Today I enjoyed speaking about the work that went into The Early Foucault with the Genealogy in the Humanities project (Syracuse University and Cornell University). Thanks to Alex Livingston and Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson for organising, and those who attended and asked questions. Good to see Colin Koopmann, Niki Kasumi Clements and Hugo da Costa, only one of whom I’ve met in person, but all have been in contact about this and related projects for a while.
At the moment, that’s the last talk on Foucault in the schedule – the next speaking events are about different things. Today is the end of term at Warwick, I’m on leave next term, and then the fellowship. This blog will be quiet for the next couple of weeks, but sometime in the last week this blog hit 3 million visits. Thanks to all who continue to read…
Disasters are all around us. In everyday parlance, disasters are understood as exceptional occurrences that destroy human life, property, and resources. For centuries, people have looked to political authorities for protection from disasters and for relief in the aftermath. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic and an endless torrent of storms, floods, and forest fires have shown that modern states and intergovernmental institutions frequently fail this burden. Worse, world leaders routinely ignore evidence that accelerated climate change is an already-rolling planetary catastrophe. So, what is a “disaster”? Who determines when and why a disaster has occurred or ceased? And what is the relationship between such occurrences and modern states who promise to “manage” them?
In All Is Well, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay argues that there is no such thing as a “disaster” outside of rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific contestation through which such occurrences are morally distinguished from the rhythms of everyday life. Disasters, Bandopadhyay asserts, are artifacts of “normal” rule. They result from the same, mundane strategies of knowledge-making and violence by which authorities, experts, and lay people struggle to develop state-like power, to define and defend the social order.
Challenging traditional narratives, All Is Well looks at “disaster management” as a historical process that produces both catastrophes and political authorities. To do so, Bandopadhyay draws on three case studies: the Marseille plague of 1720, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the Bengal famine of 1770. As far back as the eighteenth century, aspiring rulers understood disasters to be occasions for testing their state-like ambitions as they swapped divine authority for the supremacy of natural rights, Enlightenment ideals, and colonial rule. Bandopadhyay examines these exercises in catastrophe conservation and state formation and shows how the underlying beliefs and resulting insights underwrite sophisticated but deeply inequitable present-day norms and practices of global governance. He concludes that climate change, and the national and international authorities designed to fight it, are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends on reckoning with this past.
There is a discussion on the New Books Network – thanks to dmf for the link
From 1965 until 1980, Louis Althusser edited the Théorie series of books, each released by the pioneering French publisher François Maspero. Here Stuart Elden charts the history of the series, and the impact it had on French, and global, Marxist philosophy.
China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language – a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike – accessible to a globalized, digital world.
Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese script – and the value-system it represents – to the technological advances that would shape the twentieth century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone. From the exiled reformer who risked death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup, generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists and revolutionaries alike understood the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences.
With larger-than-life characters and a thrilling narrative, Kingdom of Characters offers an astonishingly original perspective on one of the twentieth century’s most dramatic transformations.
This edited collection celebrates Patrick Wolfe’s contribution to the study and critique of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. The book emphasises Wolfe’s militant and interdisciplinary scholarship, together with his determination to acknowledge Indigenous perspectives and the efficacy of Indigenous resistance. Racial capitalism and settler colonialism are as entwined now as they always have been, and keeping both in mind at the same time highlights the need to establish and nurture solidarities that reach across established divides.
Unsettling the World is the first book-length treatment of Edward Said’s influential cultural criticism from the perspective of a political theorist. Arguing that the generative power of Said’s thought extends well beyond Orientalism, the book explores Said’s writings on the experience of exile, the practice of “contrapuntal” criticism, and the illuminating potential of worldly humanism. Said’s critical vision, Morefield argues, provides a fresh perspective on debates in political theory about subjectivity, global justice, identity, and the history of political thought. Most importantly, she maintains, Said’s approach offers theorists a model of how to bring the insights developed through historical analyses of imperialism and anti-colonialism to bear on critiques of contemporary global crises and the politics of American foreign policy.
Suspended between sea and sky, battered by the waves and the wind, lighthouses mark the battlelines between the elements. They guard the boundaries between the solid human world and the primordial chaos of the waters; between stability and instability; between the known and the unknown. As such, they have a strange, universal appeal that few other manmade structures possess.
Engineered to draw the gaze of sailors, lighthouses have likewise long attracted the attention of soldiers and saints, artists and poets, novelists and film-makers, colonizers and migrants, and, today more than ever, heritage tourists and developers. Their evocative locations, their isolation and resilience have turned these structures into complex metaphors, magnets for stories. This book explores the rich story of the lighthouse in the human imagination.
Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, Hatred of Sex – University of Nebraska Press, April 2022
Hatred of Sex links Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche’s identification of a fundamental perturbation at the heart of human sexuality. Sex is hated as well as desired, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean contend, because sexual intensity impedes coherent selfhood and undermines identity, rendering us all a little more deplorable than we might wish. Davis and Dean explore the consequences of this conflicted dynamic across a range of fields and institutions, including queer studies, attachment theory, the #MeToo movement, and “traumatology,” demonstrating how hatred of sex has been optimized and exploited by neoliberalism.
Advancing strong claims about sex, pleasure, power, intersectionality, therapy, and governance, Davis and Dean shed new light on enduring questions of equality at a historical moment when democracy appears ever more precarious.
Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance. Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight—Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty—Politics of Immunity moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder.
Wide-ranging and polemical, Politics of Immunity lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined.
Update: there is a discussion at the New Books Network with Catriona Gold here.
