Mainly bought second-hand for the Indo-European project, along with Sara Safransky, The City after Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit, sent by Duke University Press.
The Rosemary LévyZumwalt book is the first part Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist – but the second part Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice was published late last year and is on order.
Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter – Routledge, December 2023
This book makes available, for the first time in English, lectures and interviews that Foucault gave in Japan in 1978, reconstructing their context, and isolating the question of their singular relevance for us today. In these forgotten lectures, in a free and often informal style, Foucault explores, together with his Japanese interlocutors, what it would mean to take up, from outside Europe, the questions he was raising at the time about Revolution and Enlightenment in the traditions of European critical thought. In a series of wide-ranging discussions, on sexuality and its history, non-Christian forms of spirituality, new forms of political movements, and the role of knowledge, power, and truth in them, Foucault examines these questions in relationship to Asia. He had hoped these questions, very much debated at the time in postwar Japan, would be the start of new forms of translation, publication, and exchange. At the heart of the lectures is thus a search for the creation of a new sort of transnational collaboration, recasting the history of European colonialism and opening to a philosophy no longer simply Western, yet to come.
The Japan Lectures thus contribute to the new scholarship in Asian and in translation studies which has long since moved away from earlier “Area Studies”; at the same time, it participates in the new scholarship about Foucault’s own work and itinerary, following the publication of an extraordinary wealth of materials left unfinished or unpublished by his untimely death. In these ways, The Japan Lectures help us to better see the implications of Foucault’s work for philosophy in the 21st century.
I say a bit about the material included in this book, on the basis of pre-publicity, here.
[updated 24 October 2023 with the paperback cover as well as the hardback]
Susan Slyomovics (ed.), Ordering Imperial Worlds: From Late Medieval Spain to the Modern Middle East, Edinburgh University Press, November 2023
Studies cross-cultural exchanges across the Mediterranean using new interdisciplinary methodologies
- An edited volume that provides architectural, literary, historical and visual analyses
- A strong focus on interpreting archives
- A work of comparative cultural studies
- Each chapter opens an original and critical perspective, the book coalescing into a wealth of new ways of thinking about the history of the Islamic world
- Represents new developments in theories of empire
- Discusses cases from medieval Spain, Ottoman Empire, colonial North Africa, and France and Algeria based on primary sources
This volume of original essays invites 10 preeminent scholars to think through a rich corpus on cities, empires, images and archaeological sites produced by the distinguished architectural historian Zeynep Çelik. Awarded the prestigious 2019 Giorgio Della Vida medal for excellence in Islamic studies by the University of California, the occasion allowed researchers from various universities, countries and disciplines to reflect on her rich body of work. Inspired by Çelik’s works, chapters travel between Muslim and Christian Spain, the Ottoman Empire and France, Europe and its overseas empire in North Africa, and more.
Angelo Del Boca, As Cruel as Anyone Else: Italians, Colonies and Empire – trans. Richard Braude, Seagull, July 2024
Reveals a dark chapter in the Italian government’s colonial history that has been largely hidden from view.
Between the end of the nineteenth century and over the first half of the twentieth, Italy invaded and occupied the Horn of Africa, Libya, and several other territories. Yet recognition of this history of colonial destruction, racist violence, and genocidal aerial and chemical warfare—carried out not only during the Fascist dictatorship but also under preceding liberal governments—has been consistently repressed beneath the myth that the Italians never truly practiced colonialism.
The late journalist, historian, novelist, campaigner, and former Resistance fighter Angelo Del Boca dismantles this myth. He expertly narrates episodes of state violence committed by Italians both abroad—from Ethiopia to Slovenia, from China to Libya—and “at home” during the civil war following Unification in the 1860s or when the anti-Fascist Resistance faced off against the Republic of Salò after 1943. Attentive to the losses and pain suffered by all sides in war, Del Boca deftly demonstrates how such violence was not only a tool of domination but has also been central to creating and shaping an Italian “people.”
Drawing on a lifetime of interviews as a special correspondent, decades of work in private and state archives, and his own experiences during the Second World War, Del Boca’s popular and influential work has contributed to overturning views of Italian history. Presenting many historical episodes in English for the first time, As Cruel as Anyone Else provides a key to reading contemporary Italy, its place in international politics, and the disturbing permanence of the far-right within mainstream Italian politics.
John Robertson (ed.), Time, History and Political Thought – Cambridge University Press, June 2023
Between the cliché that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ and the aspiration of many political philosophers to give their ideas universal, timeless validity lies a gulf which the history of political thought is uniquely qualified to bridge. For that history shows that no conception of politics has dispensed altogether with time, and many have explicitly sought legitimacy in association with forms of history. Ranging from Justinian’s law codes to rival Protestant and Catholic visions of political community after the Fall, from Hobbes and Spinoza to the Scottish Enlightenment, and from Kant and Savigny to the legacy of German Historicism and the Algerian Revolution, this volume explores multiple ways in which different conceptions of time and history have been used to understand politics since late antiquity. Bringing together leading contemporary historians of political thought, Time, History, and Political Thought demonstrates just how much both time and history have enriched the political imagination.
Lyndsey Stonebridge, We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience – Penguin, January 2024 (US; UK)
The violent unease of today’s world would have been familiar to Hannah Arendt. Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration: She lived through them all.
Born in the first decade of the last century, she escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one of its most influential—and controversial—public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all, about freedom. Questioning—thinking—was her first defense against tyranny. She advocated a politics of action and plurality, courage and, when necessary, disobedience.
