Progressive Geographies

Julian Jackson, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain – Harvard University Press/Allen Lane, June 2023

One of the great contemporary historians of France on one of the most controversial periods of twentieth-century French history

Few images more shocked the French population during the Occupation than the photograph of Marshal Philippe Pétain – the great French hero of the First World War – shaking the hand of Hitler on 20 October 1940. In a radio speech after this meeting, Pétain told the French people that he was ‘entering down the road of collaboration’. He ended with the words: ‘This is my policy. My ministers are responsible to me. It is I alone who will be judged by History.’ Five years later, in July 1945, the hour of judgement – if not yet the judgement of History – arrived. Pétain was brought before a specially created High Court to answer for his conduct between the signing of the armistice with Germany in June 1940 and the Liberation of France in August 1944.

Julian Jackson uses Pétain’s three-week trial as a lens through which to examine the central crisis of twentieth-century French history – the defeat of 1940, the signing of the armistice and Vichy’s policy of collaboration – what the main prosecutor Mornet called ‘four years to erase from our history’. As head of the Vichy regime in the Second, Pétain became one of France’s most notorious public figures, and the lightening-rod for collective guilt and retribution immediately after the Second World War. In France on Trial Jackson blends politics and personal drama to explore how different national factions sought to try to claim the past, or establish their interpretation of it, as a way of claiming the present and future.

Review in The Guardian; New Books discussion linked on the Harvard University Press page

Martin Jay, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure – Verso, October 2023

update November 2023: there is a New Books discussion with Ryan Tripp here

Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances. Honouring the Frankfurt School’s practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing “authoritarian personalities,” the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin’s work, and the ambivalence of its members’ analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. 

Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essays also acknowledge a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of “racket society,” Adorno’s dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin’s focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of – and perhaps even practical betterment – of our increasingly troubled world.

Daniel Loick, The Abuse of Property, trans. Jacob Blumenfeld – MIT Press, August 2023

A fundamental critique of the current property regime, calling for radical social and political change.

In The Abuse of Property, Daniel Loick offers a multifaceted philosophical critique of the concept of property, broadly understood. He argues that property should not be the dominant framework in which human beings regulate the use of things, that property is not the same as use. Property rights, in his view, are not conditions of freedom or justice, but deficient, dysfunctional, and harmful ways of interacting with other people and the natural environment. He dissects not only the classic justifications of property (from John Locke’s justification of property as a natural right based on individual freedom to Hegel’s justification of property as a form of mutual recognition) but also the classic critiques of property, from Proudhon and Marx up to Adorno and Agamben.

Through an innovative critical approach to legal studies, Loick demonstrates how the concept of property, historically applied to things and people and still a linchpin of our distorted relation with the world, forms a direct line from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter and beyond.

Untimely Meditations series

René Girard, All Desire is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings, ed. Cynthia L. Haven – Penguin, June 2023

A new selection of foundational works from the influential philosopher who developed the theory of mimetic desire

Why do humans have such a remarkable capacity for conflict? From ancient foundational myths to the modern era, the visionary thinker Rene Girard identified the constant, competing desires at the heart of our existence – desires that we copy from others, igniting a contagious violence. This remarkable and accessible new selection of Girard’s work shows him as a writer for our times, as he ranges over human imitation and rivalry, herd behaviour, scapegoating and how our violent longings play out in stories, from Shakespeare to religion.  

‘The explosion of social media, the resurgence of populism, and the increasing virulence of reciprocal violence all suggest that the contemporary world is becoming more and more recognizably “Girardian” in its behaviour’ The New York Review of Books

Edited with an Introduction by Cynthia L. Haven 

Haven’s biography of Girard, Evolution of Desire, was published in 2018.

Colin McFarlane, Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife – Verso, August 2023

[update September 2023 – Colin reflects on the book’s writing here; and provides an open access link]

In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Waste and the City is a call to action on one of modern urban life’s most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All.

