Although I am going to talk about what I have written, my books and papers are so on, unfortunately I forget what I have written practically as soon as it is finished. There is probably going to be some trouble about this. But nevertheless I think there is also something significant about it, in that I don’t have the feeling that I write my books. I have the feeling that my books get written through me and that once they have got across me I feel empty and nothing is left.
You may remember that I have written that myths get thought in man unbeknownst to him. This has been much discussed and even criticised by my English-speaking colleagues, because their feeling is that, from an empirical point of view, it is an utterly meaningless sentence. But for me it describes a lived experience, because it says exactly how I perceive my own relationship to my work. That is, my work gets thought in me unbeknown to me.
Massey radio lectures, 1977, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning, London: Routledge, 1978, p. 1
Update: there is a recording of the lectures online here.
Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin’s immensely influential essay, “Toward the Critique of Violence,” this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory.
The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin’s critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context.
With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin’s work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.
An English translation of a book originally published in Portuguese – description is in Portuguese below.
Este texto publicado originalmente em língua portuguesa (2007) está sendo preparado para a 5ª. Edição nesta língua. Ao mesmo tempo, foi publicado em língua italiana, em Milão (2012) e em língua espanhola, em bogotá (2019), tendo ampla circulação em virtude da amplitude de utilização do território.
O território tem sido objeto de estudos em diferentes áreas do conhecimento, como a geografia e a sociologia, a antropologia e a economia, no entanto, teve centralidade na geografia, assumindo histórica e geograficamente distintos significados, alguns conservadores do status quo e outros histórico-críticos. É um conceito polissêmico, de grande amplitude e utilizaçao no ensino, na pesquia e na extensão acadêmica e científica, assim, assume também um significado político e prático fundamental para compreender e transformar a realidade de vida cotidiana, considerando a necessidade de construir uma sociedade mais justa e ecológica. O território, desse modo, é um conceito fundamental, bem como objeto de estudos em diferentes áreas do conhecimento e, ao mesmo tempo, espaço de (in)formação, mobilização, resistência, luta e enfrentamento diante do estado burguês e dos agentes do capital: por de uma abordagem territorial histórico-crítica, conforme argumentamos, voltada para as pessoas mais simples e humildes, é tranquilamente viável a construção de projetos de desenvolvimento territorial de base local, ecológica e cultural, trabalhando-se para e com as pessoas, numa perspectiva dialógica, solidária, participativa e cooperada. Pesquisa e ação, diálogo e reflexão podem acontecer simultaneamente, no nível de cada território, em diferentes níveis escalares, em uma práxis popular e sustentável, entendendo-se o território como patrimônio da humanidade e lugar de vida saudável e emancipatória politicamente.
I’ve mentioned the Deleuze Seminars project before – an online resource gathering recordings, transcriptions and translations of his teaching work. This kind of work is very valuable, but relies on source material. I know from my work on Foucault that sometimes people have recordings or other bits of evidence, and that they don’t always realise the value. So as well as sharing the link to the resource again, I also wanted to publicise the project’s appeal for help.
Data Rescue!
Did you attend Deleuze’s courses during the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s? Do you have recordings or notes that you would be willing to have posted on The Deleuze Seminars website?
If so, please email us at <thedeleuzeseminars@gmail.com>, or send us a message using “Contact Us” link in the website. If materials cannot be sent electronically, we will try to cover the cost of shipping them via the regular postal service. Items can be mailed to the director of the project, Daniel W. Smith, Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, 100 N. University Ave., West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA.
Materials sent to us will be posted as soon as possible, and our hope is that they can ultimately be transcribed and translated.
Background
Deleuze began teaching at the University of Paris, Vincennes-St. Denis in 1969, where he taught until his retirement in 1987. Fortunately for posterity, a Japanese student named Hidenobu Suzuki recorded almost all Deleuze’s seminars between 1979 and 1987, and his cassettes became the basis for the archive established at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
However, before 1979 we have few recordings of Deleuze’s seminars, most of which were devoted to the research that resulted in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The extant recordings from this period primarily were made by Richard Pinhas and are available at WebDeleuze.
We are thus launching this data rescue effort to retrieve as many of these recordings as possible from the 1969-1979 decade (and even before). But the clock is ticking. Students who attended Deleuze’s course in 1970 when they were 25 years old are now 75 years old, and the cassette recordings form this period may soon be lost to posterity forever. So if you have recordings or notes—or know someone who does—please let us know.
