Mainly books by Bataille, but also a volume of Mircea Eliade’s journals, the first book in French on Heidegger, originally published in 1942, and Teo Ballvé’s The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia. Teo kindly sent a copy of his much-anticipated book; the others were bought second-hand.
Marta Faustino, Gianfranco Ferraro (eds.), The Late Foucault: Ethical and Political Questions – Bloomsbury, December 2020
Michel Foucault is one of the most important and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century and one of the leading figures in contemporary Western intellectual life and debate. The recent publication of his last lecture courses at the Collège de France (1981-1984), together with the short texts, essays, and interviews from the same period, have sparked new interest in his work, allowing for a new understanding of his philosophical trajectory and challenging several interpretations produced over the last few decades.
In this later phase of his thinking, Foucault deepens and expands the course of his preceding works on the genealogy of subjectivity, while at the same time adding a significant ethical and political dimension to it. His focus on the ancient ethics of care of the self and technologies of self-constitution during this period adds important nuances to his previous positions on power, truth, and subjectivity, shedding new light on his philosophical endeavour as a whole and situating his reflections at the centre of current moral debates.
Focusing on the last stage of Foucault’s thought, this book brings together international scholars to relaunch the critical debate on the significance of Foucault’s so-called “ethical turn” and to discuss the ways in which the perspectives offered by Foucault in this period might help us to unravel modernity, giving us the tools to understand and transform our present, ethically and politically.
Etienne Balibar, Spinoza, the Transindividual, translated by Mark G. E. Kelly, Edinburgh University Press, September 2020
One of the most important books on Spinoza to appear in the last 30 years, written by one of the foremost living French philosophers
- Includes a rare engagement by Balibar with psychoanalysis and Freud’s social thought
- Offers new readings of Spinoza, a canonical figure in the history of philosophy
- Intervenes in a growing discourse around the notion of transindividuality
Étienne Balibar, one of the foremost living French philosophers, builds on his landmark work Spinoza and Politics with this exploration of Spinoza’s ontology. Balibar situates Spinoza in relation to the major figures of Marx and Freud as a precursor to the more recent French thinker Gilbert Simondon’s concept of the transindividual.
Presenting a crucial development in his thought, Balibar takes the concept of transindividuality beyond Spinoza to show it at work at both the individual and the collective level.
Update: there is a review by Dan Taylor at Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
I’ve made a start with the project of listing the pieces in Georges Bataille’s Oeuvres complètes and other French collections, along with English translations of these pieces. The page is available here.
It’s not complete – I’ve done 8 of the 12 volumes of the Oeuvres, and part of one other, and listed some of the other French collections I have. This work is certainly made harder without access to libraries in present circumstances, so for a few books I don’t own, I’ve used online sources to fill in details which will later need checking. I know there are some other sources I need to check as well.
The key thing I’ve learned in doing this is that while there are some very good translations of his work, and nearly all of his books in English, it’s been largely thematic (or, less charitably, unsystematic) until the work of SUNY Press and Stuart Kendall in including material in the Oeuvres alongside the major works. With shorter works (mainly in volumes I, II, XI and XII) there are two or sometimes three translations/re-publications of some essays, and many others that have never been translated. It’s those shorter works that need to be added to this listing.
I am sure I have missed things, but I hope what is here is helpful as a start. I have more work to do on the other volumes, which I’ve begun but will post here when complete. Comments, additions, corrections welcome.
Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 81, Number 2, April 2020 – currently open access
Sharon Achinstein on Hugo Grotius, Kazutaka Inamura and Camille Robcis on Frantz Fanon, and others…
Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement, edited by Reece Jones – University of Georgia Press, 2019 (open access)
The essays in the first part of the volume make a theoretical case for free movement by analyzing philosophical, legal, and moral arguments for opening borders. In doing so, they articulate a sustained critique of the dominant idea that states should favor the rights of their own citizens over the rights of all human beings. The second part sketches out the current situation in the European Union, in states that have erected border walls, in states that have adopted a policy of inclusion such as Germany and Uganda, and elsewhere in the world to demonstrate the consequences of the current regime of movement restrictions at borders. The third part creates a dialogue between theorists and activists, examining the work of Calais Migrant Solidarity, No Borders Morocco, activists in sanctuary cities, and others who contest border restrictions on the ground.
I’ve updated the list of Geographers, sociologists, philosophers etc. on covid-19 on this site. The most recent addition is an essay by Matthew Hannah with Jan Simon Hutta and Christoph Schemann, Thinking Corona measures with Foucault (University of Bayreuth)
I will add more links as I’m told about them, but am no longer trying to keep on top of links – there are just too many pieces to add them all. Please use comments on the page (now enabled) wherever possible, and provide links please – rather than on Facebook or Twitter.
A few things, some ordered before the lockdown began and some since, that will keep me busy for a while. While I have the Heidegger book in German and English, this was an early French translation, and important in terms of the take-up of his ideas and the translation of key terms.
Two bibliographical questions about Georges Bataille:
– is there a comprehensive list anywhere of the writings by/attributed to Bataille which are not included in the Oeuvres complètes? I know of Une liberté souveraine, for example, and letters, and texts from some of the early journals he edited in different places (Le Collège de Sociologie, L’apprenti sorcier, etc.) . But I wonder if there is a comprehensive list somewhere?
– and is there a list of English translations, tallied to the Oeuvres complètes, and including texts in other places? It’s fairly easy for major works, but harder for essays – there are at least two translations of some texts, and others which I don’t think have been translated. Again, just wondering if there is a single place where this has been collated.
I’m aware of the lists on Wikipedia, on popsubculture, and the partial biographies in collections like Visions of Excess, Essential Writings, The Bataille Reader, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, and so on. There are partial bibliographies in some of the secondary books I have on Bataille, but nothing that seems comprehensive. Anyone help with this?
Update 9 April 2020: I’ve made a start with what I had in mind here.
Daniele Lorenzini on Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus
Daniele Lorenzini
In a recent blog post, Joshua Clover rightly notices the swift emergence of a new panoply of “genres of the quarantine.” It should not come as a surprise that one of them centers on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, asking whether or not it is still appropriate to describe the situation that we are currently experiencing. Neither should it come as a surprise that, in virtually all of the contributions that make use of the concept of biopolitics to address the current coronavirus pandemic, the same bunch of rather vague ideas are mentioned over and over again, while other—no doubt more interesting—Foucauldian insights tend to be ignored. In what follows, I discuss two of these insights, and I conclude with some methodological remarks on the issue of what it may mean to “respond” to the current “crisis.”
The “Blackmail” of Biopolitics
The first point that I would…
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