If you missed the 2023 Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society on ‘Foucault Before the Collège de France‘, which I edited with Daniele Lorenzini and Orazio Irrera…
All papers are open access or free access at the moment
Papers include ones by most of the editors of the early courses and manuscripts by Foucault, currently being published and in the process of being translated.
In Plantation Worlds, Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region’s landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the Global South, Barua offers an alternative grammar for articulating environmental change. In so doing, he prompts a rethinking of multispecies ecologies and how they are structured by colonialism and race.
The first edited volume solely dedicated to the philosophy of Adriana Cavaero.
“Landerreche Cardillo and Silverbloom are right to hold that Cavarero has reached ‘critical acclaim’ in the ‘Italian and English-speaking world.’ I would broaden this audience to include the rest of Europe, Latin America, and very likely other areas of the world. Cavarero’s areas of expertise—philosophy, political science, women’s and gender studies, feminist theory, musicology, literature, modern languages, queer theory, and the arts—demand a common theme to link them together within the pages of a single volume. The editors have chosen Cavarer’s political philosophy in response to that demand. Their choice is wise because the political area is central to Cavarero’s many books and of great interest to interdisciplinary as well as to philosophical thinkers and academics. Political Bodies constitutes an exciting inaugural contribution to what might be called the field of ‘Cavarero studies.'” — Fred Evans, author of Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics
Uncovers the inherently religious structure of the criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and dispossessed peoples
Most popular critical accounts of mass criminalization interpret police and prisons as purely social or political phenomena. While such accounts have been indispensable in moving millions into collective action and resistance, the carceral state remains as pervasive as ever.
White Property, Black Trespass argues that understanding why we have police and prisons, and building a world of safety and abundance beyond them, requires that we acknowledge the inherently religious function that criminalization fulfills for a colonial and racial capitalist order that puts its faith in cops and cages to save it from the existential threat of disorder that its own structural violence creates.
The story of criminalization, Krinks shows, begins with the eurochristian aspiration to become God at the expense of all others—an aspiration that gives rise to the pseudo-sacred powers of whiteness and property, and, by extension, the police power that exists to serve and protect them. Tracing the historical continuity and religiosity of the color line, the property line, and the thin blue line, Krinks reveals police power as the pseudo-divine power to exile nonwhite and dispossessed trespassers to carceral hell.
At once incisive and expansive, this groundbreaking work deepens understanding of racial capitalism and mass criminalization by illuminating the religious mythologies that animate them. It concludes with thoughts on what might be entailed in a religion rooted in rejection of the religious idolatry of mass criminalization—a religion of abolition.
Conservatives have always tended to claim Shakespeare as one of their own. In the 1950s, E. M. W. Tillyard developed the influential thesis that Shakespeare’s plays uphold the traditional social hierarchies and suggest that these hierarchies are embedded in nature. Ulysses’ speech on “degree” in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ serves as one of the key witnesses in this context. Since Tillyard’s time, scholars have persistently pointed out elements of Shakespeare’s plays that do not fit this assumption: the actions on stage persistently seem to contradict and subvert the noble proclamations of Ulysses and his peers. In the histories and tragedies, the persons on top of the hierarchy mostly seem to end up there by a combination of luck, political manipulation and, first and foremost, the effective use of violence, rather than by any apparent inborn excellence.
Accordingly, Shakespeare’s plays represent a volatile social order in which communal life unfolds as perpetual warfare between interest groups – sometimes open, sometimes covert. With Corey Robin and others, one might venture the hypothesis that this apparent discrepancy between words and deeds delineates a symptomatic ambivalence that characterizes the reactionary worldview: while reactionaries claim to be conservative, their enforcement of traditional hierarchies often takes on the form of a violent interruption of these very traditions. In the name of nature and of “real life”, they voice unprecedented demands that those who are destined to rule may finally be allowed to rule as they must and to keep their inferiors in the subjugated position they deserve. The most extreme form these demands can take is that of fascism, a militant movement of revolutionary conservatism that, according to Hannah Arendt, has the inherent tendency to destroy everything it ostensibly holds sacred (such as the family, the state and the nation). Shakespeare’s plays (first and foremost, ‘Coriolanus’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘King Lear’ and ‘Hamlet’) have been used to explore this ambivalence, by reactionaries and fascists as well as by their opponents. This one-day symposium aims to investigate this complex relationship.
