Blog

  • The Apocalyptic Sublime

    The Apocalyptic Sublime

    The internet is replete with images of commodities in the process of destruction. From the homes sucked into rising tides to stuffed toys crushed between the teeth of an hydraulic press, what does such an apocolyptic sublime tell us about the relationship between the image and contemporary capitalism?

  • Jean-Luc Godard

    Jean-Luc Godard

    In honor of Jean-Luc Godard's recent death, we're republishing Peter Wollen's essay on the great director, originally published in Paris Hollywood.

  • The Case for Degrowth

    The Case for Degrowth

    The Covid-19 pandemic further exposed a world geared toward collapse – degrowth argues that we should radically change our economic system to save the planet and build a more sustainable world for all.

  • Theodor Adorno on our relationship to our parents

    Theodor Adorno on our relationship to our parents

    Unpolitical attempts to break out of the bourgeois family usually lead only to deeper entanglement in it, and it sometimes seems as if the fatal germ-cell of society, the family, were at the same time the nurturing germ-cell of uncompromising pursuit of another.

  • Promise me this, my child

    Promise me this, my child

    Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality.

  • Antithesis by Theodor Adorno

    Antithesis by Theodor Adorno

    The subjugation of life to the process of production imposes as a humiliation on everyone something of the isolation and solitude that we are tempted to regard as resulting from our own superior choice.

  • The Sociology of Grovelling

    The Sociology of Grovelling

    The toast of Tory and Labour leaders alike, the British Monarchy offers eloquent testimony to the persistence of the country’s Old Regime. These excerpts from Tom Nairn’s The Enchanted Glass, first published during the cultural reaction of the Thatcher years, offer a republican antidote to Jubilee kitsch and state-sponsored sycophancy.

  • Profiting from their misery: Britain's private prisons

    Profiting from their misery: Britain's private prisons

    Britain's prison system has, since the Europe’s first privately run prison was opened in East Yorkshire in April 1992, become increasingly privatised and run for profit. Here, Hatty Nestor explains how we got here, and how the burgeoning Prison Abolitionist movement can help us chart a way out.