Simeon Wade’s memoir, Foucault in California, Frédéric de Towarnicki, À la rencontre de Heidegger, Louis Althusser, Journal de captivité: Stalag XA 1940-1945, and one of the several issues of Magazine littéraire on Foucault.
Wade’s memoir is the infamous Death Valley acid trip, and is discussed in an interview with Boom California, conducted by Heather Dundas. Dundas writes a foreword to this edition, which also has two of the photos from the trip as endpapers.
Atsuko Watanabe, Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination – Palgrave 2019
This book is the first attempt to comprehensively introduce Japanese geopolitics. Europe’s role in disseminating knowledge globally to shape the world according to its standards is an unchallenged premise in world politics. In this story, Japan is regarded as an enthusiastic importer of the knowledge. The book challenges this ground by examining how European geopolitics, the theory of the modern state, traveled to Japan in the first half of the last century, and demonstrates that the same theory can invoke diverged imaginations of the world by examining a range of historical, political, and literary texts. Focusing on the transformation of power, knowledge, and subjectivity in time and space, Watanabe provides a detailed account to reconsider the formation of contemporary world order of the modern territorial states.
The journal Antipode is 50. The editors have put together an e-book of ‘Keywords in Radical Geography‘, free to download.
I’ve just been told the event has been cancelled.
After Capital by Couze Venn – book discussion, Goldsmiths, 25 March 2019, 6pm
Update 12 March 2019: I’ve just been told the event has been cancelled due to ill-health.
Panel discussion on this ground-break new work and its political implications with presentations form Jeremy Gilbert, Shela Sheikh and Paul Gilroy; and quick responses from Mike Featherstone, Will Davis, Lisa Blackman and Tiziana Terranova (on video).
6 to 7.30 pm, Monday 25th March with drinks reception afterwards LG01, Professor Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths
The present crisis of capitalism has a history. A history of the private accumulation of wealth through property regimes that allows increasing commodification and the privatisation of resources: from land to knowledge and even to life itself. Understanding that history may allow us to imagine alternatives after Capital that are no longer private but common. After Capital explores this history, showing how the economy is linked to environmental…
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Short excerpt from Thomas Lemke’s excellent book on Foucault and politics, at last available in English
Thomas Lemke, Foucault’s Immanent Contradictions, Verso Blog, 22 February 2019
From Habermas to Honneth, critics have been keen to portray Foucault as a paradox-prone thinker. Thomas Lemke argues that we should embrace the recurring contradictions in Foucault’s thought as symptoms rather than inherent problems.
This is an excerpt from the introduction to Thomas Lemke’s Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason which is currently 30% off on the Verso website
Were not Foucault’s critics right to fault him for the contradictions immanent in his work? Did they not accurately describe the theoretical incoherence of calling for political resistance on the basis of a neutral conception of power? Was it not necessary to dissolve these aporias, contradictions and paradoxes in one direction or another? It seems Foucault had only two possibilities. According to the first line of reasoning, he overcame the problem and affirmed the validity of…
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I’m very pleased to say that I’ve been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme small grant for a project entitled ‘The Early Foucault: Retracing Intellectual History through Archival Sources’. As regular readers of the blog will know, I’ve been working on the first part of Foucault’s career for the past couple of years, building on the books on his later career – Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity, 2016) and Foucault: The Birth of Power (Polity, 2017). The research will involve further work with archives of Foucault’s papers in Paris and Normandy, his personal library held at Yale, and papers and libraries in Tübingen, Princeton and Irvine. It will also involve a month-long visit to the Carolina Rediviva library in Uppsala, where Foucault researched his History of Madness. The research will lead to a book entitled The Early Foucault (under contract with Polity), and the initial work for a planned book on Foucault’s career in the 1960s.
More detail on the project on the early Foucault can be found here.
