You’ve written about Beckett, Stevens, Blanchot, and others.  Literature seems a fundamental concern.  Indeed, your own prose is somewhat more literary than other contemporary philosophers’.  What is the significance of literature for you? Well, it’s very important.  When I stopped playing in punk bands when I was about 19 or 20, I decided I was […]

Laura Oldfield Ford.  Savage Messiah.  Verso, 2011. HAMLET: Alas poor ghost! GHOST: Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing To what I shall unfold It isn’t just that the alternatives are written over, or out, it is that they return as their own simulacra.     Mark Fisher from the introduction to Savage Messiah In Tom McCarthy’s […]

Josephine Berry Slater and Anthony Illes.  No Room to Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City.  Mute Books.  124 pp. “Gentrification was already coming.  The feta-cheese footprint.” — Stewart Home Broadway I Located on the historic drovers’ road that led from Essex to the slaughterhouses of Smithfield, Broadway Market in Hackney is one of the […]

Some Brief Notes on Congolese History Since its inception the Congo has been raped.  Its origins as a state are unique within African history, initiated, as it was, not as a colony but as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium; an obscene figure whose 23-year reign was cloaked in the empty rhetoric […]