Dave Beer, The case of bookcases– a followup post to The writing moment: Three difficulties with writing in this time of upheaval
Some interesting reflections from Dave on the bookshelf as backdrop, and the separation from a personal collection. Perhaps I should write something on this theme, since there is an extensive collection in my work office, from which I am separated, and an extensive one at home, which is extremely useful at this time.
Dave Beer, The writing moment: Three difficulties with writing in this time of upheaval
Waiting on…
The lockdown seems to have brought a weird mixture of lethargy and restlessness. I’m very fortunate to be busy with my university work, but I’m still left with the feeling that I’m waiting around. I’m not sure what for.
In this unsettled stasis writing about technology, media and culture is proving difficult. Not impossible, but harder. I’ve been trying to reflect on why writing is so tricky at the moment. Three things seem to stand out. [continues here]
While these are strange and disruptive times, as much as I’m able, I’m trying to make progress on this book manuscript. I’d intended to submit it to Polity by the end of April, but that unfortunately wasn’t possible. I can manage without the days I’d planned on having in Uppsala when I cut that trip short, and the work I would have done at Yale and Princeton was mainly for the next book on Foucault in the 1960s, so I hope to reschedule that trip when the situation has improved. But I do need some more time in Paris to complete this manuscript, and I am not sure when that will be possible.
Although I have most of my French theory books at home, there are a few things in my Warwick office that I can’t currently access. The Warwick library is closed, and there are few things I want to check there. And I need to get to at least two libraries in London, and both are currently closed. A key book – Foucault’s long manuscript on Binswanger – was due to be published in April, but this is now put back probably until next year as a result of the pandemic. I don’t want to wait that long, so my discussion will be based entirely on its manuscript, but for that I’ll need to have some more time with it in Paris. Finishing my manuscript is therefore dependent on ability to travel and libraries reopening.
In addition, I have found concentration much more difficult than usual. There has been something of a backlash against people writing on covid-19, and an incredulity that anyone can carry on with what they were doing before. While I am sceptical of the worth of some of the ‘hot takes’ out there, I have found other pieces very useful and interesting (see my attempt at a list of links here). Equally, I can’t see what is wrong with people continuing, where possible, with some semblance of normality. But I am surely not alone in finding concentration difficult, with anxiousness about what is happening, and the lure of news and social media updates.
I’ve been using the time to work on a few things in the manuscript, going back over drafted sections and reworking a few sections. I did make some reasonably large structural changes to the last few chapters, moving sections around, and rewriting transitions. I think it works much better now. I’ve also been reading – largely things that are peripheral to the main argument but helpful nonetheless. I’ve also gone back through my notes on the archives and filled in a few more things.
One of the key things I’ve been reading has been work by Georges Bataille. I think most of the discussion of Foucault and Bataille will be in The Archaeology of Foucault – the book looking at Foucault in the 1960s. There, I plan to discuss ‘Preface to Transgression’ and some related works, but also to see what I can say about Foucault’s work with Bataille’s Oeuvres Complètes, and his involvement with the journal Critique. Foucault joined the board after Bataille’s death, and I don’t think he ever actually met him. So, it is very much a dialogue through Foucault’s reading of his work – I don’t think Bataille would have read Foucault, and he died in 1962, just as Foucault began to be more widely known.
That Foucault read Bataille is widely reported, and there are some traces of that reading in the archives. He certainly knew Inner Experience and On Nietzsche quite early – there is a record of his reading Sartre’s very critical review of the first of these, and saying that was the moment he decided he was for Bataille and against Sartre. He also knew Bataille’s journal Acéphale, but the notes on this are, as is normal, undated, so it’s not clear when this was. By the time Foucault started to write on Bataille he obviously knew more – Eroticism is a key reference, for example. I find Bataille hard work, and while I have the Oeuvres complètes in French, I’m grateful for Stuart Kendall’s excellent translations. Following a request for help that didn’t turn up the things I was looking at, I’ve produced a Bataille bibliography of English translations, referenced to the Oeuvres complètes and other collections in French. I think it’s fairly complete – at least to any pieces translated in books by Bataille, or collections of Bataille’s writings. But as I say there, I’d welcome additions, corrections and comments.
