Browse books by title with CW new books archive feature.

Self-ish censor

Censoring Culture, ed Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva

This inch-thick collection of critical essays about American arts censorship is, then, a thoroughly unsettling, madly challenging but brilliantly necessary read.

What’s left of Christianity?

The politics of belief in the 21st century

Just as the demise of the political left forces us to rethink what is at stake in politics, and how we might seek to shape the future, the transformation of religious thinking raises important questions about the meaning of truth and morality, the nature of authority, and indeed what it means to be human.

The Housekeeper

Melanie Wallace

These are characters without character; they have no morality, no will, no responsibility. How soon you realise their inability to speak and absence of name signifies lack of participation impacts heavily on how effectively they work.

Flushed with Orange

An independent publisher’s perspective on the Orange Prize.

The Orange Prize: Friend or Phony

Culture Wars’ commissioning editor for books considers a vexed question.

Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists

Raymond Williams

Williams’ critique of cultural pessimism (from Culture & Technology, written in 1983) remains relevant given the still current trend to disavow the future and its alternative potential, and to categorise new technologies alternately as both determinants of social change and threats to established artistic, now ‘classicalised’, forms.

Emancipation(s)

Ernesto Laclau

The real disappointment for this reader is not the language, but the fact that Laclau rejects the possibility of formulating the Enlightenment notion of a totalising universal identity, and with it washes down the drain any project of uniting the world under a single banner of rationality.

Fragments

Jean Baudrillard

It is always tempting to imagine Jean Baudrillard preparing to write a book by sharpening an axe, swinging it into his computer monitor, then gluing the shattered pieces to a celluloid film reel, projecting it to a crowded room full of admirers and absolutely forbidding them to take it seriously.

Strategy of Deception

Paul Virilio

There is no consistent argument in any article, let alone any broader theme developed across the collection as a whole. Instead, it is a jumble of categories and neologisms (‘globalitarian’) with no analytical heft, mixed in with portentous quasi-mystical rambling about technology, and embarrassingly absurd predictions about the outcome of the war and its impact on international politics.

On the Shores of Politics

Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière, one of the post-Althusserian generation of French philosophers, wrote the four essays that make up this collection at the end of the Cold War (1988-1990). They are: ‘The End of Politics or The Realist Utopia’, ‘The Uses of Democracy’, ‘The Community of Equals’ and ‘Democracy Corrected’. Although each of the essays stands alone, many of the themes and arguments overlap.

The Pathology of Democracy: A Letter to Bernard Accoyer and to Enlightened Opinion

by Jacques-Alain Miller

The pathology in question, it seems, is the desire of the state to regulate psychotherapy - to intervene in that intimate relationship between therapist and what is called, for want of a better word, ‘client’. Here is Miller’s reply on behalf of all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in France.

Why? What happens when people give reasons… and why

Charles Tilly

Tilly shows that it is a mistake to counterpose ‘the real reason’ for anything to a false ‘story’. The best explanation is not one that is plucked from the ether of objectivity, unsullied by human hands, but one that resonates with specific human concerns.

In Praise of Ideology

Maurice Saatchi

It seems Lord Saatchi either doesn’t understand irony or he doesn’t understand conservatism: of course Marx championed self-realisation; but upholding self-realisation seems a strikingly progressive ideal for a ‘conservative’.

Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves

John R Bowen

Bowen comes to the conclusion that, in passing legislation on this issue, the political elites were perpetuating a French tradition from the time of Rousseau; that ‘political thinkers have long conceived of laws to teach the people moral lessons’.

The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred

Niall Ferguson

Ferguson gives much analytical weight to the concept of ‘hatred’, yet never really tells us what it is. Instead, he relies on the vague idea that hatred is one of humanity`s innate instincts.