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"The Ripe Fruit of Redemption"
Toni Negri Reviews Giorgio Agamben's The State of Exception
Giorgio Agamben's latest book is dedicated to the State of Exception,
the condition that now invests each power structure and radically
empties any experience and definition of democracy. Despite being a habitual reader of Giorgio Agamben, so far I have only
reviewed one of his books, entitled Language and Death and
published in 1982 [1].
Language and Death was a proper introduction to philosophy and
proposed the method of analysis that was to mark his future work: to
critically build, digging at the margins the existential and the
linguistic, a road of redemption on the terrain of being: a fully
immanent redemption that never forgets the mortal condition.
Anonymous Kumquat submits:
Luther Blissett's Novel Q,
William Heinemann, 2003
Reviewed by McKenzie Wark
Q is a terrific read, an epic from "the bowels
of history."(517) The story follows two main
characters. One wants to overthrow the
social order. The other is a spy in the service
of the forces who want to maintain it.
Q is the spy, in the pay of Father Carafa, an
ultra conservative figure, rapidly rising up
the hierarchy of the Catholic church. The
other main character is a radical protestant,
who sets himself against both the corrupt
power of the Catholic church, and also
against Luther's Protestant reformation. For
the more radical protestants, Luther is a
political tool in the hands of a rising
mercantile class, not a friend of the peasants
and artisans. His is just a new kind of
authority, which is "putting a priest in our
souls" (353)
Anonymous Comrade submits:
Empire After Iraq"
James Heartfield
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's book Empire (Harvard, 2000)
summarised the state of the capitalism for a burgeoning
'anti-capitalist' protest movement. The veteran Italian Marxist and his
American academic acolyte drew on the ideas of the '1968' generation of
radicals to characterise a new global capitalism. Central to their
thesis was the argument that the commercial and military rivalries that
characterised the old capitalism had been superseded. Though one
military power had indeed prevailed at the end of the Cold War, the
United States was obliged to act in the universal interests of the world
capitalist class, rather than its own. Hardt and Negri characterised
this trans-global capitalist domination Empire, which they insisted took
priority over any one imperialist interest.
jim submits "How De Body? One Man's Terrifying Journey Through an African War" by Teun Voeten, St. Martins Press, 2002
Reviewed by Bill Weinberg
Belgium-based Dutch photojournalist Teun Voeten was already a veteran of the bloodbaths in Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Nicaragua when he arrived in the West African nation of Sierra Leone in February 1998. A particularly brutal guerilla army, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), had been terrorizing Sierra Leone since 1991, and Voeten was there to photograph demobilized child soldiers who had been abducted and forced to fight for the rebels. At first, he is almost cynical about the whole ghastly affair, as if jaded to the point of complacency--the cliche of the hard-bitten war journalist.
Anonymous Comrade submits: "Can Radicals Be Liberals, Too?"
G. William Domhoff
Reviewing Letters to a Young Activist
Todd Gitlin
Can young radicals-fired by great zeal, but often short on patience-be
convinced to channel their prodigious organizing energies into activities
that might build larger constituencies and have a greater long-term impact?
Can young activists ever learn from the experience of aging radicals with
fabled pasts?
jim submits:
Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of
Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xvi + 408 pp. Maps, photos,
endnotes, bibliography, index. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-300-07792-0; $18.95
(paper), ISBN 0-300-08459-5.
Reviewed by Kenneth Slepyan, Transylvania University.
Published by H-Russia (June, 2003),
Icebreaker or Titanic? Stalin's Foreign Policy, 1939-1941
In the summer of 1995, while doing research in Moscow, I lived with an
elderly Russian intelligent couple. Aleksandr Mikhailovich, an aviation
engineer, was widely read in Russian literature and history, and seemed
quite interested in my own research on the Soviet Union in World War II. In
the midst of one of our many conversations, he surprised me with the
assertion that Stalin was, of course, responsible for the rise of Adolf
Hitler, and in addition, that Hitler attacked the Soviet Union to prevent a
Soviet offensive against Germany. When pressed for evidence he pointed to
Viktor Suvorov's book Ledokol' (Icebreaker), which claimed that Stalin was
planning on attacking Hitler but that the Nazi leader surprised him with a
pre-emptive strike.
jim submits ""Socratic Apology:
A Wonderful, Horrible Life of Hans-Georg Gadamer"
Richard Wolin, Bookforum
reviewing Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography by Jean Grondin, trasnlateed by Joel Weinsheimer, New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 480 pages.
