The words that mainstream book reviewers reach for when describing “Capitalism and its critics: A battle of ideas in the modern world” are ones like ‘magisterial’, ‘sweeping’ or ‘expansive’. Apart from suggesting a big book, there is the sense of an authoritative overview of its subject matter.   Sean Sheehan […]

In last week’s The Prisma, Claudio Chipana Gutiérrez made the case for positive forms of identity and Louisa Yousfi in “In defence of barbarism: Non-whites against the Empire” does something similar by defending the value of barbarism.   Sean Sheehan   Reading Kateb Yacine, the writer who came from the […]

Everyone knows that the world is wildly out of sync with human needs and aspirations. Ground zero is the point, not reached by those shamelessly benefitting from it, when a sense of futility sends us into a descending spiral of despondency.   Sean Sheehan   It is also the point […]

The three parts of “The aesthetics of resistance” by Peter Weiss were published between 1975 and 1981 in German. The first English translation of Volume I appeared in 2005, the second volume  fifteen years later and now the final part is available.   Sean Sheehan   Between them, the three […]

Everyone likes a story, we need them, but in the last twenty years or more story-telling at an international level has become the territory of the political right: “…pieces of information, statistics, slogans, fears, reflexes”, writes Yves Citton, have shaped many people’s imaginations and there is a pressing  need to […]