Progressive Geographies

Hannah Arendt on What Freedom and Revolution Really Mean – previously unpublished essay at LitHub (also in print in The New England Review). Thanks to Peter Gratton for the link.

In the 1960s, some years after the publication of her book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt lived in a world of revolutionary events, to which she was particularly sensitive. Such events included the expulsion of Krushchev in the Soviet Union; the construction of the Berlin Wall dividing Germany into two states; the Cuban missile crisis; the so-called “Quiet Revolution” in Canada, nationalistic in character; the Civil Rights movements here and abroad; anti-war protests, some of which were deadly, here and in Europe; military coups in South Korea, Vietnam, and Greece; Pope John XXIII’s profoundly revolutionary Second Vatican Council; the horror of the Cultural Revolution in China; the scientific revolution best known as “the conquest of space”; and the ongoing decolonization and independence battles in formerly imperial domains.

This manuscript, never before published, is marked “A Lecture” and dated “1966-67.” Where and when it was delivered, or if it was delivered, is not known. The manuscript seems too long for a single lecture. It might have been given at the University of Chicago where Arendt was teaching at the time in the School on Social Thought. Or it could have been at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, which Arendt agreed to join in 1967, primarily to be in New York, close to her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, who was unwell. The where and when of the lecture have not been confirmed, though extant records have been thoroughly searched.

–Jerome Kohn

“The Truth That Hurts, or the Corps à Corps of Tongues: An interview with Jacques Derrida” – new translation in Parallax (requires subscription), No abstract, so first note below:

1 Translator’s note [TN]: What follows is a translation of an interview with Jacques Derrida conducted by Évelyne Grossman in December 2003. The interview, entitled ‘La vérité blessante, ou le corps à corps des langues’, was published in the French journal Europe in May 2004, five months before Derrida’s death. A portion of the interview was translated into English by Thomas Dutoit and published in 2005 in the collection Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. I would like to thank the editor-in-chief of Europe, Jean-Baptiste Para, as well as Évelyne Grossman, Thomas Dutoit, and Pierre Alferi for allowing us to translate and publish the interview in this special issue of parallax. I would also like to express my gratitude to Donald Cross and Eric Prenowitz, who helped me revise this translation. A few words about the title: the phrase ‘La vérité blessante’ is a play on the French expression il n’y a que la vérité qui blesse – a rough equivalent of ‘only truth hurts’. The French verb blesser can refer to a physical wounding but also to a moral offence, to the hurting of someone’s feelings. The homophony with the English ‘blessing’ might be a deliberate choice by Derrida and Grossman – a hypothesis that the themes addressed in the interview could certainly back up. I have decided to leave the French expression corps à corps as such, both in the title and in the interview. The French phrase literally means ‘body(ies)-to-body(ies)’. It usually refers to a close encounter, a duel, a hand-to-hand combat or attack that involves bodily contact. It can be a form of wrestling, generally without mediation, at least without long-distance weaponry: ‘body-to-body’. But the expression is also used to refer to sexual embrace, intercourse or lovemaking. Both dimensions are present in the interview; in the title, the erotic, corporeal connotation is highlighted by the proximity of langues, ‘languages’ or ‘tongues’.

Alex Jeffrey, The Edge of Law: Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court – Cambridge University Press, December 2019

The Edge of Law explores the spatial implications of establishing a new legal institution in the wake of violent conflict. Using the example of the establishment of the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alex Jeffrey argues that legal processes constantly demarcate a line of inclusion and exclusion: materially, territorially and corporally. In contrast to accounts that have focused on the judicial outcomes of these transitional justice efforts, The Edge of Law draws on long-term fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina to focus on the social and political consequences of the trials, tracing the fraught mechanisms that have been used by international and local political elites to convey their legitimacy. This book will be of interest to socio-legal and geographical scholars working in the fields of transitional justice, legal systems, critical geopolitics and criminology.