The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer was a modern Methuselah. He was born on February 11, 1900, and died on March 13, 2002. During his lifetime he witnessed two world wars, Hitler's seizure of power, the collapse of communism, and the reunification of Germany. In one of his final interviews, published in the German daily Die Welt, he even commented on the events of 9/11. Although Gadamer officially retired from the University of Heidelberg in 1968, this proved to be the beginning of a momentous second career. Thereafter, he was a frequent lecturer at North American universities, bringing the tidings of "hermeneutics" — the art of textual interpretation — to a new generation of students who felt alienated from indigenous American intellectual traditions.
As it so happens, I was one of them. My encounter with Gadamer occurred at a rather forsaken outpost of higher learning in Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster University. Gadamer, then age seventy-six, still had a long and productive life ahead of him. At McMaster, he taught a weekly graduate seminar on a relatively minor Platonic dialogue, the Philebus, which we read aloud line by line. Little did I know it at the time, but in the class Gadamer had reprised the theme of his Habilitation, which he had completed nearly fifty years earlier under the supervision of University of Marburg classicist Paul Friedländer.
"The Empire Strikes Back"
Anatol Lieven
A few years in Washington, DC, snake-oil capital of the universe, and you begin to think that anything can be packaged as something else. Well, almost anything. Until I read Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I would never have believed that a postmodernist paean to Italian anarcho-syndicalism could be presented by its publishers as a defense of "the idealism of the Founders and Abraham Lincoln," and of the universal validity of the US Constitution.
nolympics submits:
"Back to the Motherland: Cuba in Africa"
Christian Parenti. Published by Monthly Review.
reviewiing Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 576 pages, cloth $34.95, paper $24.95
Angola is by most accounts a decimated, nearly hopeless land, ruined by more than three decades of war. But there was a moment in the mid-seventies when this former Portuguese colony shone as a beacon of hope for all Africa. It was here that the mythic power of white military supremacy was smashed by black troops from Angola and Cuba. And though the role of Cuban volunteers in this victory inspired Africans and left internationals everywhere, the details of the story have remained largely hidden and even in Cuba, uncelebrated.
Historian Piero Gleijeses’ new book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976, recovers this politically far away time. It is a truly impressive accomplishment, based on ten years of research using declassified U.S. intelligence, interviews with principal players, and most importantly, vaults of never before revealed Cuban documents from the Communist Party Central Committee, armed forces, and foreign ministry. This highly detailed but superbly told story recounts Cuba’s many bold, often noble, sometimes successful interventions in Africa. The operations ranged from briefly aiding revolutionary Algeria under Ahmed Ben Bella; fighting and doctoring with Amilcar Cabral’s guerrillas in Guinea Bissau; and Che’s lost year in the Congo with the demoralized rank and file of Laurent Kabila’s Simbas; to Cuba’s finest hour, outgunned and outnumbered, on the battlefields of Angola. This last adventure forms the heart of the book and was Cuba’s largest engagement, thus its details are worth recounting.
nolympics submits:
"Secret History of the IRA"
Anthony McIntyre, The Blanket
Anthony McIntyre is a former republican prisoner from Belfast, a founder of the Republican Writers Group and a harsh critic of Sinn Fein and its leadership (from the left). Here he recounts a lecture given by Ed Moloney in Galway. Maloney wrote A Secret History of the IRA, published last year. The book provides a narrative of the peace process and IRA cease fire at odds with both the IRA version and that of the relevant states. The central argument of the book suggests that Gerry Adams had been involved in negotiations towards a ceasefire with the British as early as 1986, and that those negotiations led to the IRA and Sinn Fein abandoning the central tenets of modern republicanism, (refusal to recognise the northern state, the right of the Irish people as a whole to self determination not subject to loyalist veto, the right of the Irish people to resist occupation under arms, etc).
This piece was published by The Blanket, "a journal of protest and dissent" from the north of Ireland. Read it at the link.
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