New Future

Julian Stallabrass on Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention. Case studies limning a contemporary artworld in which viewing is reconfigured by digital distractions.

Jonathan Rée on Christoph Schuringa, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. Critique of the ideological function of Anglo-American philosophy’s hegemonic style.

Carolyn Lesjak on Fredric Jameson, Inventions of a Present. The cultural theorist’s literary criticism assembled for the first time, yielding new insights on method.

Netanyahu is building on the obliteration of Gaza to launch an external offensive across multiple fronts, aiming at cantonization in Lebanon and Syria, and regime change, if not state break-up, in Iran. What explains the West's political investment in an Israeli-centric Middle East, on conspicuous display during June’s Twelve-Day War?

Following his analytic survey of socialist economic theory and practice in the last number of NLR, Aaron Benanav sets out a design for institutions that could structure an economic democracy beyond capital accumulation and waged labour. A novel dual-currency system, elected investment boards, worker self-management and trans-sectoral coordination, responsive to the broadest social goals.

Picking up on Emilie Bickerton’s identification in NLR 109 of a new genre of films centred on the working class, Julia Hertäg offers a comparative-historical view of German Arbeiterfilme. Themes and forms tracked from the radical efflorescence of Weimar through the sixties rebellion against the Bonn Republic to the anomic social landscape of the post-unification FRG.

Though brandishing ‘Stop the Steal! ’ placards, along with US and Israeli flags, nationalist mobilizations in South Korea draw on a different lineage to that of Trump, Bolsonaro or Farage. The latest NLR study of rising new rights locates the RoK’s conservative bloc in its history of collaboration with Japanese and American imperialism, now re-gearing against the PRC.

In an expansive response to Perry Anderson’s critique of international law in NLR 143, Martti Koskenniemi counterposes to headline rulings on crimes against humanity the opaque, pervasive network of techniques that constitutes the legal infrastructure of global capitalism, shaping our unequal world-social relations and how we imagine them.

In the first instalment of a major contribution to the reconceptualization of a post-capitalist social order, Aaron Benanav marshals insights from a long century of socialist thought and practice—Cabet, Marx, Preobrazhensky, Neurath, Keynes—to lay the theoretical foundations for his own multi-criterial model.

A view from China of the battle for America’s ideological soul, pitting Trump, home-grown nemesis of Western liberal democracy, against Francis Fukuyama, subtlest philosopher of its world-historical triumph. Are these contrasted figures two manifestations of the same hegemonic principle?

Interview with the Brazilian critic and theorist on the literary and political ideas informing his epic play, Queen Lira. A volatile cacophony of voices disputing his country’s path, from Dilma’s impeachment to Bolsonaro’s rise and Lula’s unexpected return.

How might we reimagine freedom on an increasingly turbulent and resource-constrained planet? Charting a course between rival left accounts, Alyssa Battistoni offers a conception inspired by de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity: a ‘situated’ freedom, which recognizes natural contingency and centres human agency.

The well-travelled life and consistently lucid, radical thought of global labour’s great comparative ethnographer—and social theorist.

In a draft text sent to NLR before his tragically early death, the sociologist reflects on the reasons for the starkly different outcomes of Afrikaner and Zionist settler colonialisms: in South Africa, a unified democratic republic, with all its problems; in Israel, ongoing war.