Beautifully visceral cinematography from Greig Fraser, and Pitt is unusually menacing; but central metaphor — the myopic robbing of a criminal poker game causing the downfall of the underworld economy substituted for the myopic robbing in the financial markets causing the downfall of the world economy in 2008 — is…

The question of whether or not we will avoid climate catastrophe — a catastrophe which, in the death grip of business-as-usual, continues to metastasize — is a process of social problem-solving writ large. Problem-solving — as the critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi argues in her Critique of Forms of Life (2018)…

These essays were written as part of my final undergraduate examination on the module ‘Global Capitalism’ at Cambridge University. They scored 77%, a starred First. — In what ways can state regulation be considered fundamental to modern capitalism? State regulation is fundamental to modern capitalism in three ways. First, the apparent attempts by neoliberals to shrink the size of the regulatory state is belied by the expansion of regulatory processes to facilitate privatisation and marketisation. Second…

Lush cinematography, shot by Christopher Blauvelt in 4:3, frames this tender tale of friendship and entrepreneurship amidst the undergrowth of 1820s Oregon. “The problem with being poor”, muses Chinese immigrant King-Lu (Orion Lee), “is getting started — you need capital.” Alongside the trapper, Cookie (John Magaro) — whose penchant for…

There is a philosophical problematic — which runs from Hegel, to Marx, to Post-Marxists like Chantal Mouffe — about the status of social conflict ‘after the revolution,’ as it were. As Todd McGowan argues, those who position Hegel as offering a theodicy of rationality — in which the progression of…

I live concepts. Most days are spent reading, interpreting, critiquing, affirming, deconstructing, reconstructing, and so on and so forth. Thinking and writing is a form of labour: with the former, I whittle away at a conceptual mass, excavate its contours, chip away at its connections, expose cracks, trace further linkages……

There were no fireworks last year, since there were no revellers to meet them. As Sky News confirmed on the first morning of 2021, rerunning their footage from the brisk night before, London’s streets were eerily empty, no one there to celebrate escaping the ‘catastrophe that was 2020.’ Of course…

‘Do you have bad men like that?’, inquires Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish convict, to aboriginal tracker, Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), who she’s enlisted to help find the men who raped her and murdered her family. Billy confirms that they do sometimes; that they turn to the spirits for help; and…

1. There is no foundational normativity, no way I can convince you objectively that Freedom is better than Order, no way I can settle those counts and disabuse you of your certainties, then that in which I do, pragmatically; that is, in just a way that happens to be, and…