Progressive Geographies

Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought – Princeton University Press, November 2024

In Citizen Marx, Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism. Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism. One of Marx’s principal political values, Leipold argues, was a republican conception of freedom, according to which one is unfree when subjected to arbitrary power.

Placing Marx’s republican communism in its historical context—but not consigning him that context—Leipold traces Marx’s shifting relationship to republicanism across three broad periods. First, Marx began his political life as a republican committed to a democratic republic in which citizens held active popular sovereignty. Second, he transitioned to communism, criticizing republicanism but incorporating the republican opposition to arbitrary power into his social critiques. He argued that although a democratic republic was not sufficient for emancipation, it was necessary for it. Third, spurred by the events of the Paris Commune of 1871, he came to view popular control in representation and public administration as essential to the realization of communism. Leipold shows how Marx positioned his republican communism to displace both antipolitical socialism and anticommunist republicanism. One of Marx’s great contributions, Leipold argues, was to place politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of socialism.

The Lenin Quintet – a series of works published to mark the centenary of his death

The Lenin Quintet includes new editions of Lenin’s work, including The State and Revolution, Not By Politics Alone, and Imperialism and the National Question, with contributions from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Tariq Ali, and Antonio Negri. See all the books here.

Benjamin Fraser, “The scholarly journal as puzzle: On time, collaboration and closure” (open access)

As the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (JUCS) closes its tenth year of publication, this second instalment of a two-part editorial turns towards questions regarding the nature of scholarly journals. Building from Part 1’s exploration of comics artist Chris Ware’s tactile puzzle Building Stories: Vortex of Anamnesis, the central metaphor of journal as an intellectual puzzle is considered. Specific aspects of time and collaboration are addressed as fundamental concerns for the puzzle of journal editing. After considering, in passing, challenges to editing in the twenty-first century, final comments address the notion of closure, drawn from comics theory.

French interview with Carlo Ginzburg

Simona Forti, Totalitarianism: A Borderline Idea in Political Philosophy – Stanford University Press, January 2024

In the last decade, we have witnessed the return of one of the most controversial terms in the political lexicon: totalitarianism. What are we talking about when we define a totalitarian political and social situation? When did we start using the word as both adjective and noun? And, what totalitarian ghosts haunt the present? 

Philosopher Simona Forti seeks to answer these questions by reconstructing not only the genealogy of the concept, but also by clarifying its motives, misunderstandings, and the controversies that have animated its current resurgence. Taking into account political theories and historical discussions, Totalitarianism especially focuses on philosophical reflections, from the question of totalitarian biopolitics to the alleged totalitarian drifts of neoliberalism. The work invites the relentless formulation of a radical question about the democratic age: the possibilities it has opened up, the voids it leaves behind, the mechanisms it activates, and the “voluntary servitude” it produces. Forti argues that totalitarianism cannot be considered an external threat to democracy, but rather as one of the possible answers to those questions posed by modernity which democracies have not been able to solve. Her investigation of the uses and abuses of totalitarianism as one of the fundamental categories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries promises to provoke much-needed discussion and debate among those in philosophy, politics, ethics, and beyond.

Raoul Vaneigem, Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century – trans. Bill Brown, Columbia University Press, February 2024

Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century is a revisionary account of the forms of thought and belief that have been rejected or suppressed by orthodox Christianity over the course of the centuries. Formidably erudite without ever drifting into dry scholasticism, Resistance to Christianityranges from the origins of the Bible to the fraught doctrinal controversies of the fourth century to the Levellers and Jansenists of the early modern period, thereby revealing the too-little-known history that lies behind the modern world’s theological horizons.

Resistance to Christianity is far more, however, than a study of religious movements and ideas; indeed, Vaneigem is bracingly unapologetic in his ambition “to examine the resistance that the inclination to natural liberty has, for nearly twenty centuries, opposed to . . . Christian oppression.” The story of how men and women have again and again resisted the authoritarian implications of religious orthodoxy is, above all, a crucial strand of the history of human freedom.

Bill Brown’s translation makes available in English a major work by one of the preeminent thinkers of our time. A remarkable feat of historical scholarship that deserves to be widely read, Resistance to Christianityrepresents radical thought at its most exciting, incisive, and compelling.

Thomas Nail, Matter and Motion: A Brief History of Kinetic Materalism – Edinburgh University Press, December 2023

Tells a new history of materialism – from prehistory to the present – that resists stasis, heirarchy and domination

• Traces a lineage of thinkers who have philosophically integrated ideas of matter, motion, indeterminacy, relationality and process
• Discusses thinkers drawn from the ancient to the modern – from the Bronze Age to quantum physics – who each offer their own kind of evidence for a world without metaphysics or hierarchy
• Shows that the established hierarchies that govern Western thought and society are contingent and performative – there is no ontologically legitimate justification for social, aesthetic or scientific domination

Thomas Nail traces an alternative history of ancient and modern thinkers who share a radically different understanding of the nature of matter and motion within the Euro-Western tradition. From Archaic Greek poetry and Bronze Age Minoan religion to the Roman poet Lucretius, and from German philosopher Karl Marx and English writer Virginia Woolf to contemporary physicists Carlo Rovelli and Karen Barad, Nail identifies a minor tradition of what he calls kinetic materialism and its three central ideas: indeterminacy, relationality and process.

For the most part, Western thinkers have considered matter and motion to be inferior to more formal and static principles. Philosophers placed metaphysical categories such as eternity, God, the soul, forms and essences at the ‘top’ of a hierarchy that secured and ordered the movement at the bottom. This has real consequences in our world. By placing stasis above motion, this hierarchy places form above matter, life above death, God above humans, humans above nature, men above women, white skin above brown skin, the first world over the third world, citizens above migrants, straight above queer… The result? Patriarchy, capitalism, racism, homophobia, ecocide. Nail seeks to undermine this inherited hierarchy and the notion that matter and motion are inferior. There are no fixed authorities. This new history of matter and motion leaves the good life up to us, whoever we may become.

Md Azmeary Ferdoush, Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border – Cambridge University Press, May 2024

The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India existed as extra-territorial spaces since 1947. They were finally exchanged and merged as host state territories in 2015. Sovereign Atonement focuses on the protracted territorial exchange and experiences of the newly accepted Bangladeshi citizens. It grapples with one broad question: why did the state assume an active role in smoothing the once excluded population’s experiences into their inclusion within the sovereign project? The book dives deep into an ethnographic and historical reading of the everyday state, land and territory, informality, (non)state actors, and performance of sovereignty. Furthermore, it troubles the often taken-for-granted understanding of exception, governance, and citizenship. As such, Ferdoush offers a retake on the two seemingly contradictory concepts -‘sovereign’ and ‘atonement’- to demonstrate that bridged together these concepts as sovereign atonement enables a novel way of appreciating geopolitical narratives, political geographies, and nationalistic discourse in South Asia and beyond.