book review – literature

REFUGEES: Every single day, people set out from Turkey to Greece, from Lebanon to Italy, from Morocco to Spain, from Libya to Malta and from Tunisia to Lampedusa. Never before have there been so many people on the run as there are right now. Journalist Sally Hayden gives testimony about the people the world has turned its back on.

HISTORY: Terje Tvedt breaks some research norms by seeing the water wheel to a greater degree than the steam engine as the real driving force behind the industrial revolution. It's about water, not cultural superiority.

PASOLINI: The apostle Paul shows the revolutionary power of fighting for a cause that defies the usual way of life. Paul becomes the symbol of creating a new reality and defeating hegemonic power. But can we imagine that there is a Paul in today's Israel?

THE OIL STATE: In this book, Alexander Etkind states that Russia is the least equal, the most militarized and the most carbonized of all the world's major countries.

PHOTO ART: The lonely person is a prerequisite for the expressive world artist who came to the fore with Edvard Munch in the 1890s. A new biography is now available: According to de Figueiredo, the frivolous reality the bohemians in Kristiania clamored for in the 1880s came to fruition in 1890s Berlin, where Munch was part of a milieu that had conversations about "naturalism and socialism, decadence and Darwinism and psychology – as well as an ever-so-small dose of Satanism”.

HAMAS: Leila Seurat provides a good basis for understanding what went terribly wrong on October 7, when Hamas made a drastic change of course. The purpose of it all was to get the Palestinian cause back on the global agenda, and it has largely succeeded.

OCCUPATION: EU parliamentarian and former trade union leader Marianne Vind has written about the problems on the European labor market in the 21st century. It could have been an important book. It just isn't.

POETRY: Vietnamese-American Ocean Vuong's poetry is corporeal and sensual. And Wales' foremost female poet Menna Elfyn writes in the Celtic-Welsh minority language Cymric. We present them both here.

ECOLOGY: Henry David Thoreau provides the recipe for a wandering life in balance with nature, but arguably also for a leisurely life in balance with oneself. He can be said to be more relevant than ever.

MUSICAL LIFE: With The Use of the Bodies and What is Philosophy?, Giorgio Agamben returns to his early main interest before the first homo sacer book – namely to being, to language, to thought and the blissful life. It is also about where you are – where you simultaneously discover life (ontology) and how life could be (politics, the happy life).

SEX: Here the male author asks: "How could I understand that I found myself in a culture that wants to identify me with the very heroes that legitimize this culture's dominance?"

AVANTGARDE: The program of the avant-garde was often about 'wild socialism' – the socialism that was critical of the Soviet Union. Aesthetically pleasing is that they uncompromisingly challenged our idea of ​​success.

INTERNET: Are we here presented with 224 pages of panic attacks?

TRANSFORMATION: Hartmut Rosa is a central critic of modernity. He emphasizes the importance of our resonant experiences – be it with another, a work or a book – as a central part of being human.

RELIGION: Religion constitutes a war against the spontaneous. Is there an equality between being an obedient citizen and being godly?

NEDVEKST: The Japanese re-reading of Marx advocates green communism or degrowth. The historical overview is impressive, and the analyzes are inspiring. Will a socialist or communist society necessarily be better, ecologically speaking? And should use value now come into play instead of exchange value?