Annihilation Aesthetics: On the Disappearances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This special issue of Thesis Eleven will be published in August 2025. Below includes a introduction to the volume accompanied by an artist’s statement by Chantal Meza whose artworks works will be featured in the issue.
by Siniša Malešević
War is not an exception that suddenly interrupts normal social life. Nearly every aspect of social life including the governance structures, social hierarchies, gender and sexual relations, religious identities, class dynamics, ethno-racial stratification, educational practices, heath systems or the administrativeand administrative apparatuses have all been molded by legacies of specific wars. Whether we like it or not, warfare has historically been and remains a norm that constantly shapes our social order.
by Eric Ferris
Previously honoring Agnes Heller and George Markus, the conference was part of an ongoing, larger Chinese federal research project on aesthetics which, in part, is a canopy for critical theory and has to date resulted in serious scholarship on Eastern European Marxist thinkers by Chinese intellectuals. Co-sponsored by Thesis Eleven, The Research Center for Marxist Theory of Literature in the College of Literature and Journalism at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, and the Marxist Aesthetics Committee of the Chinese Association of Aesthetics, the conference not only reflected Bauman’s global influence, it was also an example of how his influence continues to grow.
This special edition of Thesis Eleven focuses on the thought of British philosopher and critical theorist Gillian Rose. With contributions focusing on Rose’s political thought, her literary and aesthetic philosophy, and her engagement with Hegel, this edition hopes to further establish Rose’s work as part of the canon of late 20th century philosophy. Additionally, this issue also contains an interview with New School critical theorist Jay Bernstein, who was close friends with Rose, as well her previously unpublished lecture, “Does Marx Have a Method?”
by Howard Prosser
This interview with Martin Jay took place in January 2025. The conversation focuses on the conceptual elements of his book Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph (2025). The discussion traces the place of nominalism within philosophy and in connection to Critical Theory, history, and art.
Ghislain Deslandes, Postcritical Management Studies: Philosophical Investigations (Springer, 2023)
Reviewed by Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer
Stephen Kalberg, Max Weber’s Sociology of Civilizations: A Reconstruction (Routledge, 2021)
Reviewed by Sam Whimster
Bringing together the various heterodox traditions, groups and scholars that came under the heading of Open Marxism for the first time, this book assesses the evolution of Open Marxism from the initial usage of the term by Kostas Axelos in France in the 1950s and the journal, Arguments, principally the ‘anarchist Marx’ of Maximilien Rubel and the ‘Libertarian Marxism’ of Daniel Guérin, through Open Marxism as it was developed in Eastern Europe, especially in the scholarly work of Karel Kosik in Czechoslovakia, the work of the Polish Open Marxists and the Praxis group in Yugoslavia …
Zygmunt Bauman, Theory and Society (Polity, 2024).
Edited by Tom Campbell, Dariusz Brzezinski, Mark Davis and Jack Palmer, with translations by Katarzyna Bartoszynska
Reviewed by Peter Beilharz
Christine Mintrom, New Zealand Musicians in Australia 1959 – 1976 Vol. 1 and 2 (Tangerine Press, 2025)
Melbourne launch 2pm Sunday February 23 @ Wolfhound, 386-388 Brunswick St, Fitzroy.
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