New Reviews on Culture Machine

CULTURE MACHINE <http://www.culturemachine.net> is pleased to announce the publication of the following new book reviews:

* Sean Gaston (2009) Derrida, War and Literature: Absence and the Chance
of Meeting. London: Continuum. Reviewed by Andrew Hill

Gaston’s book is divided into two parts. In the first he gives an account of
Derrida on absence, centred on the themes of the fallacy of seeing absence
as ‘pure possibility’, and, via Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger’s work, on
meeting as irreducible to either presence or absence. In the second he takes
up these themes to interrogate the encounter between literature and war, via
(principally) Schiller, Conrad, Tolstoy, Clausewitz and Freud’s work. In so doing
Gaston surveys the relationship between war and the chance encounter, the
ties between the duel and war, the linkages between sovereignty and war,
and the politics of anonymity and naming in wartime.

* William Cleveland (2008) Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines.
Oakland, CA: New Village Press; Susan Kozel (2007) Closer: Performance,
Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press; Gerald Raunig
(2007) Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth
Century. LA: Semiotexte. Reviewed by Gray Kochhar-Lindgren.

Healing, disruption, and the exploration of interfaces: which is art? Which is
politics? Which is a provisional community bound together only by temporary
alliances? How will all of these forces interact in Tehran, Tabriz, and Qom?
What experiments are now underway to stage a shift of relations on a new
media platform? A review is not the site on which to undertake a thorough
explication of such complex questions, but I can say, without hesitation, that
all three of these writers are constructing transversal concatenations. These
concatenations, too, will be fragile, but they will create implications and open
work spaces that will traverse the arts, sciences, and the politics of
communities in Iran, here on the island, and across the distant nearness of
telepresence.

* Carolyn D’Cruz (2008) Identity Politics in Deconstruction: Calculating with
the Incalculable. Aldershot: Ashgate. Reviewed by Dhanveer Singh Brar

Carolyn D’Cruz’s Identity Politics in Deconstruction is an attempt to reassess
one of the central tenets of left wing politics since the 1970s ­ the personal
as the political. D’Cruz sets about interrogating this ideological marker because
she believes the politics it has come to represent in the contemporary context
have seemingly ‘collapsed into readymade political positions’ (ix). Identity
politics (a term which in this monograph encompasses the politics of race,
citizenship and sexual difference) has been too readily installed into a set of
definable targets. There is, for D’Cruz, a troubling conciliation between the
liberatory ethos of identity politics and state based democratic ideals. By
referring to predominantly Australian debates around Aboriginal identity claims,
queer experience and government asylum policy, she looks to pinpoint critical
disturbances in the structures which make up the politics of identity.

TO READ THE FULL REVIEWS:

1. Go to <http://www.culturemachine.net>

2. Click on the ‘Reviews’ heading right under the journal’s banner.

3. Click on the ‘PDF’ sign next to the review you are interested in.

CULTURE MACHINE http://www.culturemachine.net is an open-access peer-
reviewed journal of cultural studies and cultural theory which publishes new
work from both established figures and up-and-coming writers. It is fully
refereed and has an International Editorial Advisory Board which includes
Geoffrey Bennington, Robert Bernasconi, Sue Golding, Lawrence Grossberg,
Peggy Kamuf, Alphonso Lingis, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Mark Poster,
Avital Ronell, Nicholas Royle, Tadeusz Slawek and Kenneth Surin.

Dr Clare Birchall,
Lecturer in Cultural Studies, University of Kent.
Reviews Editor Culture Machine: http://www.culturemachine.net/
Author of Knowledge Goes Pop (Berg) http://www.bergpublishers.com/?
Co-editor of New Cultural Studies (EUP) http://www.amazon.com/New
-Cultural-Studies-AdventuresTheory/dp/0820329606tabid=761