We are grateful for your assistance in helping us complete this archive of Deleuze’s seminar lectures.
Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary.
This innovative Research Agenda draws together discussions on the conceptualization of territory and the ways in which territory and territorial practices are intimately bound with issues of power and control. Expert contributors provide a critical assessment of key areas of scholarship on territory and territoriality across a wide range of spatial scales and with examples drawn from the global landscape.
After an introduction to shifting ideas of territory, territoriality and sovereignty, the book deals with territory in its more traditional macro-scale sense at the level of the nation-state before going on to explore questions of territory, identity and belonging at a more micro-scale focusing on issues of citizenship, inclusion and exclusion.
A Research Agenda for Territory and Territoriality will be a key resource for scholars and students in geopolitics and social and cultural geography, whilst also being a thought-provoking read for those interested in nations and nationalism, sovereignty, conflict, citizenship, and territory, place and locality.
The review is a useful survey of the book and its arguments and is open access. Here’s the Verso blurb of the book.
The great French Marxist philosopher weighs up the contributions of the three major critics of modernity
Henri Lefebvre saw Marx as an ‘unavoidable, necessary, but insufficient starting point’, and always insisted on the importance of Hegel to understanding Marx. Metaphilosophy also suggested the significance he ascribed to Nietzsche, in the ‘realm of shadows’ through which philosophy seeks to think the world. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche: or the Realm of the Shadows proposes that the modern world is, at the same time, Hegelian in terms of the state, Marxist in terms of the social and society and Nietzschean in terms of civilisation and its values. As early as 1939, Lefebvre had pioneered a French reading of Nietzsche that rejected the philosopher’s appropriation by fascists, bringing out the tragic implications of Nietzsche’s proclamation that ‘God is dead’ long before this approach was followed by such later writers as Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Forty years later, in the last of his philosophical writings, Lefebvre juxtaposed the contributions of the three great thinkers, in a text that’s themes remain surprisingly relevant today.
A major two-volume reference work, but really expensive…
Historical geography is an active, theoretically-informed and vibrant field of study within modern geography, with strong interdisciplinary connections with the humanities and the social sciences. The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography provides an international and in-depth overview of the field with chapters that examine the history, present condition and future significance of historical geography in relation to recent developments and current research.
The Handbook is in two volumes, divided across nine parts. Volume One includes commentaries on the history and geography of historical geography, and reviews how historical geographers have considered the appropriation, management and representation of landscape, the changing geographies of property, land, money and financial capital, and the demographic, medical and political analysis of the world’s growing and mobile population.
Volume Two shows how historical geographers have made significant contributions to geopolitical debates about the relationships between nation-states and empires, to environmental challenges posed by human interaction with the natural world, to studies of the cultural, intellectual and political implications of modern science and technology, and to investigations of communicative action, artefacts, performances and representations. The final part reviews the methodological and ethical challenges of historical geography as a publicly engaged research practice.
Foucault’s Introduction to a translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s essay ‘Dream and Existence’ was published in late 1954. The translation was credited to Jacqueline Verdeaux, with Foucault acknowledged for the notes. Yet Verdeaux herself indicates the intensely collaborative nature of their working process and the translation. In 1958, Victor von Weizsäcker’s Der Gestaltkreis was published in French as Le Cycle de la structure, translated by Foucault and Daniel Rocher. Foucault went on to translate and introduce Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology as his secondary doctoral thesis. His engagement with Kant and Binswanger’s ideas has been discussed in the literature, but his role as translator has generally been neglected. His engagement with von Weizsäcker is almost never mentioned. This article critically discusses Foucault’s role in the Binswanger and von Weizsäcker translations, comparing the German originals with the French texts, and showing how this is a useful additional element to the story of the early Foucault.
The article should be available open access, but please contact me if you can’t access it. The article will form part of a theme issue on ‘Foucault before the Collège de France’, which I’m guest editing with Orazio Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini. The article is an initial version of some of the material in The Early Foucault(Polity, June 2021).
Talking to Thinkers with Quentin Skinner with Johnny Lyons, 2 November 2020 (video)
In the episode of Talking to Thinkers Johnny Lyons talks to the eminent historian Quentin Skinner, Barber Beaumont Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London and former Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge
