Are you drowning in deluded celebrations of a reactionary political system, a country facing economic collapse and a sporting spectacle sucking funds from our welfare system?

Are you disgusted by pleas for everyone to ‘pull together in this time of austerity’ when the only thing that isn’t being cut is the Queen’s flotilla?

After you’ve torched the street party and hung an effigy of ‘our’ monarch you may want to read these:

See these two recent pieces she has linked to – in Le nouvel observateur, and Le monde des livres. The latter raises some critical questions about the designation and what this means, especially in the light of what Foucault said about these kinds of issues.

Reblogged from The Funambulist:

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Visualizing Palestine is an open collective which attempts to demonstrate graphically the injustice to which the Palestinians are subjected to in the current apartheid -or colonization depending on whether you consider the territory Palestine/Israel as one sovereignty or two. After an historical document on the hunger strike to support Khader Adnan who was doing one to protest against his detention in an Israeli prison without having been charged with anything, they just released a map of Israel/Palestine (see above) illustrating the segregative characteristics of the road system on this territory.

Read more… 349 more words

Elden, S. Reassessing Kant’s Geography. Journal of Historical Geography. 2009;35:3-25.

Elden, S. Taking the measure of the Beiträge: Heidegger, National Socialism and the Calculation of the Political. European Journal of Political Theory. 2003;2:35-56.

Bialasiewicz, L., Elden, S. & Painter, J. The Constitution of EU territory. Comparative European Politics. 2005;3:333-363.

Elden, S. The Problem of Confession: The Productive Failure of Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality’. Journal for Cultural Research. 2005;9:23-41.

Elden, S. The State of Territory Under Globalization: Empire and the Politics of Reterritorialization. In Margaroni, M. & Yiannopoulou, E. Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics. Amsterdam: Rodopi; 2006:47-66.

The full list is here.

Immanuel Kant’s lectures on Physical Geography and the relation of his geographical and spatial concerns to his thought more generally are being reassessed. The lectures are finally about to be published in English translation, albeit in the problematic Rink edition. This will make these texts available to a much wider audience.

This talk will examine the history of the lectures and their publication; discuss Kant’s purpose in giving them; and look at the way in which he structured geographical knowledge and understood its relation to history and philosophy. It will open up some of the questions arising from the situation of the lectures in Kant’s work generally; raise some of the issues about the edition being translated; and discuss the position Kant occupies in the discipline of geography as a whole. It trades on the work in the 2012 volume Reading Kant’s Geography (SUNY Press 2012), edited by Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta.

Reblogged from biblioklept:

Didn't realise the whole thing was online.

Reblogged from Progressive Geographies:

This is now down for June 2012. Graham Harman has just posted about it here.

Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophico-morphological theory is based on an understanding of the history of culture as spatialisations of forms. The world in which we live now requires us to design new types of ‘spatialised immunity’. More broadly, the concept of a spherical logic of space – a polymorphologic of form, order and thinking – is explicated in Spheres, his three-volume archaeology of the human attempt to dwell within spaces, from womb to globe. The Spheres project (Bubbles, Globe, Foam) is a significant topological turn in the field of contemporary philosophy, ‘a super-workout for communicative energies capable of finding contact throughout the entire world.’

Details here.