Friday, September 01, 2006

Radical Philosophy 139

The latest Radical Philosophy has a striking but ambiguous cover: is the Statue of Liberty transformed with a pig's face as I first thought, or is it a bear? It's a bear from Berlin, of course!

I'm defeated by most of the content. Vladimir Safatle on 'Mirrors without images', all Lacan and Adorno and finding things in common between approaches that the author starts out by denying any 'shared dialogical field'. More entries from the Vocabulary of European Philosophies (see RP138).

Reviews: Wendy Brown's Edgework looks interesting and other books on political philosophy are marginally interesting.

The issue is saved by the Commentary by Chris Wilbert on avian flu: 'Profit, plague and poultry, ' which situates the whole hoo-hah (yes, I could well be laughing outside the other side of my putrefying face when it takes hold in my neighbourhood!) as a renewed bio-politics and risk politics that intersects with the political economic of globalization. Bird flu is being used to facilitate a shift from small-scale peasant production to agro-industrial production by corporate exporters, with examples drawn from Egypt and Thailand. This is worth following up, not just in Mike Davies's Monster at the Door, but in the work of GRAIN and the theorization of Nikolas Rose ('The Politics of Life Itself', Theory, Culture and Society 18,6)

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