Georges Canguilhem, transmission d’une pensée : des archives aux Œuvres complètes – CAPHÉS, Paris, 14 March 2019
Jeudi 14 mars 2019 — École normale supérieure, 29, rue d’Ulm, salle 236 (2e étage), 75005 Paris — 17h à 19h 30
Intervenants : Jean-François Braunstein, Camille Limoges, Claude Debru, François Delaporte, Yves Schwartz et Xavier Roth.
Modérateur : Mathias Girel, directeur du CAPHÉS
Le Centre documentaire du CAPHÉS a le plaisir d’accueillir à l’ENS depuis plusieurs années l’équipe éditoriale qui s’est constituée autour de l’entreprise des Œuvres complètes de Georges Canguilhem. Après la publication de trois des six tomes, l’équipe du CAPHÉS souhaite réunir quelques anciens élèves de Georges Canguilhem et participants à l’entreprise éditoriale pour évoquer la question de la transmission : témoignages d’anciens élèves, travail des éditeurs de textes à partir des archives, ou comment les Œuvres complètes donnent à voir les « traces du métier » du professeur de philosophie qu’a tenu à être Georges Canguilhem.
After Capital by Couze Venn – book discussion, Goldsmiths, 25 March 2019, 6pm
Update 12 March 2019: I’ve just been told the event has been cancelled.
Panel discussion on this ground-break new work and its political implications with presentations form Jeremy Gilbert, Shela Sheikh and Paul Gilroy; and quick responses from Mike Featherstone, Will Davis, Lisa Blackman and Tiziana Terranova (on video).
6 to 7.30 pm, Monday 25th March with drinks reception afterwards LG01, Professor Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths
The present crisis of capitalism has a history. A history of the private accumulation of wealth through property regimes that allows increasing commodification and the privatisation of resources: from land to knowledge and even to life itself. Understanding that history may allow us to imagine alternatives after Capital that are no longer private but common. After Capital explores this history, showing how the economy is linked to environmental damage, climate change, resource depletion, and to massive inequality. It takes the reader from liberalism to neoliberalism, from climate change to the Anthropocene, and shows how this history is inextricably the history of colonialism. It is a rich and detailed narrative of capitalism over the last 200 years, that explains its texture and its neoliberal endgame.
Couze Venn is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths and Associate Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg. He is also a managing editor of Theory, Culture & Society, and one of the editors of Body & Society. His current research concerns the search for postcapitalist alternatives to neoliberal capitalism in the context of converging crises affecting economies, climate, essential resources, the quality of the environment, and growing inequalities. In the 1970s he was a founding member of the journal Ideology & Consciousness, whose project was the critique of positivist psychological sciences and to disseminate the work of Michel Foucault and ‘French Theory’ generally as part of establishing alternative approaches for theorising subjectivity and for analysing power.
Altering cartographies of climate change, Royal Academy, London, 15 April 2019
A panel discussion looking at both material and imagined borders, and the ways in which global warming challenges Western conceptions of territory.
In 2014, Studio Folder initiated the Italian Limes project to survey the fluctuations of the boundary line across the Alps in real time. As a continuation of this project, they have been fascinated by the effects climate change can have on geopolitical understandings of borders and the methods used to represent them.
In this conversation, our panellists will discuss topics of nationalism and cartography using the example of a “moving border” introduced by Italy, Austria, and Switzerland to acknowledge the volatility of the geographical features on Italy’s northern border. The latter is continuously shifting as a result of climate change and often contradicts its representations on official maps. They will both place this case study into a wider context of the history of boundary making and discuss possible spatial interventions that correspond to a world where ecological processes are increasingly dominating geopolitical affairs.
This conversation is inspired by A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change, published by Columbia University Press in December 2018.
Speakers:
Andrea Bagnato is an architect, researcher and book editor whose research is focused on architecture and epidemiology. He is also the editor of SQM: The Quantified Home (2014).
Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at The University of Warwick, whose research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography. He is also the author of The Birth of Territory (2014).
Marco Ferrari is an architect, designer and co-founder of Studio Folder, an agency for visual and spatial research.
Susan Schuppli is an artist and researcher whose current work explores the ways in which toxic ecologies are producing an “extreme image” archive of material wrongs.
