NLR 102

interview
Hazem KandilSisi’s Egypt

Anatomy of a counter-revolution and its epigonic figurehead. Shifting relations of military, state security and business networks, in the ad-hoc construction of a regime more repressive than its predecessor. Hazem Kandil discusses the merciless crackdown on the Bedouin in Sinai, and consoling myths of the Muslim Brothers.

articles
Rob Wallace & Rodrick WallaceEbola’s Ecologies

Across the zones of Southern monoculture and deforestation, the environmental impacts of agro-economic restructuring can be traced down to the level of the virion and the molecule. A case study of West Africa’s Ebola virus, responsible for over 11,000 deaths in the last three years, illustrates this epidemiological shift.

Efrain KristalSarmiento’s Masterpiece

Fiction, history or sociology, documentary or fabrication, the explosive rhetoric of Sarmiento’s classic was formative in Spanish American literary culture. Kristal examines the composition and reception of a unique work from Argentina.

Antonio Gramsci, JnrMy Grandfather

As the world of Soviet Communism disintegrates around him, a young Russian discovers the thought and moral example of the great Italian revolutionary who was his grandfather. Antonio Gramsci Jnr on his legacy, and the remarkable family of his grandmother, Giulia Schucht.

Leszek KoczanowiczThe Polish Case

Within the new topology of conservative regimes emerging from the Great Recession, that of Poland’s Law and Justice government has a distinctive character. Leszek Koczanowicz describes the fracturing of the neoliberal-nationalist formula that had persisted since the 1990s, the second term turned as anti-Western social critique against the first.

Fredric JamesonBadiou and the French Tradition

How to locate an energizing philosophy of activity and production, and of fidelity to past revolutionary ruptures, in relation to the line that runs from Sartre, Althusser and Lacan to Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze? A critical interrogation of the return to philosophical tradition, from metaphysics to ethics, in Badiou’s major systematic works.

reviews
Burke’s Way

Francis Mulhern on David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke. Thought-world of the liberal ideologue of counter-revolution.

An Eco-Contrarian

Kate Stevens on Joachim Radkau, Age of Ecology. Global history of environmentalism by a Weberian green.

Road to Globalism

Anders Stephanson on John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power. Rise of American globalism, from Wilson to Truman.

Lessons for Eavesdroppers

Nancy Hawker on Yonatan Mendel, The Creation of Israeli Arabic. Language as an instrument for the reproduction of the securitized state.