Progressive Geographies

Rebecca Bryant and Madeleine Reeves (eds.), The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty: Political Imagination beyond the State – Cornell University Press, June 2021

Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to “take back” sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereigntyoffers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world. 

Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace Dzenovska, Sara L. Friedman, Azra Hromadžić, Louisa Lombard, Alice Wilson, and Torunn Wimpelmann.

Foucault Studies 30 now published – all open access

Three articles, one review essay and a lot of reviews, including one of my Canguilhem book and Samuel Talcott’s Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error:

Resistance: An Arendtian Reading of Solidarity and Friendship in Foucault– Liesbeth Schoonheim

Avowing Unemployment: Confessional Jobseeker Interviews and Professional CVs – Tom Boland

The Carnival of the Mad: Foucault’s Window into the Origin of Psychology – Hannah Lyn Venable

Nancy Luxon (ed.), Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 400 pp.ISBN 9781517901110 (paperback) – Julian Molina

Thomas Lemke, Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason. Translation Erik Butler. London: Verso, 2019. 445 pp.ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-645-4– Paul Gorby

Patrick G. Stefan, The Power of Resurrection: Foucault, Discipline, and Early Christian Resistance. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020. 277pp.ISBN978-1-9787-0462-6

Stephen W. Sawyer and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (ed.), Foucault, Neoliberalism, and Beyond. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 227 pp.ISBN 978-1-78660-376-0

Stuart Elden, Canguilhem. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. 215 pp. + Samuel Talcott, Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. 294 pp.ISBN 9781509528783; ISBN 3030007782– Codrin Tăut

Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: An Introduction. Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 273 pp. ISBN 9780521760904 (hardback), ISBN 9780521144834 (paperback) – Stephanie B. Martens

Critique in Truth: Bernard Harcourt’s Critique & Praxis – Colin Koopman

Alison Downham Moore on ‘Foucault’s 1960s Lectures on Sexuality’ – video abstract for Alison Downham Moore and Stuart Elden, review essay on ‘Foucault’s 1960s lectures on sexuality‘, Theory, Culture & Society (open access)

This essay is part of the special issue on ‘Foucault Before the Collège de France’, which I’m co-editing with Orazio Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini. The other papers available so far are listed here.

While our review is of the French edition, the English translation of these lectures, translated by Graham Burchell and with an introduction to Bernard Harcourt is out very soon.

An Interview on Power and Time at Journal of the History of Ideas blog (part I and part II)

The edited volume Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (2020) appeared last year from the University of Chicago Press. The work is co-edited by Dan Edelstein (William H. Bonsall Professor of French and Professor of History at Stanford University), Stefanos Geroulanos (Professor of History at New York University), and Natasha Wheatley (Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University). Power and Time’s seventeen chapters span disciplinary approaches ranging from history, to law, to anthropology, to the history of art, and each illustrates how political authority is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically-specific ways: The expansionist futurity of the Nazi “New Man” meets the apocalyptic presentism of the Manson Family “cult,” meets the “deep time” of our Age of Plastic. In their introduction, the editors propose a new theoretical model of historical temporality, chronocenosis (inspired by the biological notion of biocenosis), a term which reflects not only “the multiplicity but also the conflict of temporal regimes operating in any given moment” (4). The volume goes on to explore competing orders of time not only as they are reflected in iconic moments of rupture, such as the French Revolution, but also in “silenced clashes” stabilized by often unnoticed but decisive temporal frameworks: “An aesthetics of power and time offers a way for organizing the complexity of power, for locating [its] multiple and conflicting temporal regimes, and for understanding how these get harmonized into a seemingly sinuous, often undifferentiated temporal experience that largely eschews conflict” (37). Contributing editor Jonathon Catlin interviewed the editors about their new volume.