Cover of the book, with Melancholia I by Albrecht Dürer (1514)
Aby Warburg is regarded as one of the great pioneers of modern cultural studies. This book brings together texts by many of the most renowned researchers in the field who have been influenced by his work. They address his extraordinary impact on the understanding of cultural transmission and the influence of images and texts across time and space. What emerges is the continuing significance of Warburg for our own times. No one concerned with the many forms of the survival of the past in the present and the infinitely complex relationships between images and society will want to miss this book.
Published in cooperation with the Warburg Institute, London and with the assistance of a grant from the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, New York.
With contributions by: Andreas Beyer , Horst Bredekamp , Lorraine Daston , Georges Didi-Huberman , Uwe Fleckner , Kurt W. Forster , David Freedberg , Carlo Ginzburg , Anke te Heesen , Christopher D. Johnson , Peter N. Miller , W. J. T. Mitchell , Andrea Pinotti , Ulrich Raulff , Elizabeth Sears , Quentin Skinner , Martin Treml , Marina Warner , Martin Warnke , Claudia Wedepohl and Sigrid Weigel
The publisher sent a copy of Philippe’s book, on his request; the Behrent is to review; I have an essay in Federico’s collection, and Burak generously sent a copy of his book. The others were bought second-hand.
Humans are animals who fictionalize other animals to asse their “humanness.” We are philosophical animals who philosophize about our humanity by projecting images onto a mirror about other animals. Spanning literature, philosophy, and ethics, the thread uniting The Philosophical Animal is the bestiary and how it continues to inform our imaginings. Beginning with an exploration of animals and women in the literary work of Coetzee, famous for his book on the Lives of Animals, Eduardo Mendieta then dives into the genre of bestiaries in order to investigate the relation between humanity and animality. From there he approaches the works of Derrida and Habermas from the standpoint of genetic engineering and animal studies. While we have intensely modified many species genetically, we have not done this to ourselves. Why? Finally, Mendieta deals with the political and ethical implications suggested by this question before ending on an autobiographical note about growing up around so-called animals, and in particular horses.
“This eloquent discussion brings a range of continental figures and European traditions of philosophy to bear on the question of the animal. From Habermas to Derrida, and all that lies between, Mendieta’s discussion is unique and thought-provoking.” — Cynthia Willett, author of Interspecies Ethics
The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Politics of Technocratic Economic Governanceis about the politics of economic ideas and technocratic economic governance. It is also a book about the changing political economy of British capitalism’s relationship to the European and wider global economies. It focuses on the creation in 2010 and subsequent operation of the independent body created to oversee fiscal rectitude in Britain, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). More broadly, it analyses the politics of economic management of the UK’s uncertain trajectory, and of British capitalism’s restructuring in the 2010s and 2020s in the face of the upheavals of the global financial crisis (GFC), Brexit and COVID. A focus on the intersection between expert economic opinion of the OBR as UK’s fiscal watchdog, and the political economy of British capitalism’s evolution through and after Brexit, animates a framework for analysing the politics of technocratic economic governance.
The technocratic vision of independent fiscal councils fails to grasp a core political economy insight: that economic knowledge and narratives are political and social constructs. The book unpacks the competing constructions of economic reason that underpin models of British capitalism, and through that inform expert economic assessment of the UK economy. It also underlines how contestable political economic assumptions undergird visions of Britain’s international economic relations. These were all brought to the fore in economic policy debates about Britain’s place in the world, which in the 2010s centred on Brexit. This book analyses OBR forecasting and fiscal oversight in that broader political context, rather than as a narrowly technical pursuit.
Some interesting discussion, particularly in terms of highlighting multiple ways to work, rather than a single way to begin.
Do you use conferences as a way to start new writing projects?
In my experience it’s a pretty common practice. You are working on some research. You need to transition into the writing phase. A conference offers an impetus to make a decision about what you might write and get some kind of reasonable draft in order. After the conference, you can revise it into an article or book chapter.
There is lots to like about this strategy [continues here]
“The Architectural Gift,” a conversation between architectural historian Łukasz Stanek and Places editor Frances Richard
House of Culture and Youth Theatre Complex in Darkhan, Mongolia, designed by L. Kataev, E. Antipova, and V. Shifrin, 1978. A gift of the Soviet Union to what was then the Mongolian People’s Republic. Photographed in 2018. [Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are by Łukasz Stanek]
Gifted buildings are potent mechanisms of geopolitical reshuffling, premised on an uneven power relation between giver and receiver. How do such exchanges shape cities in transition?
