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Author Archives: Andy Merrifield
Planetary Urbanisation — The Whole and the Remainder
This essay offers another take on debates about planetary urbanisation—or “planétarisation de l’urbain,” as philosopher-urbanist Henri Lefebvre calls it. I will come back to why I think he calls it that later on. Before then, I want to start out … Continue reading
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The Amateur of Life
One of my all-time favourite essays on “amateur reason” is by the French poet Charles Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life, published in 1863. Funnily enough, this set piece of art criticism has been celebrated for many things, especially as … Continue reading
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From the Underground to The Circle, and Back Again
Since my late teens, I’ve had a penchant for Russian literature. It started with Dostoevsky. It may have been because we were both clerks—Dostoevsky’s “underground man,” that is, he’d been a clerk, too, a petty clerk in the Russian civil … Continue reading
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The Madhouse and the Whole Thing There: A Note on Amateurs and Professionals
I’m still tinkering around with this theme of “amateurs” and “professionals.” I’m writing a longer piece, which I’ve filed under my “Work in Progress” rubric, but I wanted to share a little extract here of where my head is currently … Continue reading
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Tagged Althusser, amateurs, Bazarov, Edward Said, Guy Debord, professional ideology, professionals, seven types of ambiguity, the spectacle, William Empson
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Vernacular Values: Remembering Ivan Illich
By Andy Merrifield I’ve been revisiting the great maverick radical Ivan Illich, who died in 2002, aged 76. Illich was an Austrian who had no real homeland, a Jew who became a Catholic, a Priest who denounced the Vatican, a … Continue reading
The World of Secret Affinities: Remembering Isaac Babel and Walter Benjamin
A version of this essay was previously published in August 2003 in The Brooklyn Rail 1940 was a terrible year for freethinking intellectuals. As Stalin and Hitler’s pincers tightened, a bullet and a morphine overdose saw off two of the twentieth … Continue reading
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James Joyce’s Lifewand
A version of this article was previously published in December 2013 at the antipode foundation By Andy Merrifield “He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak” – James Joyce One of the great humanist visions of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is … Continue reading
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Tagged Citizenship, Finnegans Wake, Here Comes Everybody, James Joyce
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Urban Questions: Personal and Political Interrogations
In 1977, when Manuel Castells’ classic book, The Urban Question, was first put into English, I’d been a year out of high school, in Liverpool. It was five years after its original French publication, four years since an OPEC oil … Continue reading
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Tagged Liverpool, Louis Althusser, Manuel Castells, Margaret Thatcher, social reproduction
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The Shadow Citizenry
Previously Published in June 2015 at Open Democracy” by Andy Merrifield It’s exciting to see one of Henri Lefebvre’s last essays, “Quand la ville se perd dans une metamorphose planétaire” (1989), finally make it into English, in a recent edition of … Continue reading
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andy merrifield 