A copy of Martin Jones, Cities and Regions in Crisis, generously sent by Martin, and some second-hand ones for The Early Foucault work. Clavel, Mauriac and Italiaander all knew Foucault at different times, and Pestana is a useful study of his early work.
Antía Mato Bouzas, Kashmir as a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Belonging across the Line of Control, Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Kashmir as a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Belonging across the Line of Control examines the Kashmir dispute from both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) and within the theoretical frame of border studies. It draws on the experiences of those living in these territories such as divided families, traders, cultural and social activists. Kashmir is a borderland, that is, a context for spatial transformations, where the resulting interactions can be read as a process of ‘becoming’ rather than of ‘being’. The analysis of this borderland shows how the conflict is manifested in territory, in specific locations with a geopolitical meaning, evidencing the discrepancy between ‘representation’ and the ‘living’. The author puts forward the concept of belonging as a useful category for investigating more inclusive political spaces.
Dr. Antía Mato Bouzas is a researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. Her research focus is on the politics of the South Asian region, with an interest on borders and citizenship. She currently works on a project funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) on migration from north-eastern Pakistan to the Gulf.
This looks interesting, and especially relevant given recent events, but a shame about the prohibitive price, even for the e-book.
European Social Theory theme issue on The Politics of Life, including a piece by Roberto Esposito (requires subscription)
Special issue: The Politics of Life, European Journal of Social Theory, Volume 22 Issue 3, August 2019
Contents
Guest editors: Greg Bird and Heather Lynch
Special issue introduction
Introduction to the politics of life: A biopolitical mess 301
Greg Bird and Heather Lynch
Special issue articles
Postdemocracy and biopolitics
Roberto Esposito
Me, my self, and the multitude: Microbiopolitics of the human microbiome
Penelope Ironstone
Geopower: On the states of nature of late capitalism
Federico Luisetti
Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics in multispecies homes
Heather Lynch
The eroticization of biopower: Masochistic relationality and resistance
in Deleuze and Agamben
Hannah Richter
Religion and the spontaneous order of the market: Law, freedom, and power
over lives
Elettra Stimilli
From homo sacer to homo dolorosus: Biopower and the politics of suffering 416
Charles Wells
Nancy Luxon (ed.), Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens – University of Minnesota Press, August 2019
Great to see a copy of this collection, in which I have a piece ‘Home, Street, City: Farge, Foucault and the Spaces of the Lettres de cachet‘ (preprint available here).
Expanding the insights of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families into policing, public order, (in)justice, and daily life
What might it mean for ordinary people to intervene in the circulation of power between police and the streets, sovereigns and their subjects? How did the police come to understand themselves as responsible for the circulation of people as much as things—and to separate law and justice from the maintenance of a newly emergent civil order? These are among the many questions addressed in the interpretive essays in Archives of Infamy.
Crisscrossing the Atlantic to bring together unpublished radio broadcasts, book reviews, and essays by historians, geographers, and political theorists, Archives of Infamy provides historical and archival contexts to the translation of Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault. This volume includes new translations of key texts, including a radio address Foucault gave in 1983 that explains the writing process for Disorderly Families; two essays by Foucault not readily available in English; and a previously untranslated essay by Farge that describes how historians have appropriated Foucault.
Archives of Infamy pushes past old debates between philosophers and historians to offer a new perspective on the crystallization of ideas—of the family, gender relations, and political power—into social relationships and the regimes of power they engender.
Arthur Bradley, Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure – Columbia University Press, October 2019
In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen’s existence be removed from the city as if they had never existed in the first place. Once reserved for individuals, damnatio memoriae in different forms now extends to social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and even entire peoples. In modern times, the condemned go by different names—“enemies of the people;” the “missing,” the “disappeared,” “ghost” detainees in “black sites”—but they are subject to the same fate of political erasure.
