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This article reviews Bülent Diken's recent book, Nihilism. In so doing, it focuses especially on the disjunctive synthesis between passive nihilism (post-politics, or contemporary society) and radical nihilism (the new terror). Finally, the article claims that Diken's project is to resuscitate the idea of revolution, to reinvent the revolutionary politics.

In the aftermath of the 1930s Great Depression, and as the Second World War was drawing to a close, Karl Polanyi concluded a critical analysis of market capitalism on an optimistic — and with the benefit of hindsight we can add premature — note, remarking that the 'primacy of society' over the economic system had been 'secured'. Eighty years later, amidst the unresolved turmoil of another comparable global capitalist economic crisis and accumulating signs of a growing environmental crisis, both a direct legacy of the operation of the 'market economy', the remedy advocated by governments and policy-makers is effectively a return to 'business as usual'. Notwithstanding various manifestations of public expression of dissatisfaction with the consequences of global 'free-market' capitalism, which include increasing inequality, poverty, unemployment, depletion of scarce natural resources, environmental destruction, pollution and waste, the default policy setting remains to restore global economic growth, to generate further increases in production and cultivate ever-rising rates of consumption, even if the risk is 'common ruin'. However, there are a number of realistic, progressive and radical alternatives proposed by critical analysts, including a political program for 'de-growth' , a reinvention of communism and detailed policy proposals outlining the measures necessary to promote a transition to a 'post-capitalist' society with a sustainable economy.

Proceeding from Lessing's distinction between poetry and visual art, Boris Groys argues that language is not external to, but resides behind, the image. The image constitutes the scene of a frustrated linguistic desire. Modern visual art sought to avoid the obscenity of staging this unfulfilled desire by conducting a systematic ascetic repression of the linguistic impulse. This negation of linguistic desire culminated in Judd's 'specific ob jects'. Y et the modern image, Groys emphasizes with reference to Greenberg and McLuhan, still transmits a message, namely that of its medium bearer. Modern artists torture the image and put it into a state of emergency or exception in which it confesses its interior. In the image's sub-medium space, in turn, resides language. Avantgarde artists and modern media theorists share the wish to achieve durability by becoming the media of the media. The border between the image and language, Groys closes, can neither be stabilized nor abolished.

In this article I explore how, in the League of Nations' emerging anti-trafficking regime of the 1920s and 1930s, one category of race science — climate — played a prominent role in positing natural hierarchies between nations. My purpose is twofold: (1) to explain the currency of climate at this moment and to examine the trajectory of climate as an explanatory device in the intellectual history of 'race'; and (2) to reflect on the biopolitical implications of explanations rooted in climate. The article begins with a description of how League of Nations delegates used climate as shorthand to refer to differences between the sexual mores of various nations. I then reflect more broadly on the emergence, submergence, and reemergence of climate in the history of race science, and its effects in practical settings. I move to a discussion of the significance of the age of consent as a category, and analyse the League of Nations-sponsored efforts to track ages of consent across countries as a biopolitical project. My overarching argument is that references to climate performed important ideological work in naturalizing hierarchical relations between nations. In arenas where diplomats sought to arrive at a consensus, such references rendered them more palatable and less disputable.

China is undergoing tremendous social and economic transformations with different local innovations and variations. By comparing and contrasting three industrial villages in China demonstrating different mixes along the organizational continuum from market economy to collectivist economy, this article offers an alternative model of development that combines market production and distribution with redistribution and the building of public goods based on group boundaries. This alternative market activity is named community capitalism, a concept that has the potential to mitigate the sharp dichotomy between state socialism and market economy. The article also argues that, in order to fully understand the process of China's transition, it is necessary to take into account not only the economic and political institutions, but also the local cultural, social and political resources. It is the interaction and mixes of the two that determine the path of development local communities embark on.

The work of Michel Serres has been of significant value, yet remains under-utilized across the social sciences. In this review article the long-awaited translation of his The Five Senses (1985) is explored, with particular interest in its offerings for contemporary theories of the materiality of the human condition. Serres invites the reader into a diverse and rich world of sense, from localized sites of individual bodies to global landscapes of cities and countrysides. Not reducible to individual bodies or language, sense becomes the primary mode of relationality through which experience is produced. Such insights are explored in light of contemporary concerns regarding the constitution of bodies and materiality, which emphasize notions of movement and process. The distinction Serres makes between sense and language is argued to be valuable in terms of theories of virtuality that frame material embodiment as ineffable and beyond language. The article concludes by suggesting that Serres can aid re-attunement to sense, although not in a generalistic fashion, but as part of disciplinary specific engagements.