Progressive Geographies

A Time for Critique, Edited by Didier Fassin and Bernard E. Harcourt
Columbia University Press, 2019

In a world of political upheaval, rising inequality, catastrophic climate change, and widespread doubt of even the most authoritative sources of information, is there a place for critique? This book calls for a systematic reappraisal of critical thinking—its assumptions, its practices, its genealogy, its predicament—following the principle that critique can only start with self-critique.

In A Time for Critique, Didier Fassin, Bernard E. Harcourt, and a group of eminent political theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary and legal scholars reflect on the multiplying contexts and forms of critical discourse and on the social actors and social movements engaged in them. How can one maintain sufficient distance from the eventful present without doing it an injustice? How can one address contemporary issues without repudiating the intellectual legacies of the past? How can one…

Philippe Artières, Le dossier sauvage, Verticales, Octobre 2019

« Enquêter sur des archives qui auraient été rassemblées par Michel Foucault. Déplier chacune de ses pièces pour suivre la trace d’individus qui se sont retirés du monde au XIXe et au XXe siècle. Redécouvrir, en marge du dossier, que dans une forêt des Vosges, il est un autre ermite qui a marqué mon enfance.
Lors du dépouillement de cette généalogie sauvage, il arrivera que je me perde, mais n’est-ce pas le propre du chercheur que de s’aventurer en un territoire où plus il avance plus ce qu’il croyait savoir se dérobe sous ses pas. » [Ph.A.]

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From the outset Philippe Artières stages himself receiving a file entitled «Wild Lives» which seems to have been gathered by Michel Foucault. This unpublished collection contains bundles of documents on individuals who withdrew from the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among…

Jane Hutton’s Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, is out with Routledge. I have been following Hutton’s work for a long time and I was eager to read this elaboration of her previous research on the relational political ecology of uneven material flows. Here is the summary:

How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials – fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood – from seminal public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from.

Drawing from archival documents, photographs, and field trips, the author brings these two separate landscapes – the material’s source and the urban site where the material ended up – together, exploring themes of unequal ecological exchange, labor, and material flows. Each chapter follows a single…

In French, here.

Update: the Palgrave site now says January 2020 24 November 2019 – but they have missed several previous dates…

Michel Foucault, Penal Theories and Institutions: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1971-1972 – Palgrave November 2018

“What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates (even if they had to be simple mediators or arbitrators).  What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute.  And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development.  What defines the juridical order is the way in which one confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.”

– Michel Foucault

Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel…

Aldo Avellaneda y Guillermo Vega, (eds.) Conductas que importan. Variantes de análisis de los Estudios en Gubernamentalidad. EUDENE 2018.

Presentation: Wednesday, 27, 18:30. Salón de Actos, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, Argentina.

Resumen
Los así llamados Governmentality Studies (Estudios en Gubernamentalidad) vieron la luz en el año 1991, si convenimos en otorgar crédito suficiente a la designación que Colin Gordon, Graham Burchel y Peter Miller emplearon para denominar una compilación de artículos que se hacían eco, de una u otra manera, del concepto foucaulteano de gobierno. En efecto, en la clase del primero de febrero de 1978 dictada en el Collège de France, Foucault se había enfocado en las artes de gobierno como modo específico de articulación de las relaciones de poder y en la gubernamentalidad como grilla de inteligibilidad de las mismas, dando de esta manera un giro vertiginoso sobre las estrategias de análisis de los…

Mauro Senatore review’s Jacques Derrida: La vie la mort: Séminaire (1975-1976) in Phenomenological Reviews.
The seminar’s translation, 𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ, by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, is expected next year.