La Pensée 410 – special issue on Henri Lefebvre

La Pensée 410special issue on Henri Lefebvre

Les 24 et 25 mars 2022 s’est tenu à Paris un colloque, organisé par La Pensée, le Groupe d’études du matérialisme rationnel et la Fondation Gabriel Péri, consacré à l’étude et à l’hommage d’Henri Lefebvre.

Henri Lefebvre est un philosophe français mondialement connu, lu et traduit par plusieurs générations dans le monde, son Le marxisme, édité aux PUF dans la collection « Que sais-je ? », est la plus forte vente de cet éditeur depuis 1948.

[…] Le voyage au pays philosophique de Lefebvre peut s’épanouir sous le soleil radieux de l’audace ou s’égarer dans la brume déconcertante des concepts, mais, quoi qu’il en soit, le voyage en vaut la peine. Henri Lefebvre nous oblige à penser dans la bousculade des certitudes ébranlées et dans la résignation d’un confort perdu. Au cours de ce colloque, chacun, tour à tour, a partagé ses enthousiasmes ou confessé ses doutes, pour le plus grand profit de nos lecteurs…

Posted in Henri Lefebvre | Leave a comment

Kristi Sweet, Kant on Freedom, Nature, and Judgment: The Territory of the Third Critique – Cambridge University Press, January 2023 [and open access Introduction]

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

Kristi Sweet, Kant on Freedom, Nature, and Judgment: The Territory of the Third Critique – Cambridge University Press, January 2023

Another expensive hardback, but looks interesting…

[update: the Introduction is available open access]

Kant’s Critique of Judgment seems not to be an obviously unified work. Unlike other attempts to comprehend it as a unity, which treat it as serving either practical or theoretical interests, Kristi Sweet’s book posits it as examining a genuinely independent sphere of human life. In her in-depth account of Kant’s Critical philosophical system, Sweet argues that the Critique addresses the question: for what may I hope? The answer is given in Kant’s account of ‘territory,’ a region of experience that both underlies and mediates between freedom and nature. Territory forms the context in which purposiveness without a purpose, the Ideal of Beauty, the sensus communis, genius and aesthetic ideas, and Kant’s conception of life and proof…

View original post 78 more words

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Victor Konrad and Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Border Culture: Theory, Imagination, Geopolitics – Routledge, December 2022

Victor Konrad and Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Border Culture: Theory, Imagination, Geopolitics – Routledge, December 2022

This book introduces readers to the cultural imaginings of borders: the in-between spaces in which transnationalism collides with geopolitical cooperation and contestation.

Recent debates about the “refugee crisis” and the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have politicized culture at and of borders like never before. Border culture is no longer culture at the margins but rather culture at the heart of geopolitics, flows, and experience of the transnational world. Increasingly, culture and borders are everywhere yet nowhere. In border spaces, national narratives and counter-narratives are tested and evaluated, coming up against transnational culture. This book provides an extensive and critical vision of border culture on the move, drawing on numerous examples worldwide and a growing international literature across border and cultural studies. It shows how border culture develops in the human imagination and manifests in human constructs of “nation” and “state”, as well as in transnationalism. By analyzing this new and expanding cultural geography of border landscapes, the book shows the way to a fresh, broader dialogue.

Exploring the nature and meaning of the intersection of border and culture, this book will be an essential read for students and researchers across border studies, geopolitics, geography, and cultural studies.

Posted in Boundaries, Territory | 1 Comment

Italo Calvino, The Written World and the Unwritten World: Collected Non-Fiction, translated by Ann Goldstein – Penguin, January 2023

Italo Calvino, The Written World and the Unwritten World: Collected Non-Fictiontranslated by Ann Goldstein – Penguin, January 2023

‘An indispensable writer … Calvino, possesses the power of seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams to life’ Salman Rushdie

The difference between life and literature; the good intentions of holiday reading; the avante-garde; the fate of the novel; the fantastical; the art of translation: these are just some of the ideas in The Written World and the Unwritten World. A collection of essays, articles, interviews, correspondence, notes and other occasional pieces on writing, reading and interpreting books, this work gives us new insight into Italo Calvino’s expansive, curious and generous mind.

Posted in Italo Calvino, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Michel Foucault Werner Schroeter, la conversation (film) (1981)

Michel Foucault and Werner Schroeter, la conversation (film) (1981)

A not very good quality version is here –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLcY9Mx8KZ4

French transcript in Dits et écrits, and elsewhere – online here

An English translation is in Foucault at the Movies

Clare O'Farrell's avatarFoucault News

Poster for sale – click picture MICHEL FOUCAULT WERNER SCHROETER, LA CONVERSATION (CARNET FILMÉ : 3 décembre 1981)
Année : 1981. Durée : 1 H 30′

Voir aussi BNF Catalogue Général

An English translation of the conversation between Foucault and Schroeter can be found in Foucault at the Movies

Fiche technique : Réalisation, montage, son, effets spéciaux : Gérard Courant.
Voix : Michel Foucault, Werner Schroeter, Gérard Courant.
Postproduction : Gérard Courant, Pierre Laudijois.
Production : Les Amis de Cinématon, Les Archives de l’Art Cinématonique, La Fondation Gérard Courant.