I’ve also been doing a bit more work on how encountering Heidegger would have been for someone reading him, in German but also French translation, in the early 1950s. There wasn’t that much Heidegger published even in German at the time – some early writings, Sein und Zeit, the Kant book, several long essays which ended up in Wegmarken, and some texts on Hölderlin. The ‘Letter on Humanism’ was a key text, written in response to a question from Jean Beaufret, and very much directed to a French audience. Holzwege came out in 1950 and this was really the beginning of the later Heidegger. Introduction to Metaphysics was published in 1953; Vorträge und Aufsätze and Was heißt Denken? in 1954. So, not a great deal in German compared to what has become available since, but quite a lot of that was in French, and certainly much more in French than English in this period. This has led me to read quite a few of the early French translations – texts Foucault had access to, though he was also reading the German. Foucault also had access to some unpublished texts. There is a substantial discussion of how Foucault read Heidegger in Chapter 5, following a discussion of some lectures he attended on Heidegger in Chapter 1.
I’ve also been working through an accumulated folder of pdfs – various articles on Foucault and connected thinkers in this period, which I’ve been collecting over the course of working on this project. Some sent to me, others have been sitting there for a long time. I’ve moved some to the folder for the 1960s book, but this ‘to read’ folder is now looking very empty. I’m nearly there, and if it wasn’t for the archives and libraries being closed this may well have been the post where I would have sent the book off to review. As it is, I need to put it to one side for an indeterminable and possibly interminable period.
I’ve been doing a little tentative work towards the 1960s book, beginning work on a Lefebvre editing project I planned to do from now until the end of June, and thinking seriously about the next big project beyond Foucault. Much is uncertain in future planning, and my plans for research leave are thrown into doubt by the current situation in Universities. For the moment at least I have some time to make progress on these different projects, if only I could regain my usual focus…
Katharina E. Piechocki, Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe – University of Chicago Press, November 2019
Somehow I missed this when it was published late last year, but looks fascinating:
What is “Europe,” and when did it come to be? In the Renaissance, the term “Europe” circulated widely. But as Katharina N. Piechocki argues in this compelling book, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe’s boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent’s formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. As Piechocki shows, this tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used not only to represent but, more importantly, also to shape and promote an image of Europe quite unparalleled in previous centuries. Engaging with poets, historians, and mapmakers, Piechocki resists an easy categorization of the continent, scrutinizing Europe as an unexamined category that demands a much more careful and nuanced investigation than scholars of early modernity have hitherto undertaken. Unprecedented in its geographic scope, Cartographic Humanism is the first book to chart new itineraries across Europe as it brings France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal into a lively, interdisciplinary dialogue.
Terrains and Territories – Stuart Elden and Nico Buitendag discussion at Undisciplined
Many thanks to Nico for this invitation, and for a wide-ranging discussion that touches on nearly everything I’ve worked on. This is part of a series of discussions on this podcast, with geographers and theorists.
I am honoured to speak to Prof. Stuart Elden about his ground-breaking work in political geography. We talk about the concept of territory, about new ways of reading Shakespeare, and his archival work on Michel Foucault. Here is the link to Prof. Elden’s awesome blog: progressivegeographies.com/ In Undisciplined we speak to experts from all fields whose research is exciting and novel. The tone of conversation is relaxed, and is intended to stimulate and intrigue anyone who is interested in learning more about cutting-edge developments, and looking at the world in new ways.
The intro track is from my talented friend, Graeda. Check it his page too! https://soundcloud.com/graedamusic
Feel free to visit our Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/undisciplinedpod
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast…
Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR…
Jacques Derrida, Clang – a new translation of Glas by David Wills and Geoffrey Bennington, University of Minnesota Press, December 2020
A new translation of Derrida’s groundbreaking juxtaposition of Hegel and Genet, forcing two incompatible discourses into dialogue with each other.
