Sovereignty has been at the heart of political philosophy for centuries, and yet it is far from clear what work sovereignty is actually doing in the modern world. Is sovereignty indivisible? Why are some international interventions acceptable but others condemned or resented? Is sovereignty always popular? What role does sovereignty have in a world of international finance, global information exchange, and supranational regulation? Is sovereignty only relevant to some parts of the world or of global relevance? This volume will place the intellectual roots of sovereignty in a conversation with sociological theory and the realities of a globalised world to create a broader context for our contemporary debates.
Capitalism, by the twenty-first century, has brought us an era of escalating, overlapping crisis – ecological, political, social – which we may not survive. In this brilliant, wide-ranging conversation, political philosophers Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi identify capitalism as the source of the devastation and examine its in-built tendency to crisis. In an exchange that ranges across history, critical theory, ecology, feminism and political theory, Fraser and Jaeggi find that capitalism’s tendency to separate what is connected – human from non-human nature, commodity production and social reproduction – is at the heart of its crisis tendency. These “boundary struggles,” Fraser and Jaeggi conclude, constitute capitalism’s most destructive power but are also the sites where a fighting left movement might be able to halt the destruction and build the non-capitalist future we so desperately need.
A crucial text for students of political theory, economic theory, and social change, Capitalism offers an invigorated critique of twenty-first century capitalism and an incisive study of our current conjuncture.
Update: there is an extended interview with Sebastian Budgen of Verso Books here
It will still be some time before I return to work, as there are medical issues still to be resolved. I’m not returning to the research for my new Indo-European thought project yet, but I will be sharing a few things here and on social media – mainly the work of others that looks interesting.
The books which arrived while I was in hospital – mostly ordered before I was admitted.
I was pleased to be able to find a complete set of the Marcel Mauss, Œuvres, along with the Écrits politiques; a few books by or about Saussure, including some of his previously-unpublished manuscripts. Other books here include Jeffrey Whyte’s The Birth of Psychological Warfare, which I read in manuscript, and which is open access as an e-book. There’s also a copy of Shiloh Krupar’s Health Colonialism: Urban Wasteland and Hospital Frontiers (also an open access e-book), Emmanuelle Loyer’s biography of Lévi-Strauss (I’d had the Warwick library copy out for months), and the new René Girard collection, All Desire is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings, edited by Cynthia L. Haven.
The last of these piles has some English translations of Portuguese books, kindly sent by my former PhD, António Ferraz de Oliveira. As it is some time before I’m supposed to be back at work, these are likely to be some of the first things I read from this lot.
A brief health update. Some of you know I’ve been unwell the past couple of weeks.
Very unexpectedly, I had to have open heart surgery on Monday 10 July. Two valves were repaired successfully. I am now recovering well, but not all is yet resolved. I may get to go home soon, though that’s not yet certain. There will certainly be a long period of recovery after that. Thanks for all messages of support I’ve received here and elsewhere. I may not reply, but all are read and much appreciated.
Update 21 July: I’m happy to say I’ve been at home for just over a day and continuing the recovery here.
The last post on Lefebvre’s banned books was one I wrote a few days ago but hadn’t quite finished. I’m posting it now and expect it will be the last substantive post for some time on Progressive Geographies.
I am currently in hospital undergoing some tests and awaiting surgery. The condition is serious but treatable, and I am expected to make a good, though slow recovery.
I’ll hopefully be back before too long. Many thanks for reading this site and hopefully the archive and resources remain useful.
Update June 2025: a revised and expanded version of this post is here.
About twenty years ago, in an essay on Henri Lefebvre, I said that his book on Nietzsche (1939) was on the prohibited ‘Liste Otto’. These were books that had to be removed from sale, and existing copies destroyed, after the German occupation of France. For other reasons now I’ve recently looking at the list – the 1940 version is here – and discover that this is not one of the books on the list. Mea culpa.
As far as I can tell, only two books written by Lefebvre are on the list – there are various iterations from 1940 and through the occupation. The books are Hitler au pouvoir (1938) and Le Matérialisme dialectique (1940). So too was Cahiers de Lénine sur la dialectique de Hegel (1938) and Karl Marx’s Morceaux choisis (1934), both of which Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman had edited.
Three books that were on the list – Le matérialisme dialectique shown here is a later reprint
Guterman was Jewish, so this alone would have been enough for inclusion on this list. But Lefebvre’s book on Nietzsche, his Le Nationalisme contre les Nations (1937) and the collection of texts by Hegel he and Guterman had edited (1938) are not on the lists I’ve seen, and nor is their co-authored book La conscience mystifiée (1936).
three books that were not included on the list
There is therefore something of an arbitrary nature of the list – there are obviously reasons why the Nazi occupiers would object to those they did include, but those reasons would also seem to apply to ones they did not. The Nietzsche book, for example, is very much written as a challenge to the fascist appropriation.
In looking further into this, though, I went back to the original edition of Critique de la vie quotidienne from 1946. On the page ‘Du même auteur’, Lefebvre lists his previous publications.
There he distinguishes three ways his books were suppressed.
seized and destroyed in October 1939 by order of the Daladier government
seized and destroyed at the beginning of 1940 by the publisher
seized and destroyed at the end of 1940 by the occupying authority, Liste ‘Otto’
Interestingly, he says Le Nationalisme was in the first category; Hitler and Nietzsche in the second; Le matérialisme dialectique and the collections on Lenin and Hegel were in the third. From the lists I’ve seen, this isn’t entirely correct either for category three, but it explains why the Nietzsche book was indeed removed from sale shortly after publication, and why copies are so hard to find today. And presumably the ‘Liste Otto’ did not need to proscribe books that were already banned.
The list of books by Lefebvre ‘En préparation’ is also interesting – only a few of these were ever published, but that’s another story, some of which also concerns censorship.
I hope what I’ve reported here is accurate, but happy to receive additions or corrections.
Incidentally, my 2004 book on Lefebvre has long been available as print-on-demand only, and keeps going up in price. Someone has uploaded a version here though… [final link now fixed, apologies]
Description
Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze’s thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art.
Examining Blanchot’s suggestion that art and dream are “outside” of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault’s theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze’s philosophy of time and his work with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka’s Castle, Villeneuve’s Arrival, and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses…
Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to the author Kristin Ross about her recent book, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life, a collection of essays that examine how everyday life emerges as a vantage point for understanding and transforming our social world. The book represents three decades of Ross’s writing about the everyday in French political, social, and cultural theory and history, including the commune form and current autonomous zones in France, the romance and memory of the May 1968 protests, and the present predicaments both faced and created by the Macron government. Featuring a long interview with the pioneering philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the book also invokes the work of Fredric Jameson, Jacques Ranciere, Emile Zola, and many others, to explore the intersections of political transformation and cultural representation as resources for thinking opposition and liberation in the present.
Details of the book here. Thanks to dmf for the link.
