Progressive Geographies

Walter Benjamin and Shakespeare, Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB, 28-29 November 2018

One of the key figures in Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play is Hamlet; for Benjamin as for Schmitt and Agamben, Shakespeare’s tragedy is emblematic of a political theology as distinctive for the 17th century as for its latter day reception in the 20th century. There are, however, repeated references to Shakespeare throughout Benjamin’s writings. While a central part of the workshop will focus on Hamlet, the Baroque and Benjamin’s theory of the mourning play, the workshop will also seek to offer analyses of the constancy of reference to Shakespeare, both tragic and comic, in translation and in stagecraft. The workshop will open with a discussion of the new Italian translation of Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, presented by the translators Alice Barale and Fabrizio Desideri.

Speakers include: Alice Barale, Fabrizio Desideri,Julia Reinhard Lupton, Freddie Rokem, Howard Caygill, Julia Ng, Andrew Benjamin, Björn Quiring and Fabrizio Desideri.

This conference is organised by Andrew Benjamin, Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics at Monash University, Australia and Julia Ng, Lecturer in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London.

A full programme will be announced shortly. Free and open to all.

Further details and booking form here.

The Body Productive programme – Birkbeck, University of London, 8 December 2018

The keynote is by François Guéry – ‘Marx’s Vision of our Future’, and has a closing roundtable on ‘The Productive Body in the 21st Century’. The conference develops themes from François Guéry and Didier Deleule’s The Productive Body (1972), translated in (2014). The conference website has some excerpts and discount codes.

François Dosse, La saga des intellectuels français, I: À l’épreuve de l’histoire (1944-1968) and La saga des intellectuels français, II: L’avenir en miettes (1968-1989) – Gallimard, 2018

Nul n’était aussi bien armé que François Dosse pour relever le défi : une histoire panoramique et systématique de l’aventure historique et créatrice des intellectuels français, de la Libération au bicentenaire de la Révolution et à la chute du mur de Berlin.
Son Histoire du structuralisme en deux volumes, son attention à la marche des idées, ses nombreuses biographies (de Michel de Certeau, Paul Ricœur, Pierre Nora, Cornelius Castoriadis) lui ont donné, depuis vingt ou trente ans, une connaissance assez intime de la vie intellectuelle de la seconde moitié du XX^e siècle pour lui permettre de couronner son œuvre par une tentative de cette envergure.
Le premier volume, 1944-1968, couvre les années Sartre et Beauvoir et leurs contestations, les rapports contrastés avec le communisme, le choc de 1956, la guerre d’Algérie, les débuts du tiers-mondisme, l’irruption du moment gaullien et sa contestation : un temps dominé par l’épreuve de l’histoire, l’influence du communisme et la progressive désillusion qui a suivi.
Le second volume, 1968-1989, va de l’utopie gauchiste, de Soljenitsyne et du combat contre le totalitarisme, à la «nouvelle philosophie», l’avènement d’une conscience écologique, la désorientation des années 80 : un temps marqué par la crise de l’avenir et qui voit s’installer l’hégémonie des sciences humaines.
Ce ne sont là que quelques-uns des points de repère de cette saga, qui embrasse une des périodes les plus effervescentes et créatrices de l’intelligentsia française, de Sartre à Lévi-Strauss, de Foucault à Lacan.
Le sujet a déjà suscité une énorme bibliographie, mais une fresque de pareille ampleur est appelée à faire date.

Saw this in Paris last month, but thanks to Harvey Shoolman for the links and the prompt to link to it. Hopefully an English translation will follow.

The Alphonso Lingis Reader, edited by Tom Sparrow – U Minnesota Press, 2018 (via Object-Orientated Philosophy)

Alphonso Lingis is arguably the most intriguing American philosopher of the past fifty years—a scholar of transience, someone who has visited and revisited more than one hundred countries and has woven this itinerary into his writing and allowed it to give form to his thinking. This book assembles a representative selection of Lingis’s work to give readers a thorough sense of his methodology and vision, the diversity of his subject matter, and the unity of his thought.

Lingis’s writing evinces the many kinds of knowledge and subtle forces circulating through human communities and their environments. His unique style blends travel writing, cultural anthropology, and personal accounts of his innumerable experiences as an active participant in the adventures and relationships that fill his life. Drawing from countless articles, essays, and interviews published over fifty years, editor Tom Sparrow chose works that follow Lingis’s engaging, often intimate reflections on the body in motion and the myriad influences—social, cultural, aesthetic, libidinal, physical, mythological—that shape and animate it as it moves through the world, among people and places both foreign and domestic, familiar and unknown. In a substantial Introduction, Sparrow provides a biographical, critical, intellectual, and cultural context for reading and appreciating Alphonso Lingis’s work.

An extended encounter with the singular philosopher, The Alphonso Lingis Reader conducts us through Lingis’s early writing on phenomenology to his hybrid studies fusing philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, communication theory, aesthetics, and other disciplines, to his original, inspired arguments about everything from knowledge to laughter to death.

Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times (Duke UP, 2016) reviewed at LSE Review of Books

How do colonial histories remain active forces shaping the conditions and most urgent issues of the present? In Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times, Ann Laura Stoler utilises ‘duress’ as a category of domination as the prism through which to analysis how imperial traces continue to impact on relations of exploitation in the contemporary moment. Ed Jones praises this book as a refreshing and deeply creative interpretation of modern politics that will offer a laboratory of ideas to readers.  

Tom Harper, Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library – October 2018 (via the Maps and Views Blog)

From the publication in 1595 of the first ‘atlas’ by Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator, the term has become a universally adopted title for books containing accurate, uniform, and evenly spread maps of all or some of the world. This is an atlas with a difference. Few of the maps in this book could reasonably be called ‘accurate’ in the modern sense and could almost certainly not be used to plan a journey. Yet this atlas can help us to travel in a way that regular atlases do not, because by looking at old maps and getting to know their stories we can be transported back to the times in which they were made.The generous, full-colour illustrations of each map in this book range from the Klencke Atlas to Hokusai’s Map of China, from a 1682 pirate map of Guatemala to 20th-century cartographic postcards featuring maps of Australia. Atlas is the definitive printed showcase of the British Library’s extensive and unparalleled map collection.