Présentation

Michel Foucault Werner Schroeter, la conversation (1981) est, après Vivre à Naples et mourir (1978) et Il faut le sauver ! (1980) et avant Werner et Nenad (2009), la troisième des quatre rencontres cinématographiques que j’ai eues avec Werner Schroeter. À la différence des deux premières, cette fois-ci, une personnalité extérieure à l’oeuvre du cinéaste allemand s’est jointe à cette…

View original post 641 more words

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Jacques Lacan, Premiers écrits, Seuil, January 2023 [updated]

Updated with some information on the contents, how it relates to a previous out-of-print collection, and plans for a translation.

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

Jacques Lacan, Premiers écrits, Seuil, January 2023

Avant que d’être psychanalyste, Lacan a été psychiatre. On n’aurait pas republié ses premiers écrits s’ils n’invitaient à une lecture après coup. Que nous apprennent-ils de la formation du futur analyste ?

Sa clinique est enracinée dans l’unicité du cas. Celui-ci n’est jamais choisi que pour sa « singularité ». Il faut qu’il présente un « caractère original », une « atypicité ». On pourrait y reconnaître une orientation vers le « un par un » qu’impose la pratique analytique.

La singularité du cas se retrouve au niveau du détail clinique, serré avec un souci de précision poussé à l’extrême de la minutie. Lacan fera état plus tard de son goût pour « la fidélité à l’enveloppe formelle du symptôme ».

Trois autres traits font traces de l’avenir. C’est l’usage du mot de structure pour désigner l’organisation d’une entité formant un tout…

View original post 147 more words

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Mark Atherton, Kazutomo Karasawa, Francis Leneghan (eds), Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature – Brepols, 2002

Mark Atherton, Kazutomo Karasawa, Francis Leneghan (eds), Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature – Brepols, 2002

Looks interesting, but that price!

Across three thematically-linked sections, this volume charts the development of competing geographical, national, and imperial identities and communities in early medieval England. Literary works in Old English and Latin are considered alongside theological and historical texts from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Accounts of travel, foreign contacts, conversion, migration, landscape, nation, empire, and conquest are set within the continual flow of people and ideas from East to West, from continent to island and back, across the period. The fifteen contributors investigate how the early medieval English positioned themselves spatially and temporally in relation to their insular neighbours and other peoples and cultures. Several chapters explore the impact of Greek and Latin learning on Old English literature, while others extend the discussion beyond the parameters of Europe to consider connections with Asia and the Far East. Together these essays reflect ideas of inclusivity and exclusivity, connectivity and apartness, multiculturalism and insularity that shaped pre-Conquest England.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Twenty one 1000 word encounters with Lauren Berlant’s work at The Geographical Journal

Twenty one 1000 word encounters with Lauren Berlant’s incredible work

Encountering Berlant Part 1: Concepts otherwise

Encountering Berlant Part 2: Cruel and other optimisms

Open access – thanks to Ben Anderson for the link

Posted in Lauren Berlant, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Books received – Roland Barthes

Some lecture courses by Roland Barthes, and Michael Moriarty’s study of him, all bought second-hand.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My favourite music of 2022

  1. Mikael Åkerfeldt, Clark score
  2. Akku Quintet, Live
  3. Anchor and Burden, Molten Burden and Feels like Forever
  4. The Aristocrats With Primuz Chamber Orchestra
  5. Sel Balamir, ( )rphans
  6. Big Big Train, Welcome to the Planet
  7. Tim Bowness, Butterfly Mind
  8. Miles Davis – That’s What Happened bootleg series 7 [my least favourite Miles period, but still….]
  9. D’Virgilio, Jennings, Morse, Troika
  10. Roger Eno, The Turning Year
  11. Fractal Sextet, Fractal Sextet
  12. Gavin Harrison, Sanity and Gravity (reissue)
  13. King Crimson, In the Court of The Crimson King – King Crimson at 50 (box)
  14. Volker Lankow, Places
  15. David Longdon, Door One
  16. Lonely Robot, Model Life
  17. Magma, Kãrtëhl
  18. Marillion, An Hour Before It’s Dark
  19. The Mars Volta, The Mars Volta
  20. Mask of Confidence, Mask of Confidence
  21. The Pineapple Thief, Give It Back
  22. Pink Floyd, Animals (remaster/5.1)
  23. Porcupine Tree, Closure/Continuation
  24. Pure Reason Revolution, Above Cirrus
  25. Markus Reuter, Truce 2
  26. Reuter Motzer Grohowski, Bleed
  27. J.Peter Schwalm, Stephan Thelen, Transneptunian Planets
  28. Derek Sherinian, The Vortex
  29. Stephen Thelan, Fractal Guitar 3 (and Fractal Guitar 2 remixes)
  30. Bernhard Wöstheinrich & Tobias Schößler, Der Ort

And live, I particularly enjoyed Big Big Train, Frost*, Marillion, Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets, The Neal Morse Band, Porcupine Tree, Transatlantic, Van der Graaf Generator and the streaming of Nik Bärtsch’s Montags series at yourstage.live

[I should have shared the lists from previous years: 2021, 20202019201820172016201520142013 and 2012.]

Posted in Music, Uncategorized | 3 Comments