Gary Gutting (1942-2019)

Posted on January 20, 2019 by

I’m sorry to hear the news of the death of Gary Gutting (on Daily Nous). Gutting was someone whose work I’ve known for a long time – Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason was an early book on Foucault I read, in the first year of my PhD. It’s still one I go back to consult. In recent years I knew about him mainly through the work of the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, which he co-edited.

The Daily Nous post has some other links about his work, and will link to obituaries when they appear.

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Kathryn Medien, ‘Palestine in Deleuze’ – Theory, Culture & Society, online first

Posted on January 18, 2019 by

Kathryn Medien, ‘Palestine in Deleuze‘ – Theory, Culture & Society, online first (requires subscription)

In the late 1970s and early 1980s French philosopher Gilles Deleuze authored a series of articles in which he reflected on the formation of the state of Israel and its subsequent dispossession and colonisation of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Naming the state of Israel as a colonial state, Deleuze’s under-discussed texts connect Israel’s programme of colonisation to that of the United States and the persisting dispossession of indigenous peoples. In so doing, this article argues, Deleuze offers an analysis of the development of capitalism that takes seriously its relation to colonial violence. Having called attention to Deleuze’s writings on Palestine, the conclusion of this article asks why these texts have been marginalised by Deleuze scholars. It asks how we might think of this marginalisation as contributing to the subjugation of Palestinian life, and as indicative of how relations of colonialism structure western social theory.

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David Beer, Georg Simmel’s Concluding Thoughts: Worlds, Lives, Fragments – Palgrave June 2019

Posted on January 18, 2019 by

DxIn_cNWsAAUSJ5.jpg-large.jpgDavid Beer, Georg Simmel’s Concluding Thoughts: Worlds, Lives, Fragments – Palgrave June 2019

This book draws upon the work of Georg Simmel to explore the limits, tensions and dynamism of social life through a close analysis of the works produced in the final years of his life and reveals what they might still offer some 100 years later. Focusing on the relationships between worlds, lives and fragments in these works, David Beer opens up a conceptual toolkit for understanding life as both an individual experience and as a deeply social phenomenon. Taking the reader through artistic and musical forms of inspiration, to the problems of culture and on to the conceptual understanding of lived experience, the book illuminates the richness of Simmel’s ideas and thinking. This sophisticated dialogue with Simmel’s lesser known later works will provide fresh insights for students and scholars of cultural and social theory and pave the way for a reinvigorated engagement with his ideas.

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Neil Brenner, New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question – OUP, June 2019

Posted on January 18, 2019 by

9780190627195Neil Brenner, New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question – OUP, June 2019

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

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Review Michel Foucault va au cinéma / Foucault at the Movies (2019)

Posted on January 18, 2019 by

Foucault at the Movies (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/foucault-at-the-movies/9780231167079) reviewed in French

Foucault News

Sforzini, A. (2019). Michel Foucault va au cinéma / Foucault at the Movies. Le Foucaldien, 5(1), 1.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.56

Abstract
This article reviews the book Foucault at the Movies, published in French in 2011 and translated into English by Clare O’Farrell in 2018. The author first discusses the general structure and aims of the volume. The article then summarizes the two main essays composing the book, and finally examines its philosophical relevance for contemporary Foucauldian studies.

Keywords: Foucault , cinema , history , event , body , experience

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The Eye of War: A Symposium

Posted on January 11, 2019 by

Symposium on Antoine Bousquet’s new book The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone

The Disorder Of Things

Over the coming week, The Disorder of Things will host a symposium on Antoine Bousquet’s new book The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone, published last year by University of Minnesota Press. Following today’s introductory post by the author will be contributions from Katharine Hall, Dan Öberg, Matthew Ford, and Jairus Grove before a final rejoinder from Antoine. See also The Eye of War‘s accompanying website for a visual synopsis of the book and special order discounts.

Antoine is a Reader in International Relations at Birkbeck, University of London and a long-standing contributor to The Disorder of Things. His first book was The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (Hurst Publishers & Columbia University Press, 2009). Antoine’s visual-heavy war-centric twitter feed can be found here.

All the entries in this series will be collated here. Previous…

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Richard Polt, Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties – Rowman & Littlefield, March 2019

Posted on January 11, 2019 by

9781786610492Richard Polt, Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties – Rowman & Littlefield, March 2019

In this important new book, Richard Polt takes a fresh approach to Heidegger’s thought during his most politicized period, and works toward a philosophical appropriation of his most valuable ideas. Polt shows how central themes of the 1930s—such as inception, emergency, and the question “Who are we?”—grow from seeds planted in Being and Time and are woven into Heidegger’s political thought. Working with recently published texts, including Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, Polt traces the thinker’s engagement and disengagement from the Nazi movement. He critiques Heidegger for his failure to understand the political realm, but also draws on his ideas to propose a “traumatic ontology” that understands individual and collective existence as identities that are always in question, and always remain exposed to disruptive events. Time and Trauma is a bold attempt to gain philosophical insight from the most problematic and controversial phase of Heidegger’s thought.

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Books received – Bataille & Weil, Grmek, Heidegger, Cook, Theory, Culture & Society

Posted on January 11, 2019 by

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Books received – George Bataille and Eric Weil correspondence, Mirko D. Grmek, Pathological Realities: Essays on Disease, Experiments, and History; the new translation of Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning the Thing, Deborah Cook, Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West, and the 2018 annual review of Theory, Culture & Society, including my review essay of Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume 4.

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Corine Pelluchon, Nourishment: A Philosophy of the Political Body – Bloomsbury 2019

Posted on January 3, 2019 by

9781350073876Corine Pelluchon, Nourishment: A Philosophy of the Political Body, translated by Justin E. H. Smith,  Bloomsbury 2019

In this original and important book, Corine Pelluchon argues for nothing less than a new social contract that does justice to the biosphere, to all life, especially other animals, as well as human life, and to future generations. On the basis of a phenomenology of food and nourishment, she shows how freedom depends on the “love of life” and on sharing what nourishes with others. Pelluchon also takes up the practical challenge of reimagining democratic institutions to sustain this ethics of life. Anyone interested in questions of justice and environmental or food ethics should read this book.

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Jo van Every – About the Short Guides Series on writing and publishing

Posted on January 2, 2019 by

Jo van Every, About the Short Guides Series – an introduction to her series of books about academic writing and publishing. The third volume is due out soon.

As I was finalising the third volume in this series of books, my editor suggested that I might want to write a series introduction. I published the first volume, The Scholarly Writing Process in November 2016. The 2nd volume, Finding Time for your Scholarly Writing was published in April/June 2018. The ebook of volume 3, Scholarly Publishing, will be publishing on 7 January 2019 with the paperback following later that month.

There are lots more links and some discussions about writing and publishing from this site archived here.

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