NLR 86

article
Susan WatkinsAnnexations

After decades of connivance with territorial seizures from Palestine to East Timor, the West rediscovers the principle of state sovereignty in Crimea. The actual record of 20th-century land grabs, and the cross-cutting geopolitical pressures bearing down on Ukraine.

interview
Suleiman MouradRiddles of the Book

A scholar of Islamic history discusses the formation and trajectory of the last great Abrahamic religion. Tensions between ecumenicism and jihad, pan-Islamism and division of the umma, and a bleak present of recrudescent sectarianism.

article
Nancy FraserBehind Marx’s Hidden Abode

Behind exchange there lurks production, but what is more hidden still? The disavowed conditions of capital’s possibility—in reproduction, politics and nature—as sites for expanded anti-capitalist struggle.

obituary
Robin BlackburnStuart Hall, 1932–2014

Founding editor of NLR, pioneer of Cultural Studies, early analyst of Thatcherism, theorist of Caribbean identities, nuncio of New Times—Robin Blackburn remembers Stuart Hall.

articles
Peter DewsNietzsche for Losers?

Opening a symposium on Malcolm Bull’s Anti-Nietzsche, Dews retraces the logic of critical supersession in European philosophy before taking issue with the author’s account of Nietzschean will to power and the reading strategy to be pursued in the face of it.

Raymond GeussSystems, Values and Egalitarianism

Perspectivist or systematic, transcendental or not? Geuss considers the character of Nietzsche’s philosophizing, the meanings of valuation and the question of equality in Marx’s thinking.

Kenta TsudaAn Empty Community?

Beyond property rights to Bull’s negative ecology: Tsuda asks whether this is not an unavowed theory of distributive justice, one crucially lacking a theory of needs.

Malcolm BullThe Politics of Falling

In conclusion, Bull replies to his critics, discussing the status of valuation and the scope of will to power; Heidegger and the question of nihilism; and the logic of extra-egalitarianism.

reviews
Xanadu as Phalanstery

Rob Lucas on Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?. A utopian capitalist proposal to rewire the web and save the middle class.

Across the ‘Between’

Christopher Prendergast on Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois and Distant Reading. What can digital research tools add to the palette of a justly renowned critic?

A Monument to Himself

Anders Stephanson on George Kennan’s Diaries. Reflection and self-flagellation from the strategist of the Cold War.