Arthur Bradley explores the power to render life unlived from ancient Rome through the War on Terror. He argues that sovereignty is the power to decide what counts as being alive and what does not: to make life “unbearable,” unrecognized as having lived or died. In readings of Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Robespierre, Schmitt, and Benjamin, Bradley asks: What is the “life” of this unbearable life? How does it change and endure across sovereign time and space, from empires to republics, from kings to presidents? To what extent can it be resisted or lived otherwise? A profoundly interdisciplinary and ambitious work, Unbearable Life rethinks sovereignty, biopolitics, and political theology to find the radical potential of a life that neither lives or dies.
In this book, Arthur Bradley identifies the antinomical point of crossing, hitherto obscure, between the paradigms of biopolitics and political theology in the sovereign prerogative of making life, or death, never happen. It is a conceptual passage of extreme interest that, by rethinking the performative role of negation, widens the boundaries of political ontology. The sources used—ancient, modern, and contemporary—place this work at the center of current philosophical and political debate. Roberto Esposito, author of Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life
Arthur Bradley poses here a dramatic and unsettling challenge: to think a new natality. Not a renaissance, but a powerful call for ‘future political children’ to be born, who would break the cycles of a sovereign power intent on erasing countless existences that, beyond annihilation, would simply never have been. By way of Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Schmitt, and others, Unbearable Life presents us with a generalized martyrology, reading with unceasing insights the remarkable figures of Cacus and of Jephthah’s daughter, of Robespierre and the Zapatistas, in order to diagnose and combat a nihilopolitics that, older and stronger than we wish to admit, very much persists today. Gil Anidjar, author of Blood: A Critique of Christianity
There is no ‘murderous consent’ organized by the state more radical and absolute than the one that declares the very existence of an individual or a community to be intolerable. What sovereign power then organizes is that individual or community’s confinement to a state of inexistence that culminates in its erasure. Because such consent takes us to the heart of the modern theological-political imaginary, it is important to write its genealogy. Revisiting anew the thought of Foucault, Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Schmitt, and Benjamin, this is what the decisive analyses of Unbearable Life propose: a plunge into the roots of the violence that the contemporary world does not stop imposing upon us with increasing urgency. Marc Crépon, author of Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death
Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border around the World, Verso, 2019
Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine, Indigo, 2019; reviewed by Will Davies in The Guardian
In surrealist artist Paul Klee’s The Twittering Machine, the bird-song of a diabolical machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Leading political writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour argues that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with social media.
Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.
Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into.
‘Richard Seymour has a brilliant mind and a compelling style. Everything he writes is worth reading.’ – Gary Younge, Editor-at-Large, Guardian
‘One of our most astute political analysts.’ – China Miéville, author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
A copy of Neil Brenner’s New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question, sent by Neil, and some books from Duke University Press in recompense for review work. They are Stuart Hall, Essential Essays and Cultural Studies 1983; Ann Laura Stoler, Duress, Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory, Jason Dittmer, Diplomatic Material, Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies, Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds and collections edited by Kregg Hetherington on Infrastructure, Environment and the Life in the Anthropocene and by Suzanne Guerlac and Pheng Cheah on Derrida and the Time of the Political.
Teo Ballvé, The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia – Cornell University Press, 2020
No details yet on the Cornell site, but it is part of the Cornell Series on Land: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment. Really good to see Teo’s work about to be published in book form.
Nidesh Lawtoo, (New) Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth – Michigan State Press, August 2019
Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are currently returning to the forefront of the political scene? In this book, Nidesh Lawtoo furthers his previous diagnostic of crowd behavior, identification, and mimetic contagion to account for the growing shadow cast by authoritarian leaders who rely on new media to take possession of the digital age. Donald Trump is considered here as a case study to illustrate Nietzsche’s untimely claim that, one day, “ ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, will be the real masters.” In the process, Lawtoo joins forces with a genealogy of mimetic theorists—from Plato to Girard, through Nietzsche, Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Bataille, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, among others—to show that (new) fascism may not be fully “new,” let alone original; yet it effectively reloads the old problematics of mimesis via new media that have the disquieting power to turn politics itself into a fiction.
