is the death of civilisation as we know it.
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GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes, and recommends a a candid, evidence-based record of Britain’s role in the slaughter visited by Israel upon the Palestinians
ALAN McGUIRE welcomes a biography of the French semiologist and philosopher