Progressive Geographies

The Alphonso Lingis Reader, edited by Tom Sparrow – U Minnesota Press, 2018 (via Object-Orientated Philosophy)

Alphonso Lingis is arguably the most intriguing American philosopher of the past fifty years—a scholar of transience, someone who has visited and revisited more than one hundred countries and has woven this itinerary into his writing and allowed it to give form to his thinking. This book assembles a representative selection of Lingis’s work to give readers a thorough sense of his methodology and vision, the diversity of his subject matter, and the unity of his thought.

Lingis’s writing evinces the many kinds of knowledge and subtle forces circulating through human communities and their environments. His unique style blends travel writing, cultural anthropology, and personal accounts of his innumerable experiences as an active participant in the adventures and relationships that fill his life. Drawing from countless articles, essays, and interviews published over fifty years, editor Tom Sparrow chose works that follow Lingis’s engaging, often intimate reflections on the body in motion and the myriad influences—social, cultural, aesthetic, libidinal, physical, mythological—that shape and animate it as it moves through the world, among people and places both foreign and domestic, familiar and unknown. In a substantial Introduction, Sparrow provides a biographical, critical, intellectual, and cultural context for reading and appreciating Alphonso Lingis’s work.

An extended encounter with the singular philosopher, The Alphonso Lingis Reader conducts us through Lingis’s early writing on phenomenology to his hybrid studies fusing philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, communication theory, aesthetics, and other disciplines, to his original, inspired arguments about everything from knowledge to laughter to death.

Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times (Duke UP, 2016) reviewed at LSE Review of Books

How do colonial histories remain active forces shaping the conditions and most urgent issues of the present? In Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times, Ann Laura Stoler utilises ‘duress’ as a category of domination as the prism through which to analysis how imperial traces continue to impact on relations of exploitation in the contemporary moment. Ed Jones praises this book as a refreshing and deeply creative interpretation of modern politics that will offer a laboratory of ideas to readers.  

Tom Harper, Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library – October 2018 (via the Maps and Views Blog)

From the publication in 1595 of the first ‘atlas’ by Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator, the term has become a universally adopted title for books containing accurate, uniform, and evenly spread maps of all or some of the world. This is an atlas with a difference. Few of the maps in this book could reasonably be called ‘accurate’ in the modern sense and could almost certainly not be used to plan a journey. Yet this atlas can help us to travel in a way that regular atlases do not, because by looking at old maps and getting to know their stories we can be transported back to the times in which they were made.The generous, full-colour illustrations of each map in this book range from the Klencke Atlas to Hokusai’s Map of China, from a 1682 pirate map of Guatemala to 20th-century cartographic postcards featuring maps of Australia. Atlas is the definitive printed showcase of the British Library’s extensive and unparalleled map collection.

Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times – Punctum Books, 2018

available in paperback or pdf download (minimum price $5; free after six months)

Update: reader’s guide

A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury us. “The Anthropocene,” or The Human Era, is an attempt to name our geological fate – that we will one day disappear into the layer-cake of Earth’s geology – while highlighting humanity in the starring role of today’s Earthly drama. In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv proposes an ecological realism that takes as its starting point humanity’s eventual demise. The only question for a realist today, he suggests, is what to do now and what quality of compost to leave behind with our burial.

The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz.

Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.

“What can process philosophies teach us about the Anthropocene? In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv  shows how a new eco-realism untangles several traditions of thought and practice to come to terms with the contemporary condition. The author himself takes huge steps in the direction needed.  A rich, bracing, and illuminating book!” ~ William E. Connolly, author, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming

Antoine Bousquet, The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone – University of Minnesota Press, October 2018 (and website here)

Andy Merrifield on Marx, Beckett and more…

Laurence Lampert, What a Philosopher Is? Becoming Nietzsche (U Chicago Press, 2018) – reviewed at NDPR

It’s a very critical review of what sounds like a fascinating book. I suspect there is something of the clash within North American approaches to Nietzsche playing out here. Here’s the press description:

The trajectory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought has long presented a difficulty for the study of his philosophy. How did the young Nietzsche—classicist and ardent advocate of Wagner’s cultural renewal—become the philosopher of Will to Power and the Eternal Return?

With this book, Laurence Lampert answers that question. He does so through his trademark technique of close readings of key works in Nietzsche’s journey to philosophy: The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Human All Too Human, and “Sanctus Januarius,” the final book of the 1882 Gay Science. Relying partly on how Nietzsche himself characterized his books in his many autobiographical guides to the trajectory of his thought, Lampert sets each in the context of Nietzsche’s writings as a whole, and looks at how they individually treat the question of what a philosopher is. Indispensable to his conclusions are the workbooks in which Nietzsche first recorded his advances, especially the 1881 workbook which shows him gradually gaining insights into the two foundations of his mature thinking. The result is the most complete picture we’ve had yet of the philosopher’s development, one that gives us a Promethean Nietzsche, gaining knowledge even as he was expanding his thought to create new worlds.