Tim Simpson, Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution – University of Minnesota Press, April 2023

Posted on April 19, 2023 by stuartelden

Tim Simpson, Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution – University of Minnesota Press, April 2023

Update: there is a New Books discussion with Michael O. Johnston here.

Betting on Macau delves into the radical transformation of what was formerly the last remaining European territory in Asia, returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 after nearly half a millennium of Portuguese rule. Examining the unprecedented scale of its development and its key role in China’s economic revolution, Tim Simpson follows Macau’s emergence from historical obscurity to become the most profitable casino gaming locale in the world.

Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and renowned for its unique blend of Chinese and Portuguese colonial-era architecture, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, including two of the world’s largest buildings. Simpson situates Macau’s origins as a strategic trading port and its ensuing history alongside the emergence of the global capitalist system, charting the massive influx of foreign investment, construction, and tourism in the past two decades that helped generate the territory’s enormous wealth. 

Presented through a cross section of postcolonial studies and social theory with extensive insight into the global gambling industry, Betting on Macau uncovers the various roots of the territory’s lucrative casino capitalism. In turn, its trenchant analysis provides a distinctive view into China’s broader project of urbanization, its post-Mao economic reforms, and the continued rise of its consumer culture.

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Books received – Bataille, Eliade, Castree, Charnock & Christophers, Hakl

Posted on April 18, 2023 by stuartelden

The older collection L’Apprenti Sorcier and the new translation The Limit of the Useful by Bataille; a volume of Eliade correspondence; Noel Castree, Greig Charnock, Brett Christophers, David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to his Thought and Hans Thomas Hakl’s Eranos: An Alternative History of the Twentieth Century.

The last two books were recompense for review work; the others bought second-hand or new.

Posted in David Harvey, Georges Bataille, Mircea Eliade | 2 Comments

Niki Kasumi Clements, “Foucault the Confessor”, University of Bristol, 19 April 2023, 3.30pm

Posted on April 17, 2023 by stuartelden

Niki Kasumi Clements, “Foucault the Confessor”, University of Bristol, 19 April 2023, 3.30pm

Joint Research Talk 

Department of French & the Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition

Niki Kasumi Clements, Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Associate Professor of Religion at Rice University

Respondent: Federico Testa, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol

Wednesday, 19 April 2023 (3:30pm)

Room LT3, School of Modern Languages, 17 Woodland Road, Arts Complex, University of Bristol

Drinks reception from 5pm (Humanities Common Room, 11 Woodland Road)

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Paul Allen Miller, “Foucault’s Formative Years” – review of The Early Foucault (Polity, 2021) in Symploke

Posted on April 17, 2023 by stuartelden

Paul Allen Miller, “Foucault’s Formative Years” – a very generous review of my 2021 Polity book The Early Foucault in Symploke. The review requires subscription, unfortunately, but I’m happy to share if you email me.

Stuart Elden has become the definitive chronicler of Foucault’s intellectual evolution. The Early Foucault is the third in what will ultimately be a four-volume history. The series began with Foucault’s Last Decade (2016). While the first volume was originally intended as a stand-alone work, it immediately became clear to the publisher and the reviewers alike that this approach should be extended to the whole of Foucault’s intellectual life. Elden has created what is in effect a kind of Bible for Foucault scholars, a series of works that any serious student of Foucault simply must consult…

The issue also contains a review symposium of Allen’s own book Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity.

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Carlo Ginzburg, The Soul of Brutes – Seagull, November 2022

Posted on April 14, 2023 by stuartelden

Carlo Ginzburg, The Soul of Brutes – Seagull, November 2022

A collection of diverse yet interconnected essays from one of the world’s most respected historians.

Carlo Ginzburg has been at the forefront of the discipline of microhistory ever since his earliest works were published to great acclaim in the 1970s. The Soul of Brutes brings together four of Ginzburg’s recent scintillating essays and lectures that testify to the diversity of his thoughts on history and philosophy.

“Civilization and Barbarism” resurrects a sixteenth-century debate between two thinkers in Spain about the humanness, or lack thereof, of Native Americans, and highlights the influence of classical thinkers, from Herodotus to Aristotle, and the iterations and interpretations through which their writings have traversed down to the Cinquecento. In “The Soul of Brutes” Ginzburg traces the genealogy of the debate on the rationality of animals and the limits of their imagination, from Plutarch and Aristotle to sixteenth-century thinkers like Pietro Pomponazzi and Girolamo Rorario. Following Montaigne, he provokes, are we to beasts as they seem to us? In “Calvino, Manzoni and the Grey Zone,” Carlo Ginzburg pithily writes about the mental dialogue between Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and two Italians who profoundly influenced Levi’s search for these “unexplored pockets of exception”—his contemporary Italo Calvino and the nineteenth-century novelist and philosopher Alessandro Manzoni. And finally, in “Schema and Bias”, he probes whether the historian can clearly see into the past, peering through the layers of bias, which include their own prejudices, or if relativism is the only path.

With several beautifully reproduced color illustrations, The Soul of Brutes will interest not only scholars of history, philosophy, and art, but also general intellectual readers.

Posted in Carlo Ginzburg, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology – Yale University Press, January 2023

Posted on April 14, 2023 by stuartelden

Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology – Yale University Press, January 2023

What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century’s most important philosopher?
 
Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it. In this book Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised.

New Books podcast –

New Statesman piece by Lyndsey Stonebridge – Who is Afraid of Martin Heidegger?

Update: also a piece in The Conversation

Update 2: an excerpt from the book is at the LARB

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David Farrell Krell, Three Encounters: Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida – Indiana University Press, June 2023

Posted on April 14, 2023 by stuartelden

David Farrell Krell, Three Encounters: Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida – Indiana University Press, June 2023

In 1974, thirty-year-old philosopher and translator David Farrell Krell began corresponding and meeting with Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Years later, he would meet Jacques Derrida and, through many letters and visits, come to know him well. Drawing on unpublished correspondence and Krell’s warmly told personal recollections, Three Encounters presents an intimate and highly insightful look at the lives and ideas of three noted philosophers at the peak of their careers. 

Three Encounters offers a chance for readers to encounter these three great philosophers and their ideas, not merely through the lens of their biographies, but as “people” we come to know through their personal correspondence and Krell’s recollections. Three Encounters demonstrates the intertwining of thought and lived experience.

“In the tradition of Continental Philosophy, Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida loom large, and Krell is perhaps unique in having had personal relationships with all three. The reader comes away from this book with vivid pictures of these philosophers. We learn not only about aspects of their professional lives, but also about them as people at the times Krell knew them. A delight to read.”~Samir Haddad, Fordham University 

“The text brims with philosophical ideas from the three thinkers—as well as from Nietzsche, whose presence shadows much of the narrative—and these ideas are presented clearly and discussed in ways that are invariably illuminating. The prose flows beautifully, with frequent sparkles of wit and erudite humour. The interweaving of ideas and themes with engaging anecdotes is judicious and nuanced. I found the entire account enthralling.”~Graham Parkes, University of Vienna

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David Harvey discussion “La géographie du capital” and dialogue with Jean-Luc Mélenchon (videos)

Posted on April 13, 2023 by stuartelden

David Harvey discussion – although the questions are in French, Harvey speaks in English, followed by an interpreter.

Cette conférence est le premier événement d’une série de deux organisés par le département de géographie de l’Institut La Boétie, dans le cadre de ses chaires, à l’occasion de la venue exceptionnelle de David Harvey en France.

David Harvey est un géographe britannique. Il est le fondateur de la géographie critique et à l’origine de la première lecture spatiale de la théorie marxiste. Aujourd’hui, géographe le plus cité du monde, il est une référence pour plusieurs générations d’intellectuels à travers le monde entier.

Dans cette conférence dédiée à la géographie du capital, David Harvey présentera les principaux éléments qu’il développe depuis plus de quarante ans sur la production de l’espace par le capitalisme. Cet exposé pourra le conduire à revenir sur différents processus urbains, sur les relations entre centre et périphéries, ou encore sur l’impérialisme.

David Harvey and Jean-Luc Mélenchon dialogue (here the interpreter is simultaneous, so speaks over Harvey).

Cette conférence est la seconde organisée par le département de géographie de l’Institut La Boétie, dans le cadre de ses chaires, à l’occasion de la venue exceptionnelle de David Harvey en France.

David Harvey est un géographe britannique. Il est le fondateur de la géographie critique et à l’origine de la première lecture spatiale de la théorie marxiste. Aujourd’hui, géographe le plus cité du monde, il est une référence pour plusieurs générations d’intellectuels à travers le monde entier.

Après avoir présenté dans une première conférence le 8 avril 2023 sa théorie sur la géographie du capital, il dialoguera avec Jean-Luc Mélenchon, co-président de l’Institut La Boétie et ancien candidat à l’élection présidentielle.

Dans cet échange exceptionnel et inédit, se mêleront pensée critique théorique et de l’action politique transformatrice. Les deux évoqueront ensemble de nombreux sujets comme leurs conceptions de la ville, la crise du néolibéralisme, la place de l’État, l’état de la gauche et des mouvements sociaux en Europe et dans le monde…

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Wendy Brown, Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber – Harvard University Press, April 2023

Posted on April 13, 2023 by stuartelden

Wendy Brown, Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber – Harvard University Press, April 2023

One of America’s leading political theorists analyzes the nihilism degrading—and confounding—political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility.

How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.

To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values.

Without accepting Weber’s arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.

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Shiloh Krupar, Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers – University of Minnesota Press/Forerunners, March 2023

Posted on April 12, 2023 by stuartelden

Shiloh Krupar, Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers – University of Minnesota Press/Forerunners, March 2023

Health Colonialism considers how U.S. urban development policies contribute to the uneven and unjust distribution of health care in this country. Here, Shiloh Krupar investigates the racially inequitable effects of elite U.S. hospitals on their surrounding neighborhoods and their role in consolidating frontiers of land primed for redevelopment. 

Naming this frontier “medical brownfields,” Krupar shows how hospitals leverage their domestic real estate empires to underwrite international prospecting for patients and overseas services and specialty clinics. Her pointed analysis reveals that decolonizing health care efforts must scrutinize the land practices of nonprofit medical institutions and the liberal foundations of medical apartheid perpetuated by globalizing American health care.

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