You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of history and its racialized inequalities. Our posture and gait reflect our social and political experiences as we navigate the city under capitalism. Through a series of dialogues with thinkers and walkers, his book explores the relationship between freedom and the human body
How We Walk foregrounds the work of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and leading thinker of liberation, who was one of the first people to think about the politics of ‘walking while black’. It also introduces us to the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who wrote that one could discern the truth about a person through their posture and gait. For Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the ability to walk upright and with ease is a sign of personal and social freedom.
Through these excursions, Beaumont reimagines the canonical literature on walking and presents a new interpretation of the impact of class and race on our physical and political mobility, raising important questions about the politics of the body.
There is a discussion with Annie Olaloku-Teriba at the Verso podcast. Thanks to dmf for that link.
A post exploring the generational links between Merrifield, David Harvey, Piero Sraffa and Antonio Gramsci.
I was in New York recently, where I once lived, some twenty-years back, there to visit my old friend and mentor, my old university teacher—and now he is old—an 88-year-old David Harvey, the world-renowned Marx scholar. I hadn’t seen him for a while and was keen to catch up, to hear his news and tell him some of my own, about my life in Rome, about my work on Gramsci. Ever so brilliant, it’s good to get some tips from David, some inspiration, a little encouragement, as well as a bit of critical feedback. As usual, too, in his company, we did a lot of talking and eating, some drinking, and together we rode the East River ferry over to Brooklyn and back, just for the fun of it, on a bitterly cold afternoon. It’s one of David’s favorite Big Apple past times; he does it alone most days; during Covid lockdowns, he said, it was an al fresco lifeline. [continues here]
I’ve not written much on Kant, but he was the topic of perhaps my favourite of the essay collections I’ve edited or co-edited – Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), Reading Kant’s Geography, SUNY Press, 2011.
Eduardo and I discussed the idea and while we realised we couldn’t write the book together, we did know or know of the people who could. We brought many of them together for workshops in New York and Durham. It’s very much a book I think of as one by many hands – not just a collection of pieces on a theme, but one where the pieces fit together to cover most of the aspects of a topic.
The book came out shortly before the translation of one of the versions of Kant’s lectures was translated into English in the Natural Science collection. The problems of that text are discussed in the book in detail – we had contributions from the English and French translators, and the German editors.
Perspectives on Kant’s teachings on geography and how they relate his understanding of the world.
For almost forty years, German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant gave lectures on geography, more than almost any other subject. Kant believed that geography and anthropology together provided knowledge of the world, an empirical ground for his thought. Above all, he thought that knowledge of the world was indispensable to the development of an informed cosmopolitan citizenry that would be self-ruling. While these lectures have received very little attention compared to his work on other subjects, they are an indispensable source of material and insight for understanding his work, specifically his thinking and contributions to anthropology, race theory, space and time, history, the environment and the emergence of a mature public. This indispensable volume brings together world-renowned scholars of geography, philosophy and related disciplines to offer a broad discussion of the importance of Kant’s work on this topic for contemporary philosophical and geographical work.
It was not the easiest of books to get contracted – I remember clearly one rejection, only moments after we’d sent a carefully-crafted pitch, which was basically to say “philosophers aren’t interested in geography; geographers aren’t interested in Kant”. But it found a good home with SUNY Press, thanks to the interest of Dennis J. Schmidt in the project.
The table of contents is:
Acknowledgments
Reintroducing Kant’s Geography
Stuart Elden
I. The Invention of Geography: Kant and His Times
Immanuel Kant and the Emergence of Modern Geography
Michael Church
Kant’s Geography in Comparative Perspective
Charles W. J. Withers
II. From a Lecture Course of Forty Years to a Book Manuscript: Textual Issues
Kant’s Lectures on “Physical Geography”: A Brief Outline of Its Origins, Transmission, and Development: 1754–1805
Werner Stark
Historical and Philological References on the Question of a Possible Hierarchy of Human “Races,” “Peoples,” or “Populations” in Immanuel Kant—A Supplement.
