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The Politics of Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa was one of the greatest and strangest poets of the 20th century, famous for the elusive profusion of his ‘heteronyms’. Yet in light of the first biography worthy of him, and recent Portuguese studies of his work, he emerges as perhaps the most passionate—and productive—political writer of all the original modernists, as Portugal lurched from the noisy overthrow of its monarchy to the quiet tyranny of Salazar.

Timpanaro Among the Anglo Saxons

Advocate of philosophical materialism; incisive critic of Freud and of post-Saussurean linguistics; noted philologist: considerations on the reception of Sebastiano Timpanaro in the Anglophone world, and his relations with New Left Review in particular.

Domesticating Hegel

Michael Lipkin on Klaus Vieweg, Hegel: Der Philosoph der Freiheit. The author of Philosophy of Right as roistering liberal.

Mathematics and Modern Literature

If modernist literature has been fascinated by the possibilities of mathematical formalism, mathematicians have repaid the compliment in their use of that paramount avant-garde form: the manifesto. Here we publish extracts from Alice Bamford’s bravura treatment of experimentation at Bourbaki and Oulipo.

Knight’s Moves

A retrospective on the life and work of pioneering cultural critic, theorist and practitioner Peter Wollen. From Methodist roots to Parisian exile, radical journalism to avant-garde filmmaking, auteurism and semiotics to the landmark Raiding the Icebox.

Rules of The Game?

Lorna Finlayson on Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice. The gestation of Rawlsian justice theory, marked by postwar neoliberal thought and Oxford ‘ordinary language’ philosophy.

Engels’s Second Theory

The author of Buying Time detects a state-political supplement to Marxian social theory in Engels’s analyses of 19th-century militarism. The interplay of modes of production and destruction, class struggle and international warfare, from the Crimea to the War on Terror.

Negt without Kluge

Adrian Grama on Oskar Negt Überlebensglück and Erfahrungsspuren. The social theorist traces his passage through German history and formation in and against the Frankfurt School.

A Tale of Two Marxisms

The political-intellectual career of sociologist Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019), traced by a friend and collaborator. Amid the demise of actually existing socialism, a passage from class analysis to utopian imaginings, science to critique. Can Polanyi offer insights on how these strands might be joined?

A Mud-Brick Utopia

Owen Hatherley on Salma Samar Damluji and Viola Bertini, Hassan Fathy: Earth & Utopia. A full-scale study of the radical mud-brick designs of Egypt’s pre-eminent modernist architect.

Homo Europus

As Jean-Claude Juncker steps down from the European Commission, reflections on his career as synecdoche for the political culture of the EU—and the passage of his homeland, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, from steel producer to financial lair.

Memoirs of an Undutiful Daughter

Emma Fajgenbaum on Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs. Part memoir, part chronicle of a troubled-tender relationship, the film-maker’s final book.

K-Punk At Large

The most powerful critique of neoliberal culture since the crisis, issued from the margins of the blogosphere. Simon Hammond traces the arc of Mark Fisher’s career, from accelerationism to Capitalist Realism and beyond, in a striking comparison with the critical cultural studies of Stuart Hall.

The French Exception

Grey Anderson on Julian Jackson, A Certain Idea of France. Can the latest life of de Gaulle rescue him from the enormous condescension of the Anglo-Saxon powers?

A Critical Conformist

Alexander Zevin on Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism. Indictment—and illustration—of liberal complacencies.

William Empson, Nonesuch

Francis Mulhern on Michael Wood, On Empson. Reclaiming the heterodox thinker for literary criticism.

Redemption Through Discourse?

Peter Osborne on Stefan Müller-Doohm, Habermas: A Biography. Life and times of the Eurozone’s most decorated philosopher.

Ben Anderson 1936–2015

Affecting tribute to the author of Imagined Communities, tracking a friend’s life from birth in pre-war Yunnan to exclusion from Suharto’s Indonesia, area studies at Cornell to delvings into popular Siam, recovery of the international context of Filipino revolt against Spain, and final return to Java.

Antonio Candido 1918–2017

Pioneer analyst of a Brazilian literary space, Candido surveyed Western cultural centres and their contending theories, not simply to measure up local experience, but to test them against it. Portrait of a gifted teacher and literary critic, subtle master of his country’s complex ex-colonial condition.

Philosophy as Cabaret

Esther Leslie on Jörg Später, Siegfried Kracauer: Eine Biographie and Graeme Gilloch, Siegfried Kracauer: Our Companion in Misfortune. Contrasting approaches to the most variegated outrider of the Frankfurt School.

Two-Island Estrangement

Nikil Saval on Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger. The early years in Jamaica and Britain of NLR’s first editor and the founder of Cultural Studies, at home in neither island, an influence across the world.

The Soul of the Eurozone

The character, career and intellectual output of Europe’s most consequential politician, Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble—longest-standing member of parliament in his country’s history, superintendent of national reunification and drill-master of continental austerity, obliged to serve in the shadow of a muddle-through mediocrity.

Burke’s Way

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

My 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.

