Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia is a warning against resurgent fascism. By Peter E. Gordon

‘Some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game’ Seventy years after its publication, Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia is a warning against resurgent fascism      Minima Moralia is a work of exile. Published just over… Read More Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia is a warning against resurgent fascism. By Peter E. Gordon

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Adele Dipasquale: Careless mothers, sterile goddesses and ungrateful offspring

Nature is a tricky term. It can refer to the quality of things, to what moves things into existence or to the world as a whole. Read and heard, from political debate to food labelling, it is in constant use: back to nature, 100% natural, natural order, unnatural acts, natural ways of living, wisdom of… Read More Adele Dipasquale: Careless mothers, sterile goddesses and ungrateful offspring

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Chris Hedges: Heeding James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’

One hundred years ago this week, Sylvia Beach, who ran the bookstore Shakespeare and Company on 12 rue de l’Odéon in Paris and nurtured a community of expatriate writers that included Richard Wright, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, placed in the bookstore’s front window a… Read More Chris Hedges: Heeding James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’

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Udi Greenberg: Freud and the Miseries of Politics

It is tempting to harness Civilization and Its Discontents as a guide to our contemporary political morass, but doing so may obscure its most valuable message.    Civilization and Its Discontents; translated by James Strachey and edited by Samuel Moyn Sigmund Freud was an ambivalent man, especially when it came to politics. He often held conflicting… Read More Udi Greenberg: Freud and the Miseries of Politics

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Chandran Nair: White privilege and global capitalism have roots in private property rights

It is rare and often uncomfortable to discuss the relationship between race and capitalism. Attributing certain economic systems to race relations and even discrimination are generally seen as reductive and even racist. Yet it is important to recognise that capitalism has a racial origin in the West – which knowingly placed white populations, and in… Read More Chandran Nair: White privilege and global capitalism have roots in private property rights

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Philip Oltermann – Red poets’ society: the secret history of the Stasi’s book club for spies

At the height of the tense second phase of the cold war, a group of Stasi majors, propaganda officers and border guards convened at a heavily fortified compound in socialist east Berlin. From spring 1982 until winter 1989, they gathered once every four weeks, from 4pm until 6pm, at the House of Culture inside the… Read More Philip Oltermann – Red poets’ society: the secret history of the Stasi’s book club for spies

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