E-SUPPLEMENT TO THE JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS THEORY
Badiou, Alain. Black: The Brilliance of a Non-Color. Translated by Susan Spitzer. New Jersey: Polity, 2016. ISBN-10: 1509512071. Hardcover, paperback, e-book. 80 pages. Claire Colebrook calls Alain Badiou’s newest book Black: The Brilliance Of A Non-Color, a “singular and remarkable book.” My initial reaction was similar, though I have always been impressed by Badiou’s eloquence and prose. […]
Note: This review is also published simultaneously in the PDF special issue of JCRT 16.1. Butler, Judith. Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. ISBN-10: 082326467X. Paperback. 228 Pages. Despite having appeared separately in journals or as chapters in other books over the last twenty years, the essays collected in Judith Butler’s Senses […]
Kovács, Ábrahám, and James L. Cox, Editors. New Trends and Recurring Issues in the Study of Religion: Context and Overview. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2014. ISBN-10: 9632368509 Hardcover, e-book. 249 pages. This stimulating volume of ten articles by historians, sociologists and theologians leads readers into the field of “theory and method” for the study of religion. Kovács […]
Kotsko, Adam. The Prince of this World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. ISBN-10: 1503600203. Hardcover, paperback, e-book. 225 pages. Adam Kotsko’s aim in The Prince of this World might be construed as a clever modulation of the oft-quoted line from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing […]
Laruelle, François. General Theory of Victims. Translated by Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015. ISBN-10: 0745679617. Hardcover, paperback, e-book. 161 Pages. There is a kind of “non-philosophical” eruption happening in so-called Continental philosophy. After a prodigious output for over three decades, François Laruelle is finally now garnering attention in Anglophone scholarship. Indeed, […]
Thacker, Eugene. Cosmic Pessimism. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2015. ISBN-10: 193756147X. E-book, paperback. 55 pages. It might be worth quoting from the beginning of this pocket-sized, 69-page book to give a sense of its style and subject: We’re doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the […]
Caputo, John D. The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016. ISBN-10: 1598151711. Paperback, e-book. 148 pages. What is the interest of theology? Traditionalists will answer that it is interested solely in God, and more specifically, to define and defend the reality of God as supreme being. Much of […]
White, Ryan. The Hidden God: Pragmatism and Posthumanism in American Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. ISBN-10: 0231171005. Hardcover, e-book. 248 pages. Ryan White’s The Hidden God: Pragmatism and Posthumanism in American Thought (Columbia University Press, 2015) sets for itself a rather Herculean task of coherently discussing perhaps the sole concept that is unavailable for conceptual analysis: […]
Irigaray, Luce and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York, Columbia University Press, 2016. ISBN-10: 0231173873 Hardcover, paperback, e-book. 248 pages. Through Vegetal Being is not a book about plants but, rather, an attempt to think with and through them. For some that may seem an odd, even impossible, endeavor. The Western […]
Hughes, Aaron. Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity: An Inquiry into Disciplinary Apologetics and Self-Deception. London: Equinox Publishing, 2016. ISBN-10: 1781792178. Hardcover, paperback. 256 pages. Introduction: It has never been exactly clear what apologetic scholarship achieves. Are apologetic scholars reinforcing a certain status quo that lies outside of academe, one that is located in the particular […]