The Heirs of Gramsci

Transformations of the Prison Notebooks’ fertile problematic of hegemony by a quartet of thinkers—Hall, Laclau, Guha, Arrighi—from Jamaica, Buenos Aires, Bengal, Milan. Coercion and persuasion, ideology and economic interest, national and inter-state systems as means for thinking Thatcherism’s ascendancy, populist strategies, peasant rebellion, post-colonial rule and the geo-political logics of American power.

Edinburgh’s Philosophe

Neil Davidson on James Harris, Hume. Ground-breaking biography of the Scottish Enlightenment’s man of letters.

Little Big Man

Rebecca Karl on Alexander Pantsov & Steven Levine, Deng Xiaoping. Formation and modus operandi of the Number Two Capitalist Roader.

Lives of Jughashvili

Tony Wood on Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Volume I and Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator. Contrasting portrayals of the ‘man of steel’.

Approximate Tzara

Emma Fajgenbaum on Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada. Tristan Tzara’s trajectory from avant-garde Bucharest to Cabaret Voltaire and the French Surrealist scene.

The Abolitionist—II

In the second part of a sweeping reconstruction of the development of Marx’s thought, the ways in which bourgeois society came to be replaced by capitalism as the cardinal object of investigation after the collapse of the revolutions of 1848, and the political lessons of his passage across that watershed for rebellions in the new century.

A Revolutionary Mobile

Blair Ogden on Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. The lost wanderer of legend in new and more searching biographical light.

The Abolitionist—1

Opening salvo of a two-part reconstruction of Marx’s intellectual passage through the Hegelian—then Ricardian—conceptual landscape of his early years, taking him to the threshold of his mature architectonics of capitalism as a mode of production. From a starting-point in the philosophical empyrean of the 1830s to a turning-point with the economic upturn of the early 1850s, the development of one sketch of an historical materialism to the brink of another.

Rethinking the Republic

Nowhere else in the West does a single figure occupy the same position in national life as the political writer Fintan O’Toole in Ireland. The first full consideration of the cursus and corpus of this powerful critic of the island’s establishment, and the society over which it has presided. Merits and limitations of another understanding of ‘republicanism’ in Ireland.

A Mind of the Left?

Michael Christofferson on Christophe Prochasson, François Furet. A former colleague supplies the case for the defence.

Forever Orwell

Francis Mulhern on Rob Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel. The protean cult of Eric Blair finds its latest iteration.

A Monument to Himself

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

Stuart 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.

Counterpuncher

Retrospective on the liberated life and work of Alexander Cockburn, whose last book, A Colossal Wreck, completes a dazzling triptych. Shaping influences of family, place and political epoch on a singularly radical temperament, and the keen-edged prose in which it found expression.

Dostoevsky’s Plans

Manuscripts and drafts as proliferations of possible novels, exceeding many times over the confines of the texts Dostoevsky finally published.

Consilium

“This issue of the journal is devoted to a two-part study of American foreign policy by Perry Anderson. ‘Imperium’ examines the objectives and outcomes of us world power; ‘Consilium’, the thinking of its policy elite. nlr has run three special numbers before: Tom Nairn . . .” read more

Mexican Notebooks: 1940–1947

Recently discovered diaries of the exiled novelist, with portraits of associates past and present, reflections on the Second World War, and vivid descriptions of the country where Serge lived out his final years.

Delhi’s Dynasts

Kheya Bag on Rani Singh, Sonia Gandhi: An Extraordinary Life, An Indian Destiny. Flacking for the world’s longest-running electoral dynasty.

Third World and After

Ian Birchall on Christoph Kalter, Die Entdeckung der Dritten Welt. The French left’s discovery of the Third World.

The Setting Sun

In one of the last interviews before his death in 2009, the author of Tristes Tropiques discusses his early literary ambitions, the relation between field work and theory, and the future of anthropology as a discipline.

Dialectic of Dionysus

Sven Lütticken on Asger Jorn, Fraternité Avant Tout. The Danish artist and Situationist wrestles with Engels and Nietzsche.

Alexander Cockburn, 1941–2012

A tribute to Alexander Cockburn—director of CounterPunch, Marxian environmentalist, long-standing editor of New Left Review. Robin Blackburn traces his path from County Cork to Soho, Havana to Manhattan, the Florida Keys to California’s Lost Coast.

The Family Firm

Tom Hazeldine on D R Thorpe, Supermac. Lengthy apologia for Harold Macmillan from a serial Tory biographer.

Ronald Fraser, 1930–2012

Tribute to the author of Blood of Spain, locating the impulse behind his oeuvre in a commitment to explore lived experience. Reconstructions of work, war, politics and subjectivity, from Napoleonic era to post-Fordist present.

A Metaphysics of Democracy

Jacob Collins on Marcel Gauchet, L’avènement de la démocratie, t. III. Europe’s age of catastrophe as struggle between religious and secular political logics, in the vision of a sotto voce liberal.

Digital Partisans

A tonic for cyber-babble from the pages of Mute magazine, assessing the real impact of new technology on politics and cultural life. Can this valuable source of critique survive in a cold recessionary landscape?