Progressive Geographies

Sylvie Lafleur (ed.), Foucault à Montréal: Réflexions pour une criminologie critique – Éditions de la rue Dorion, January 2021

En 1976, Michel Foucault participe à une conférence organisée par l’Office des droits des détenus de concert avec l’École de criminologie de l’Université de Montréal. Il y présente ses réflexions sur l’usage des peines de substitution à l’incarcération qui, pour plusieurs, témoignent d’une tendance à l’adoucissement des punitions et présagent la disparition de la prison. Doutant que les sociétés qui y ont recours soient plus tolérantes, Foucault croit, au contraire, que l’utilisation des peines alternatives est symptomatique de l’extension d’une « société policière » qui ne ménage pas les efforts pour fabriquer des délinquant·s et punir les personnes faisant l’objet d’un ressentiment politique et populiste, qu’elles soient pauvres, migrant·es ou marginales.

Dans « Alternatives » à la prison : diffusion ou décroissance du contrôle social – allocution méconnue et longtemps oubliée enfin restituée ici –, Foucault s’interroge sur la logique soutenant la surveillance accrue des personnes et annonce la transformation de la société en prison ouverte. L’auteur de de Surveiller et punir doute que l’imposition de sanctions non carcérales témoigne qu’une rupture avec l’emprisonnement est survenue et suppose que le recours aux mesures probatoires et à la surveillance policière s’intensifiera avec le temps.

Près d’un demi-siècle plus tard, qu’en est-il des perceptions de Foucault ? L’imposition de peines de substitution participe-t-elle à dématérialiser l’architecture pénale ? Vivons-nous dans une société moins tolérante aux « inconduites » ? Quelle raison pénale marque notre contemporanéité ? Comment fabrique-t-on des délinquant·es aujourd’hui ?

Constitué d’entretiens avec les organisateurs de la conférence de Michel Foucault, Jean-Claude Bernheim et André Normandeau, et de spécialistes du contrôle social et de la criminalité, Jade Bourdages, Tony Ferri et Anthony Amicelle, Foucault à Montréal répond à ces interrogations et porte un regard critique sur la judiciarisation croissante des rapports sociaux.

A shorter version has been published by Éditions Divergences as ‘Alternatives’ à la prison. Foucault’s Montréal talk has been published in different forms; there was an English translation by Couze Venn in Theory, Culture & Society in 2009 (requires subscription).

Lucia Rubinelli, Constituent Power: A History – Cambridge University Press, April 2020

From the French Revolution onwards, constituent power has been a key concept for thinking about the principle of popular power, and how it should be realised through the state and its institutions. Tracing the history of constituent power across five key moments – the French Revolution, nineteenth-century French politics, the Weimar Republic, post-WWII constitutionalism, and political philosophy in the 1960s – Lucia Rubinelli reconstructs and examines the history of the principle. She argues that, at any given time, constituent power offered an alternative understanding of the power of the people to those offered by ideas of sovereignty. Constituent Power: A History also examines how, in turn, these competing understandings of popular power resulted in different institutional structures and reflects on why contemporary political thought is so prone to conflating constituent power with sovereignty.

The first in-depth treatment of the history of the language of constituent power

Offers a clear analysis of the difference between constituent power and ideas of sovereignty

Will appeal equally to historians, who tend to confuse constituent power with notions of sovereignty, political theorists, who often disregard its history, and to scholars in public and constitutional law

There will be a roundtable discussion of the book on March 9 2021 (details here).

Robert von Friedeburg, Luther’s Legacy: The Thirty Years War and the Modern Notion of ‘State’ in the Empire, 1530s to 1790s – Cambridge University Press, 2016

In this new account of the emergence of a distinctive territorial state in early modern Germany, Robert von Friedeburg examines how the modern notion of state does not rest on the experience of a bureaucratic state-apparatus. It emerged to stabilize monarchy from dynastic insecurity and constrain it to protect the rule of law, subjects, and their lives and property. Against this background, Lutheran and neo-Aristotelian notions on the spiritual and material welfare of subjects dominating German debate interacted with Western European arguments against ‘despotism’ to protect the lives and property of subjects. The combined result of this interaction under the impact of the Thirty Years War was Seckendorff’s Der Deutsche Fürstenstaat (1656), constraining the evil machinations of princes and organizing the detailed administration of life in the tradition of German Policey, and which founded a specifically German notion of the modern state as comprehensive provision of services to its subjects.

‘This book offers an original and striking argument about the emergence of the German concept of the State from conflict and dialogue among princes and their subjects amidst the catastrophic circumstances of the Thirty Years War and its immediate aftermath. Friedeburg breaks new ground by shifting the discussion away from the unsteady development of German liberalism and the supposed uncritical and even enthusiastic embrace of monarchism, which allegedly pushed Germany along a deviant ‘special path’ away from western democracy and towards Nazism.’ Peter H. Wilson, University of Hull

I missed this when it came out a few years ago, but looks a very interesting contribution to debates about 17th century political theory and history.

Ziad Elmarsafy, Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought: Massignon, Corbin, Jambet – Bloomsbury, January 2021

Why would a devout Catholic, a committed Protestant, and a Maoist atheist devote their lives and work to the study of esoteric aspects of Islam? How are these aspects ‘good to think with’? What are the theoretical and intellectual problems to which they provide solutions? These are the questions at the heart of Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought. The three French specialists of Islam described above form an intellectual and personal genealogy that structures the core of the text: Massignon taught Corbin, who taught Jambet in his turn. Each of them found in the esoteric a solution to otherwise insurmountable problems: desire for Massignon, certainty for Corbin, and resurrection/immortality for Jambet. Over the course of three long chapters focused on the life and work of each writer, the book maps the central place of esoteric Islam in the intellectual life of twentieth and twenty-first century France.

“In this remarkable work, Ziad Elmarsafy re-opens the esoteric archive of modern French Islam. It requires a scholar of exceptional cultural, philosophical and linguistic range to even begin to do justice to Massignon, Corbin and Jambet’s work and Elmarsafy is that scholar. As he reconstructs the intellectual history of French engagements with esoteric Islam, Elmarsafy not only tells a story that has never properly been told before, but creates an entirely new genealogy of the evolution of modern French thought that forces us to re-pose classic questions about truth, subjectivity and freedom we thought we had already answered. Finally, and most importantly, however, this book beautifully exemplifies its own central argument about French esoteric Islam: Elmarsafy’s deeply affirmative readings of Massignon, Corbin and Jambet are distinguished throughout by the very intellectual hospitality or openness to the other that characterises their own engagements with the Islamic tradition. This is a major intellectual achievement by one of the most important scholars of comparative literature and thought working today and we are all in his debt.” –  Arthur Bradley, Professor of Comparative Literature, Lancaster University, UK,