Progressive Geographies

Paul Earlie, Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis – Oxford University Press, February 2021

In Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis, Paul Earlie offers a detailed account of the importance of psychoanalysis in Derrida’s thought. Based on close readings of texts from the whole of his career, including less well-known and previously unpublished material, the title sheds new light on the crucial role of psychoanalysis in shaping Derrida’s response to a number of key questions. These questions range from the psyche’s relationship to technology to the role of fiction and metaphor in scientific discourse, and from the relationship between memory and the archive to the status of the political in deconstruction. 

Focusing on Freud but proposing new readings of texts by Lacan, Torok and Abraham, Laplanche and Pontalis, amongst other seminal figures in contemporary French thought, Earlie argues that Derrida’s writings on psychoanalysis can also provide an important bridge between deconstruction and the recent materialist turn in the humanities. Challenging a still prevalent ‘textualist’ reading of Derrida’s work, he explores the ongoing contribution of deconstruction and psychoanalysis to pressing issues in critical thought today, from the localizing models of the neurosciences and the omnipresence of digital technology to the politics of affect in an age of terror.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Inheritance – Duke University Press, 2021

Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s inheritance was passed down not through blood or soil but through a framed map of Trentino, Alto Adige—the region where family’s ancestral alpine village is found. Far more than a map hanging above the family television, the image featured colors and lines that held in place the memories and values fueling the Povinelli family’s fraught relationships with the village and with each other. In her graphic memoir The Inheritance, Povinelli explores the events, traumas, and powers that divide and define our individual and collective pasts and futures. Weaving together stories of her grandparents’ flight from their village in the early twentieth century to the fortunes of their knife-grinding business in Buffalo, New York, and her own Catholic childhood in a shrinking Louisiana woodlands of the 1960s and 1970s, Povinelli describes the serial patterns of violence, dislocation, racism and structural inequality that have shaped not only her life but the American story. Plumbing the messy relationships among nationality, ethnicity, kinship, religion, and belonging, The Inheritance takes us into the gulf between the facts of history and the stories we tell ourselves to survive and justify them.

“With the understanding of a scholar and the storytelling instincts of a novelist, Elizabeth A. Povinelli has brought a rare degree of scope and insight to the graphic memoir form. Relatively few illustrated works are so complex and insightful, so intricately concerned with families, nationalities, and politics. An extraordinary book.” — Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

“A melancholy yet often darkly funny reflection on the intersections of biography, geography, kinship, and history, The Inheritance is a genuinely original work that made an impact on this reader and will leave a lasting mark on the field.” — Naisargi N. Dave, author of Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics

The Introduction is available open access here.

Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy – Paris Institute for Critical Thinking Bookaholics #5

Converts to the Real was published by Harvard University Press in 2019.

Our fifth interview is with Edward Baring, intellectual historian (New Jersey, USA) by Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte (Basel, Switzerland) Monday, December 21, 2020

Christopher Harker, Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine – Duke University Press, January 2021

In Spacing Debt Christopher Harker demonstrates that financial debt is as much a spatial phenomenon as it is a temporal and social one. Harker traces the emergence of debt in Ramallah after 2008 as part of the financialization of the Palestinian economy under Israeli settler colonialism. Debt contributes to processes through which Palestinians are kept economically unstable and subordinate. He draws extensively on residents’ accounts of living with the explosion of personal debt to highlight the entanglement of consumer credit with other obligatory relations among family, friends, and institutions. Harker offers a new geographical theorization of debt, showing how debt affects urban space, including the movement of bodies through the city, localized economies, and the political violence associated with occupation. Bringing cultural and urban imaginaries into conversation with monetized debt, Harker shows how debt itself becomes a slow violence embedded into the everyday lives of citizens. However, debt is also a means through which Palestinians practice endurance, creatively adapting to life under occupation.

“The first in-depth ethnographic research on debt formation in the contemporary Palestinian context, this groundbreaking work proposes a host of new ways for social geographers to rethink debt at multiple scales. Spacing Debt ambitiously engages theoretical debates across a wide array of disciplinary approaches and effectively links it with fascinating and carefully treated ethnographic cases and interview materials.” — Deborah James, author of Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa

The Introduction is open access here

Simon Brown, ‘Intellectual Journalism and Intellectual History‘, Journal of the History of Ideas blog

In an interview at the Chronicle Review with the writer and teacher Maggie Doherty about academic humanities and public writing, I encountered a term for the first time that described in a new way what felt very familiar: “Intellectual Journalism.” The interviewer used it to gesture toward the book reviews, trade titles and essays that authors — or readers — with graduate training might write (or read) outside of their own formal disciplines and the peer-reviewed journals and book series that sustain them. My experience turning over the category of “Intellectual History” on its many sides to better understand how it held together led me to wonder about this congruent term. [continues here]

Confronting the Long Arc of U.S. Border Policy

THE CELEBRATORY CLAMOR surrounding President Joe Biden’s 100-day deportation moratorium was short-lived, as a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the pause on deportation within a few days of its announcement. Even though the court order did not require the Biden administration to proceed with deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement swiftly deported hundreds of people to Guatemala, Honduras, and Jamaica anyway. [continues here]

This article is adapted from Harsha Walia’s forthcoming book, “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism” (Haymarket, February 9, 2021), with a foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley and an afterword by Nick Estes. Excerpts are included here with permission of the publisher.