Werner Stark
Translating Kant’s Physical Geography: Travails and Insights into Eighteenth Century Science (and Philosophy)
Olaf Reinhardt
Writing Space: Historical Narrative and Geographical Description in Kant’s Physical Geography
Max Marcuzzi
III. Towards a Cosmopolitan Education: Geography and Anthropology
“The Play of Nature”: Human Beings in Kant’s Geography
Robert Louden
The Pragmatic Use of Kant’s Physical Geography Lectures
Holly Wilson
The Place of the Organism in Kantian Philosophy: Geography, Teleology, and the Limits of Philosophy
David Morris
IV. Kant’s Geography of Reason: Reason and Its Spatiality
Kant’s Geography of Reason
Jeff Malpas and Karsten Thiel
Orientation in Thinking: Geographical Problems, Political Solutions
Onora O’Neill
“The Unity of All Places on the Face of the Earth”: Original Community, Acquisition, and Universal Will in Kant’s Doctrine of Right
Jeffrey Edwards
V. Gender, Race, History, and Geography
Cosmopolitanism in the Anthropology and Geography
David Harvey
Is there Still Room for Freedom? A Commentary on David Harvey’s “Cosmopolitanism in the Anthropology and Geography”
Ed Casey
Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race
Robert Bernasconi
The Darker Side of the Enlightenment: A De-Colonial Reading of Kant’s Geography
Walter Mignolo
Geography is to History as Woman is to Man: Kant on Sex, Race, and Geography
Eduardo Mendieta
An earlier essay of mine, “Reassessing Kant’s Geography” was published in Journal of Historical Geography in 2009. My introduction to the edited volume was a shorter, and revised version of this text. I’m happy to share the pdf of the essay if you email me.
Some nice things were said about the book:
“…a timely collection of eighteen essays woven into a coherent matrix by the two editors Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta. A splendid job, by its nature an inherently interdisciplinary endeavour, at the same time a window to the past and a gate-opener to the future. ” —Gunnar Olsson, Geografiska Annaler Series B
“One of the great strengths of Reading Kant’s Geography is that it brings together geographers and philosophers to engage with the nexus between Kant and geography. ” — Robert Mayhew, Journal of Historical Geography
“A moment of Kantian enlightenment! In a splendid, interdisciplinary set of interrogations, the nature and significance of Immanuel Kant’s geography is brought into full light for the very first time. This remarkable work of retrieval thus enlightens, at once, Kant’s own Enlightenment project, and geography’s place in the project of Enlightenment. Whether dealing with racial geography, philosophical topography, or cosmopolitan politics, Reading Kant’s Geography constantly illuminates and instructs. If, as is sometimes said, geography is too important to be left to geographers, it’s no less true that it’s too important to be left to philosophers. ” — David N. Livingstone, author of Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins
“This volume of impeccable scholarship and sustained critical inquiry performs an invaluable service. It is a major contribution to writings on the history of geography, but it also shows that Kant’s geography was far from incidental to the whole outworking of his philosophy, nor to what he claimed about the potentialities and pitfalls in shared human occupation of the planet. As such, this volume needs to be read by anyone concerned with enlightenment, modernity, and issues such as cosmopolitanism and transnationalism. ” — Chris Philo, editor of Theory and Methods: Critical Essays in Human Geography
“This excellent book, which oozes scholarly seriousness from start to finish, offers something new to philosophers and geographers alike… There is a pleasing consistency to Reading Kant’s Geography that the editors and contributors must be congratulated for. Despite involving nineteen different authors and two translators, all the pieces are intellectually rich, carefully argued, well structured and written in crisp English. There was clearly a collective desire to ensure that this book meets the highest scholarly standards. The SUNY Press have also done an excellent presentational job: from the cover sleeve to the font choice to the extensive end notes and beyond, the book makes you want to pick it up and dive in. Reading Kant’s Geography is both authoritative and attractive in equal measure”. — Noel Castree, Annals of the Association of American Geographers
How did early moderns experience sense and space? How did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge out of those experiences and further shape them This Element takes an approach that is both global expansive and locally rooted by focusing on four cities as key examples: Florence, Amsterdam, Boston, and Manila. They relate to distinct parts of European cultural and colonialist experience from north to south, republican to monarchical, Catholic to Protestant. Without attempting a comprehensive treatment, the Element aims to convey the range of distinct experiences of space and sense as these varied by age, gender, race, and class. Readers see how sensory and spatial experiences emerged through religious cultures which were themselves shaped by temporal rhythms, and how sound and movement expressed gathering economic and political forces in an emerging global order. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Progressive Geographies 