Renewal and reinvigoration has never been more urgent for the Left, yet with a few exceptions, mostly in Latin America, it is everywhere in retreat and on the defensive. A serious intellectual realignment – while of course not sufficient – is necessary. It is my contention, as I’ve argued in the two previous posts, that […]

In yesterday’s post, I argued that critique is a double-edged sword: a necessary aspect of political struggle, but one that, in combination with social atomisation and lack of political agency, deepens our alienation and contributes to a cycle of cynicism and bad faith. How then, do we extricate ourselves from this impasse? Sloterdijk proposes that […]

In the face of looming environmental catastrophe, we seem unable to resist the temptation to bury our heads in the sand. The feeble results of the Cancún summit last month, in which world leaders yet again kicked the can down the road, were hardly unexpected, but depressing nonetheless. Enormous and powerful interests defend the status […]

Regular readers will be aware of the back-and-forth between the writer, blogger and academic Emmett Stinson, and various Overland peeps. I’ve been away for the last fortnight, and so missed the most recent installments in the saga. Then, this morning when I started writing in Jane’s thread, my brief comments blew out so much that […]

POMO OZ: Fear and Loathing Downunder Niall Lucy Freemantle Press Ah, postmodernism. The word makes us shudder, or cheer or jeer or laugh or roll our eyes. The multiplicity of reactions it engenders surely reflects the multiplicity of meanings it has accumulated. Reading Niall Lucy’s POMO OZ: Fear and Loathing Downunder, one is by turns […]