Sara Fregonese (SF): This book is the result of my doctoral research (2004-2008), to which I then added a layer of historical detail about the administrative changes in 1840s Mount Lebanon and their impact on today’s sectarian politics. I also integrated a chapter on more recent sustained urban clashes in 2008 that partly encompasses my postdoctoral research around sovereignty and non-state armed groups (2009-2012) and their relation with the idea and practice of the State.
What made me write the book was, firstly, a disciplinary frustration with the lack of attention (in western scholarship at least) given to the representations and narrations of non-state actors and sub-national spaces of the civil war in Lebanon. We see a lot of grand scale geopolitical analysis around the 1975-1990 events, but less enquiry linking the kind of geopolitical reasoning from international relations and political science, with spatial accounts of what was actually happening at the urban level during the conflict.
Update: there is a discussion on the New Books podcast here.
Parrots and snakes, wild cats and monkeys—exotic pets can now be found everywhere from skyscraper apartments and fenced suburban backyards to roadside petting zoos. In Animal Traffic Rosemary-Claire Collard investigates the multibillion-dollar global exotic pet trade and the largely hidden processes through which exotic pets are produced and traded as lively capital. Tracking the capture of animals in biosphere reserves in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize; their exchange at exotic animal auctions in the United States; and the attempted rehabilitation of former exotic pets at a wildlife center in Guatemala, Collard shows how exotic pets are fetishized both as commodities and as objects. Their capture and sale sever their ties to complex socio-ecological…
In Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci, Francesca Antonini offers a fresh insight into Antonio Gramsci’s thought. Building on the achievements of recent Gramscian scholarship, she investigates his usage of the concepts of Bonapartism and Caesarism, both in his pre-prison writings and in the Prison Notebooks. The Caesarist-Bonapartist paradigm relates crucially to Gramsci’s reflections on hegemony and on its transformations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While this model is essential to Gramsci’s understanding of the interwar period and of the Fascist regime in Italy, it also sheds a meaningful light on other past and present scenarios, from the French Second Empire to the USSR of his time. Finally, yet importantly, Antonini’s analysis illuminates Gramsci’s approach towards the Marxian legacy.
Just in hardback and ebook at present, but books in this series do appear in paperback with Haymarket a bit later. The Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks collection Francesca co-edited, and which I previously mentioned on this blog, is now available in paper.
Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks offers a rich collection of historical, philosophical, and political studies addressing the thought of Antonio Gramsci, one of the most significant intellectuals of the twentieth century. Based on thorough analyses of Gramsci’s texts, these interdisciplinary investigations engage with ongoing debates in different fields of study. They are exciting evidence of the enduring capacity of Gramsci’s thought to generate and nurture innovative inquiries across diverse themes.
Gathering scholars from different continents, the volume represents a global network of Gramscian thinkers from early-career researchers to experienced scholars. Combining rigorous explication of the past with a strategic analysis of the present, these studies mobilise underexplored resources from the Gramscian toolbox to confront the actuality of our ‘great and terrible’ world.
Contributors include: F. Antonini, A. Bernstein, D. Boothman, W. Buddharaksa, T. Chino, R. Ciavolella, C. Conelli, A. Crézégut, V. Cuppi, Y. Douet, A. Freeland, F. Frosini, L. Fusaro, R. Jackson, A. Loftus, S. Meret, S. Neubauer, A. Panichi, I. Pohn-Lauggas, R. Roccu, B. Settis, A. Showstack Sassoon, A. Suceska, P.D. Thomas, N. Vandeviver, M.N. Wróblewska.
In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Mark G. E. Kelly about his article “Foucault and the Politics of Language Today,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website.
From Telos 191 (Summer 2020):
Foucault and the Politics of Language Today
Mark G. E. Kelly
We find ourselves today in a conjuncture where the use of language has become an object of political concern to a perhaps unprecedented extent, or at least in unprecedented ways. In particular, the words used to refer to individuals and to groups, down to the use of pronouns, have come into intense…
Some books bought recently for the Foucault work, related projects and J.S. Mill for teaching. I’m teaching the history of political thought again this year, and while I have most of the texts we’re using, didn’t have Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government which is in this collection, edited by Mark Philp of Warwick’s History department and Frederick Rosen of UCL.
On 2 December 1970, Michel Foucault delivered his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France. He was 44 years old. My thanks to Marcelo Hoffman for alerting me to this anniversary. Had this not been such a crazy term, it would have been nice to commemorate this event a bit more, but I did at least want to mark the date.
The text was first published in the series of inaugural lectures by the Collège itself as Leçon inaugurale faite le Mercredi 2 Décembre 1970. It was then published as a short book by Gallimard in February 1971 as L’ordre du discours: Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970. Although Foucault notes in the Gallimard edition that it is not quite the same as the spoken text, I didn’t know about the Collège de France publication. When the lecture was reprinted in the Pléiade Œuvres the Gallimard version was the one used – a critical edition would have been useful.
