From the latest issue of Continent, Graham Harman (AUC): Meillassoux’s Virtual Future; Michael O'Rourke (IC-Dublin): The Afterlives of Queer Theory; and Gregory Kirk Murray (GPC): Covering Giorgio Agamben's Nudities. From Social Text, a series of articles on thinking through violence. Concluding their three-part exchange for Mute, artist Alfredo Jaar and philosopher Simon Critchley contemplate how to keep on, artistically and politically, in the face of the spectacular violence that washed-up liberal democracy meets with daily indifference; in two recent books — Web Aesthetics and Interface Criticism — new media critics rescue the sensuality of digital aesthetics from the gnostic grip of communications theory; and in the elegant and obscure Letters Journal, an anonymous collective traverses the black hole of nihilism to elude capitalism's all-encompassing ability to swallow resistance. From Ceasefire magazine, an A-Z of theory continues with profiles of Arjun Appadurai and Samir Amin (and part 2). Signs and wonder: The narrow focus of "profane" media studies on semiotics and consumption ignores the extent to which culture is rooted in our deep yearning for the sacred. A review of Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power by Derek Hook. From The Rumpus, Nicholas Rombes on Julia Kristeva’s face. From Jacobin, Jason Schulman writes in defense of grand narratives. Thinking anew, every time: An encounter with Judith Butler. Radical, like in the eighties: A review of Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory by Gail Day. A review of The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory by Benjamin Noys. A review of Democracy in What State? by Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross and Slavoj Zizek (and more).