The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich (1342–after 1416) is the first known woman to author a book in the English language, recognized today for her strikingly optimistic claim that “all shall be well.” Her visionary text Revelations of Divine Love is the product of many years of contemplation, written and revised after a life-changing event of near-fatal illness and divine revelation.
Hannah Lucas explores the entanglement of illness and revelation in Julian’s writings, illuminating the unexpected commonalities between the medical and the mystical and their significance for philosophies of health. Framed by an original application of post-Heideggerian philosophy, Impossible Recovery offers a vivid new interpretation of the medieval mystic as crafting a proto-phenomenological theology of well-being. Lucas’s careful readings pay close attention to Julian’s mystical language and poetics, revealing the surprising resonances of her writings with modern and postmodern thought. Refracted through Julian’s Revelations, this book advances a powerful existential query about the possibilities of recovery—of well-being, and of medieval history.
The new edition uses the translation by Derek Coltman as the basis, but also has notes with all the first edition variants, updated, completed and sometimes corrected notes, a new Introduction by me and an Afterword by Veena Das.
A photo of the proofs of the new, critical edition, the 1988 original English translation, and the French second edition of 1948
A pile of recently bought or sent books including The Anti-Security Collective, The Security Abolition Manifesto, Miguel de Beistegui, Lacan: A Genealogy, Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, Zoroastre, Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of The Song of Igor’s Campaign, the most recent issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas, Maan Barua, Plantation Worlds, and a somewhat battered first edition of Georges Dumézil’s La Religion romaine archaïque.
One of the collective sent the manifesto, and Barthes and de Beistegui were in recompense for review work. Duke University Press kindly sent the copy of Plantation Worlds. I have an essay in the journal – “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” – and the first edition of Dumézil’s text will be useful as I continue working through his books in detail (I already have the second, revised edition and translation). The article is behind a paywall, but email me if you don’t have institutional access and would like to see a copy.
Maps the radical cosmopolitan dimension of global protests and social movements from recent decades
Rethinks the foundations, practices and institutions of cosmopolitanism from a radical perspective
Reads the first cosmopolitan stance of the Ancient Cynics as a militant cosmopolitics
Argues for conceiving the idea of World Republic as the institution of critique
Formulates a sustained critique of political philosophy’s reluctance to view human beings as citizens of the world
Works across the disciplines of political theory, critical theory, continental philosophy, poststructuralism and deconstruction
This book explores cosmopolitanism’s radical dynamic as expressed in the struggles from below, all over the world, against exclusion and domination, pointing to the horizon of another world that appears possible. It shows that cosmopolitanism emerges negatively through disaffiliation from the given forms of belonging and by questioning of the existing meanings and unjust practices. Through a radical critique, cosmopolitanism goes to the roots of the existing world order based on the nation-state, exposes its exclusionary structure, and brings instead the idea of a World Republic where No One Is Illegal and where all are equal citizens of the world.
With this series, usually paperbacks follow 12 months after publication with Haymarket.
This volume gathers papers written by archaeologists utilising the methods of historical materialism, attesting not only to what Marxism has contributed to archaeology, but also to what archaeology has contributed, and can contribute, to Marxism as a method for interpreting the history of humanity. The book’s contributors consider the question of what archaeology can contribute to a historical perspective on the overcoming of present-day capitalism, synthesising developments in world archaeology, and supplying concrete case studies of the archaeology of the Americas, Europe and the Near East.
Contributors are: Guillermo Acosta Ochoa, Marcus Bajema, Bernardo Gandulla, Alex Gonzales-Panta, Pablo Jaruf, Vicente Lull, Savas Michael-Matsas, Rafael Micó, Ianir Milevski, Patricia Pérez Martínez, Cristina Rihuete Herrada, Roberto Risch, Steve Roskams, Henry Tantaleán, Marcelo Vitores, and LouAnn Wurst.
