Aug 31, 2006

New Left Review July-August 2006

In NLR 40, July-August 2006

Malcolm Bull extends his analysis of the question of agency (see ‘The Limits of Multitude’, NLR 35 ) by proposing a reconceptualization of the relation between collective will and invisible hand. Can bearings drawn from Hegel, Gramsci, Sartre indicate the route to a new global order through dissolution of the Western imperial state?

R. Taggart Murphy analyses the historical roots of Tokyo’s post-1868 geo-financial support for the ruling superpower, London or Washington, and the implications of China’s rise for Japanese strategy.

Terry Eagleton sets Samuel Beckett’s work for the French Resistance against his dogged refusal of all ideology. Traces of Ireland’s history—hunger, deferment, deflation, indeterminacy— in his exile art.

Also in NLR 40:

* Gadi Algazi on ‘Offshore Zionism’ in the Occupied Territories: a militarized alliance of state-subsidized software firms, real-estate developers and captive Orthodox labour.
* Immanuel Wallerstein surveys the global landscape that might emerge from a declining US hegemony.
* Sven Lütticken draws lessons from Hitchcock, Conrad and Benjamin on the poetics of suspense and surprise.
* Amit Chaudhuri unravels assumptions in the charge, levelled at India’s anglophone writers, of exoticizing the Subcontinent for Western markets.

Book Reviews:

* Benno Teschke on Herfried Münkler, Imperien . Can an ideal-type for empire be deduced from a historical sociology of Han, Persian, Roman, Ottoman and US models?
* Jan Breman on Mike Davis, Planet of Slums . Panorama of the epochal shift to a majority urban world, from favelas and gecekondular to villas miseria.
* Tariq Ali on John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: a Life . Portrait of the Liberator as pragmatist, and his legacy from the colonial Andes to the Caracas of today.

War for the Middle East

Despite the ‘greenlighting’ by Western and Arab powers, Israel war aims in Lebanon have been thwarted—at least temporarily—by fierce popular resistance. See Tariq Ali, ‘The War for the Middle East’.

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