Extrapolating from his talk on Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ recent film about 18th century folk legend Jack Sheppard, Benedict Seymour traces the intimate relationship between death, representation, fiction and speculation. Then, as now, the attempt to escape from capitalism’s calculus threatens to collapse into another moment of capture

From a canal path confrontation comes bobo redemption. A docu-fiction by Benedict Seymour

The hipster was riding home from work along the canal path, past the yuppie apartments. The light was beautiful through the clouds and everything had a magical sheen in the aftermath of the rainstorm.

The Passive Vampire, Romanian surrealist poet Ghérasim Luca's recently translated book, brings objects and desires into intimate contact, with unexpected results. Review by Kenneth Cox

The English translation of Roberto Esposito’s Bios appears to be an important contribution to the critical analysis of a politics of life, but can the book’s claim to ‘revitalise’ politics really be thought from within the exclusive bounds of academic philosophy? Erik Empson reviews

Reconstructing Mayakovsky is a new hybrid media novel inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian Futurist poet who killed himself in 1930 at the age of 36. The novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and tragedy have been eliminated through technology.  As readers discover Mayakovsky’s biography (prison at age 15, lifelong affair with his editor’s wife, fame, revolution, suicide, posthumous resurrection by Joseph Stalin), they explore their own fears and fantasies about the future.

Declaring the economic off-limits to politics, the art world’s favourite philosopher, Jacques Rancière, does have something to hide, argues Paul Helliwell

 

‘There is no science… but of the hidden’ – a phrase by Bachelard taken up by the Althusserians.

– Jacques Rancière from ‘The Janus-Face of Politicized Art’[1]