We Are Free to Change the World is a book about the Arendt we need for the twenty-first century. It tells us how and why Arendt came to think the way she did, and how to think when our own politics goes off the rails. Both a guide to Arendt’s life and work, and its dialogue with our troubled present, We Are Free to Change the World is an urgent call for us to think, as Hannah Arendt did—unflinchingly, lovingly, and defiantly—through our own unpredictable times.
Thomas Vesting, State Theory and the Law: An Introduction – Edward Elgar, 2022, paperback 2023
There has been renewed and growing interest in exploring the significant role played by law in the centralization of power and sovereignty – right from the earliest point. This timely book serves as an introduction into state theory, providing an overview of the conceptual history and the interdisciplinary tradition of the continental European general theory of the state.
Chapters present a theory of the state grounded in cultural analysis and show liberal democracy to be the paradigm of today’s western nation-state. The analysis includes the emergence of legal forms and institutions that are linked either to the constitutional state (the securing of civil liberties and fundamental rights), the welfare state (social and welfare law), or the network-state (regulation of complex digital technologies). Thomas Vesting focuses on illustrating the fundamental features of these evolutionary stages – the three layers constituting the modern state – and reveals their cultural and social preconditions.
This book will be an ideal read for students, postgraduates, and other academic audiences with interests in state theory, jurisprudence, legal theory, political theory, and legal philosophy.
Richard Saull, Capital, Race and Space, two volumes – Brill, 2023; paperbacks with Haymarket in summer 2024
– Capital, Race and Space, Volume I: The Far Right from Bonapartism to Fascism
In this first volume of Capital, Race and Space, Richard Saull offers an international historical sociology of the European far-right from its origins in the 1848 revolutions to fascism. Providing a distinct and original explanation of the evolution and mutations of the far-right Saull emphasizes its international causal dimensions through the prism of uneven and combined development.
Focusing on the twin (political and economic) transformations that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century the book discusses the connections between class, race, and geography in the evolution of far-right movements and how the crises in the development of a liberal world order were central to the advance of the far-right ultimately helping to produce fascism.
– Capital, Race and Space, Volume II: The Far Right from ‘Post-Fascism’ to Trumpism
In this second volume of Capital, Race and Space, Richard Saull offers an international historical sociology of the Western far-right from the end of World War II to its contemporary manifestations in Trumpism and Brexit. Focusing on its international causal dimensions, Saull draws on the theory of uneven and combined development to provide a distinct and original explanation of the evolution and mutations of the ‘post-fascist’ far-right.
Despite the transformed geopolitical context of capitalist development after 1945 – with decolonization and the end inter-imperial rivalry – the far-right continued to be intimately connected to the consolidation of the anti-communist liberal order. Thereafter, the far-right also formed an important, if contradictory, element within the neoliberal historical bloc that emerged in the 1980s and has been the main ideo-political beneficiary of the 2007-8 neoliberal crisis.
Tehlike, Suç ve Haklar, 2023: Michel Foucault ile Jonathan Simon’ın Söyleşisi, trans. Utku Özmakas, Ayrıntı Yayınları, October 2023
A text I edited from the Berkeley archive, “Danger, Crime and Rights: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon“, which originally appeared in Theory, Culture and Society in 2016, has been translated into Turkish by Utku Özmakas as a short book.
The Turkish version comes with a short new introduction by me. I will share the English text of this Introduction here in a few weeks.
İngilizcede 2016’da yayımlanan bu metin Michel Foucault ile Jonathan Simon arasında Ekim 1983’te San Francisco’da yapılan bir konuşma kaydının yazıya dökülmesiyle ortaya çıktı. Foucault Kitaplığı’nın üçüncü kitabı olarak Utku Özmakas’ın çevirisiyle ilk defa Türkçede. Foucault ve Simon, filozofun 1977’de verdiği “19. Yüzyıl Adli Psikiyatrisinde ‘Tehlikeli Kişi’ Kavramına Dair” başlıklı konferansını ele alarak başlıyorlar sohbete ve hukuk sisteminde tehlike, suç, sorumluluk ve haklar üzerine bir tartışmaya geçiyorlar. Bu söyleşi metnine Stuart Elden’in Türkçe baskıya yazdığı kısa önsöz, İngilizce baskıya yazdığı giriş ve Simon’un söyleşiye dair geriye dönük yorumu eşlik ediyor. Bir hukuk sistemi, belli bir anda, belli bir toplumdaki bir güç ilişkisinin, bir kuvvet ilişkisinin ifadesidir, dolayısıyla hukukun herhangi bir şekilde kutsallaştırılmaması gerekir. Gelgelelim haklar ve hukuk tam olarak aynı şey değildir. Her halükârda bir kuruma, bir yasaya, bir hukuk sistemine karşı bu kurumların, yasaların, hukuk sisteminin temelinde olan ya da olduğu varsayılan haklar adına karşı durmanın ya da bunlarla mücadele etmenin önemli olduğunu düşünüyorum.
The publisher, Ayrıntı Yayınları, are also translating my book The Archaeology of Foucault.
Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World – Yale University Press, September 2023; paperback August 2024
How can one European capital be responsible for most of the West’s intellectual and cultural achievements in the twentieth century?
Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens—every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna.
The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt was the melting pot at the heart of a vast metropolitan empire. But with the Second World War and the rise of fascism, the dazzling coteries of thinkers who squabbled, debated, and called Vienna home dispersed across the world, where their ideas continued to have profound impact.
Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of this extraordinary story. Tracing Vienna’s rich intellectual history from psychoanalysis to Reaganomics, Cockett encompasses everything from the communist rebels of Red Vienna to the neoliberal economists of the Austrian School. This is the panoramic account of how one city made the modern world—and how we all remain inescapably Viennese.