I was first alerted to the differences by an anonymous informant, ‘Ambulo Ergosum’, who provided me with notes on the differences. I bought a copy of the original text, and also compared it to the later published (and reprinted) version. The results of this analysis are here.
The lecture has been translated into English three times – first by Rupert Swyer as a journal article which was reprinted as an appendix to some editions of The Archaeology of Knowledge, and then again in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader (open access here). A third – and to my mind, the best – translation by Thomas Scott-Railton is in Nancy Luxon (ed.), Archives of Infamy (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). All these translations are of the later, Gallimard version.
One week after the lecture, Foucault gave the first lecture of the Leçons sur la volonté de savoircourse, which has been translated as Lectures on the Will to Know. The inaugural lecture might have been usefully included in that volume when it was published. It works as a standalone text, and initiates his series of courses, but is also very directly linked to that first course.
As far as I am aware there is no recording of the inaugural lecture. This is the case for all Foucault’s lectures from the first few courses, which is why they were published on the basis of his manuscript notes (or, with the third, on a transcription of tapes which seem no longer to exist). There was a re-recording of the lecture made a few years ago, by France Culture, but the audio is no longer available (the page it was hosted on is here).
I discuss ‘The Order of Discourse’ in the Introduction to Foucault: The Birth of Power, seeing the lecture as a kind of hinge between the work of the 1960s and the 1970s work to come. The lecture certainly has links back to The Archaeology of Knowledge, but also hints of questions of power and a project on sexuality. However, when I wrote that book I wasn’t aware of the earlier published version, and so I might discuss it a little again in the final pages of my study of Foucault in the 1960s. Work for that is ongoing, albeit very slowly at the moment. I’ll hopefully write an update on that research soon.
But for today I did want to mark this anniversary of one of Foucault’s most interesting and important lectures, at a crucial point in his career. I previously posted about a recent Brazilian collection commemorating the lecture – Rosimeri de Oliveira Dias and Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues (eds.), Ordens do discurso: comentários marginais à aula de Michel Foucault.
How do we live well? The first sentence of Grace and Gravity raises the fundamental question that constantly occupies our minds-and of all those who lived before us. Paradoxically, the impossibility of answering this question opens up the very room needed to find ways of living well. It is the gap where all disciplines fall short, where architecture does not fit its inhabitants, where economy is not based on shortage, where religion cannot be explained by its followers, and where technology works far beyond its own principles.
According to Lars Spuybroek, the prize-winning former architect, this marks the point where the “paradoxical machine” of grace reveals its powers, a point where we “cannot say if we are moving or being moved”. Following the trail of grace leads him to a new form of analysis that transcends the age-old opposition between appearances and technology. Linking up a dazzling and often delightful variety of sources-monkeys, paintings, lamp posts, octopuses, tattoos, bleeding fingers, rose windows, robots, smart phones, spirits, saints, and fossils-with profound meditations on living, death, consciousness, and existence, Grace and Gravity offers an eye-opening provocation to a wide range of art historians, architects, theologians, anthropologists, artists, media theorists and philosophers.
“Lars Spuybroek is one of the freshest and most original voices in our contemporary intellectual world. Grace and Gravity is a truly exceptional and quite extraordinary book. The reader comes away from encountering it with their minds instructed and their lives enriched. It is so much more than a merely ‘academic’ book and it can be appreciated on many levels. It is a book to savour and one can only be grateful for such a work.” – Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick, UK
“Natura semper facit saltus, nature always makes leaps. In this impressively erudite book, Lars Spuybroek shows that these leaps are not across sheer void, but a ‘thin, ghostlike film’ that does not quite belong either to the parts or wholes of things. Against the recent dogmas of continuity and immanence, he invites us to a new understanding of his key term, grace.” – Graham Harman, SCI-Arc, USA
I don’t have absolutely everything I’ve published in pdf, but I’m happy to share the articles and chapters I do have. If you can’t find it on this site, please contact me.
Coils of the Serpent is a scholarly journal dedicated to the investigation of contemporary manifestations of power. It is intended as an open-access platform where diverse theories and analyses of power shall be developed, brought into dialogue with each other, discussed, criticized, illustrated and popularized. The journal was launched in 2016.
Lacan: A Genealogy provides a genealogical account of Lacan’s work as a whole, from his early writings on paranoid psychosis to his later work on the real and surplus enjoyment.
Beistegui argues that Lacan’s work requires an in-depth genealogy to chart and interpret the his key concept of desire. The genealogy is both a historical and critical approach, inspired by Foucault, which consists in asking how – that is, by what theoretical and practical transformations, by the emergence of which discourses of truth, which institutions, and which power relations – our current subjectivity was shaped. Desire is a crucial thread throughout because it lies at the heart not only of liberal political economy, psychiatry and psychopathology, and the various discourses of recognition (from philosophy to psychology and the law) that shape our current politics of identity, but also, and more importantly, of the manner in which we understand, experience and indeed govern ourselves, ethically and politically.
A novel reading of Lacan that foregrounds the radicality and urgency of his concepts and the relationship between desire, norm and the law.
Rosemary-Claire Collard, 