Jacques Derrida’s famously challenging book Glas puts the practice of philosophy and the very acts of writing and reading to the test. Presented here in an entirely new translation as Clang—its title resonating like the sound of an alarm or death knell—this book brilliantly juxtaposes Hegel’s totalizing, hierarchical system of thought with Genet’s autobiographical, carceral erotics.
Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980), edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, University of Minnesota Press, December 2020 [updated: April 2021]
Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970–71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet.
These archival documents—public announcements, manifestos, reports, pamphlets, interventions, press conference statements, interviews, and round table discussions—trace the GIP’s establishment in post-1968 political turmoil, the new models of social activism it pioneered, the prison revolts it supported across France, and the retrospective assessments that followed its denouement. At the same time, Intolerable offers a rich, concrete exploration of Foucault’s concept of resistance, providing a new understanding of the arc of his intellectual development and the genesis of his most influential book, Discipline and Punish. Presenting the account of France’s most vibrant prison resistance movement in its own words and on its own terms, this significant and relevant collection also connects the approach and activities of the GIP to radical prison resistance movements today.
he Prisons Information Group was a crucial part of Foucault’s political trajectory, but it was an intensely collaborative project between intellectuals, prisoners, and their families. Expertly translated and introduced, this is the definitive collection of the group’s writings. Although the focus is France, the texts also illuminate other European countries, while the Algerian war opens up questions of colonialism, and the group’s links to the Black Panthers make it important for an understanding of the politics of race. A significant book that is both long overdue and a timely intervention in contemporary debates about police and prison abolition and reform.
Stuart Elden, author of The Early Foucault
Intolerable contributes to incarceration studies by highlighting the contributions (and pointing to the contradictions) of the Prisons Information Group (GIP). By emphasizing the activism of the GIP, it demonstrates how the author and theorist as an academic activist was influenced by the militancy of political actors and revolutionaries who took great risks, especially as incarcerated intellectuals and rebels, to challenge repression structured by racial/colonial capitalism and captivity.
Joy James, author of Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader
I’ve done some further updating to the list of works in Georges Bataille’s Oeuvres complètes and other French collections and the English translations.
The main addition is that I’ve now listed the articles in Volumes XI and XII of the Oeuvres complètes, along with their translations.
There was some other work over the last week, including filling in details of pieces in The Cradle of Humanity, details of the dossiers at the end of Vol X, and listing the short pieces included in “The Place of Violence: Selected Writings”, translated by Bruce Belay, Parallax 6 (2), 2010, 81-91.
I think this listing is now complete, and that it includes all the short pieces in English books by Bataille, as well as the longer works. But I am sure there are pieces translated in edited collections or in journals which I’ve missed, so as before I’d certainly welcome additions, corrections or comments.
This page is part of the Resources part of this site, which also includes lots of resources on Foucault (links, some images, translations, a bibliography of his collaborative projects, audio and video links, etc.), reading guides to Lefebvre and Sloterdijk, a German-French-English bibliography of Ludwig Binswanger, literature on Boko Haram, Ebola and Covid-19, links and comments on writing and publishing, and lists of my favourite academic books of each year.
Where to start with reading Peter Sloterdijk? – my reading guide has been updated with recent translations from Polity.
I’d still suggest beginning with either You Must Change Your Life or In the World Interior of Capital, depending on whether you are most interested in philosophy of the self or philosophy of the world. I’ve not kept up on his more recent works, but I’ve tried to add in links to all the translations – let me know if I’ve missed any.
I launched this site 10 years ago – both as a blog, but also as a place to share publications, some research resources and other things. I never imagined I’d still be running it a decade later. My focus has changed quite a lot in this time – when I started it I was in the Geography department at Durham, about half-way through a research fellowship working on territory, and for the past seven years I’ve been in Warwick’s Politics and International Studies department. I’ve moved through interests in Foucault, Canguilhem, Shakespeare. terrain and other things in this time. Many thanks for reading.
