Sophie Wahnich

Mixed bag. The main point is interesting and she touches on important ideas with regards to emotion, what vengeance means and differing contexts of terror. It doesn't really delve into it but it's a good starting point and I'd be interested in further works looking at these ideas. I'd probably give it a 3, but it's kind of ruined by poor editing and translation.

Some passages are frustrating and I had to read over and over to understand - the English isn't always idiomatic and some phrases are rendered in a weird way. A few of the quotes from other philosophers are impossible to understand so I gave up - I've read them over and over and over and not had a clue what they're saying. It's especially frustrating because the terms used aren't hard, they're just put together in baffling ways. It uses a few French terms consistently but never provides a definition. The book benefits from some knowledge of the figures and events of the French Revolution which isn't provided - I know the basics but not what every figure mentioned did. I realised after a bit I was clearly not the original audience for the book, but it's not that I'm missing major background, just useful facts. It'd have been better if Verso had focused on stuff like this, instead of the pretty ridiculous introduction from Zizek (300 is a good movie and not a racist caricature if you make some highly unlikely assumptions. Whatever dude, you're talking bollocks). In general, the book was tough to read. Some parts were ok but you could end up on a nearly unintelligible paragraph pretty often. I feel like I completely missed out on what several key concepts mean. Overall, it's an interesting work seriously marred by the pretty poor work by the folks at Verso. A great shame.

As an aside, One of the things which stands out the most here is the absurd and hideous attacks on the French Revolution from mainstream figures. Hannah Arendt's claims about things "founded on pity" as attacks on any attempt at equality - she makes Hayek style claims about mediocrity and how horrible equality is - are almost unbelievable in their contempt for the working class.

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