Progressive Geographies

Interview podcast with Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, editors of Intolerable. Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980), UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS 2021, New Books Network, Dec 20, 2021

Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980)(University of Minnesota Press, 2021), edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, is a groundbreaking collection of writings by Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group documenting their efforts to expose France’s inhumane treatment of prisoners

Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970-71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet.

These…

Philipp Felsch, The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990, (Translated by Tony Crawford), Polity, 2021

‘Theory’ – a magical glow has emanated from this word since the sixties. Theory was more than just a succession of ideas: it was an article of faith, a claim to truth, a lifestyle. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks and triggered heated debates in seminar rooms and cafés. The Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Adorno, Derrida, Foucault: these and others were the exotic schools and thinkers whose ideas were being devoured by young minds. But where did the fascination for dangerous thoughts come from?

In his magnificently written book, Philipp Felsch follows the hopes and dreams of a generation that entered the jungle of difficult texts. His setting is West Germany in the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s: in a world frozen in the Cold War, movement only…

Cat Moir,Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics– hardback Brill 2019; paperbackHaymarket, 2020

Discussion 14 December 2021, 5pm – details and registration here

Update: the stream of this discussion will be here

Cat Moir’s 2020 book Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics (Historical Materialism Books, Brill & Haymarket Books) situates Bloch’s philosophy in the context of historical and contemporary debates about utopianism, science, and the theoretical and practical tasks of Marxism. Bloch’s project of a speculative materialism was famously dismissed by Jürgen Habermas as naïve and outdated. By reconstructing it and bringing it into conversation with current work in new materialism and ecological Marxism, Moir demonstrates its relevance for illuminating questions of agency and the human-nature relation that concern us today.

This online roundtable discussion broadcast by Historical Materialism brings together respondents with a wide range of relevant expertise to discuss the issues raised by…

Foucault in the Panopticon
How Michel Foucault’s encounters in Poland’s heavily policed gay community informed his ideas
GEOFF SHULLENBERGER | Reason, FROM THE DECEMBER 2021 ISSUE

In 1958, the 32-year-old philosopher Michel Foucault arrived in Poland to assume the directorship of the Centre Français in Warsaw. Less than a year later, he abruptly left the country. According to a rumor that circulated for years, this rapid exit was precipitated by a sexual liaison with a young man who turned out to be on the payroll of the communist state’s secret police. Amid the minor scandal that ensued, the French embassy requested Foucault’s resignation and departure from Poland. His biographers have treated this Polish sojourn and the incident that brought it to an end as a footnote to his early career, covering it in a few pages.

In Foucault in Warsaw, first published in Polish in 2017 and now available…