Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Godard’s 1966 film inspired by newspaper accounts of bourgeois women taking up prostitution for the disposable income, contains one of my favorite scenes in all his movies. In it a young boy tells his mother Juliette (Marina Vlady) about a dream...
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007, 640 pp. The opening sequence of Michael Haneke’s 1997 and 2008 film, Funny Games, features a happy couple and their prepubescent son passing the time on a road trip by playing...
Book Review Works discussed in this essay: Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis (Verso, 2007: 192 pages) Once upon a time there was this princess, Cassandra. She was the first daughter of Troy, sister of mighty Hector and noble Paris. She seemed to combine the...
Book Review: Metapolitics, by Alain Badiou (Verso Books, 2006). 2005 marked the long overdue publication of English translations of Alain Badiou’s magnum opus, Being and Event (1988), and his more recent “little red book,” Metapolitics (1998). In the spring of that...
Book Review •The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek (MIT Press 528 pages) One of today’s leftist theoretical commonplaces is that “we don’t know where we are,” thus the call to “Theory” (etymologically, a viewing, a seeing). This proposition, a favorite...