The book outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city. Adopting Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the right to the city’, it uses the notion of ‘citylife’ to reframe the discourse on sanitation from a narrowly-defined policy discussion to a question of democratic right to public life and health. In doing so, the book shows that sanitation is an urbanizing force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life.

D.J.S. Cross, Deleuze and the Problem of Affect – Edinburgh University Press, May 2023 (paperback)

Systematically analyses affect as the fundamental problem in and for Deleuze’s philosophy

• Re-examines Deleuze’s status as a pillar of affect theory and, a fortiori, affect theory itself
• Demonstrates simultaneously ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ tendencies of Deleuze’s philosophy 
• Develops affect as the operator of interdisciplinarity according to Deleuze
• Challenges the portrayal of Deleuze as an unambiguous champion of affect

Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Deleuze has been pivotal for the recent ‘affective turn’ in philosophy and the humanities at large. Critics and proponents alike, however, have yet to appreciate the extent to which Deleuze himself remains profoundly ambivalent toward affect and embodiment in general. In this book, D. J. S. Cross argues that this ambivalence and its longevity have been overlooked because they only become apparent through a systematic analysis of affect throughout Deleuze’s work. 

By outlining how, from beginning to end, Deleuze’s system of thought both ruptures and complies with the tradition, Cross recalibrates Deleuze’s philosophy and the recent ‘affective turn’ that hinges upon it.

Annie Pfeifer, To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation – Cornell University Press, 2023

To the Collector Belong the Spoils rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Annie Pfeifer examines the relationship between literary modernism and twentieth-century practices of collecting objects. From James’s paper hoarding to Einstein’s mania for African art and Benjamin’s obsession with old Russian toys, she shows how these authors’ literary techniques of compiling, gleaning, and reassembling constitute a modernist style of collecting that reimagines the relationship between author and text, source and medium. Placing Benjamin and Einstein in surprising conversation with James sharpens the contours of collecting as aesthetic and political praxis underpinned by dangerous passions. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, order and chaos, the past and the future.

Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement’s artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past. By despoiling and decontextualizing the work of others, these three authors engaged in a form of creative plunder that evokes collecting’s long history in the spoils of war and conquest. As Pfeifer demonstrates, more than an archive or taxonomy, modernist collecting practices became a radical, creative endeavor—the artist as collector, the collector as artist.

Sheryl Lightfoot and Elsa Stamatopoulou eds., Indigenous Peoples and Borders – Duke University Press, February 2024

The legacies of borders are far-reaching for Indigenous Peoples. This collection offers new ways of understanding borders by departing from statist approaches to territoriality. Bringing together the fields of border studies, human rights, international relations, and Indigenous studies, it features a wide range of voices from across academia, public policy, and civil society. They explore the profound and varying impacts of borders on Indigenous Peoples around the world and the ways borders are challenged and worked around. From Bangladesh’s colonially imposed militarized borders to resource extraction in the Russian Arctic and along the Colombia-Ecuador border to the transportation of toxic pesticides from the United States to Mexico, the essays examine sovereignty, power, and the obstruction to Indigenous rights and self-determination as well as globalization and the economic impacts of borders. Indigenous Peoples and Borders proposes future action that is informed by Indigenous Peoples’ voices, needs, and advocacy.

Tone Bleie, Andrea Carmen, Jacqueline Gillis, Rauna Kuokkanen, Elifuraha Laltaika, Sheryl Lightfoot, David Bruce MacDonald, Toa Elisa Maldonado Ruiz, Binalakshmi “Bina” Nepram, Melissa Z. Patel, Manoel B. do Prado Junior, Hana Shams Ahmed, Elsa Stamatopoulou, Liubov Suliandziga, Rodion Sulyandziga, Yifat Susskind, Erika M. Yamada

“This insightful and important volume offers readers, teachers, scholars, and students a collection of essays that widen our understanding of the global phenomenon of Indigenous People’s politics. Indigenous Peoples and Borders is a singular, well-structured source for teaching and analyzing Indigenous studies through a comparative and global perspective. It will become a go-to book for the field.” — Kevin Bruyneel, author of Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States