Progressive Geographies

Eduardo Mendieta reviews Lester Embree and Michael D. Barber (eds.), The Golden Age of Phenomenology at the New School for Social Research, 1954-1973, Ohio University Press, 2017, at NDPR.

John H. Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling – University of Chicago Press, 2018 – reviewed at NDPR by Lenny Moss

The emergence of biology as a distinct science in the eighteenth century has long been a subject of scholarly controversy. Michel Foucault, on the one hand, argued that its appearance only after 1800 represented a fundamental rupture with the natural history that preceded it, marking the beginnings of modernity. Ernst Mayr, on the other hand, insisted that even the word “biology” was unclear in its meaning as late as 1800, and that the field itself was essentially prospective well into the 1800s.

In The Gestation of German Biology, historian of ideas John Zammito presents a different version of the emergence of the field, one that takes on both Foucault and Mayr and emphasizes the scientific progress throughout the eighteenth century that led to the recognition of the need for a special science. The embrace of the term biology around 1800, Zammito shows, was the culmination of a convergence between natural history and human physiology that led to the development of comparative physiology and morphology—the foundations of biology. Magisterial in scope, Zammito’s book offers nothing less than a revisionist history of the field, with which anyone interested in the origins of biology will have to contend.

Kélina Gotman, Choreomania: Dance and Disorder – OUP 2018

When political protest is read as epidemic madness, religious ecstasy as nervous disease, and angular dance moves as dark and uncouth, the disorder being described is choreomania. At once a catchall term to denote spontaneous gestures and the unruly movements of crowds, choreomania emerged in the nineteenth century at a time of heightened class conflict, nationalist policy, and colonial rule. In this book, author Kélina Gotman examines these choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of the choreomania concept as it moved across scientific and social scientific disciplines. Reading archives describing dramatic misformationsof bodies and body politicsshe shows how prejudices against expressivity unravel, in turn revealing widespread anxieties about demonstrative agitation. This history of the fitful body complements stories of nineteenth-century discipline and regimentation. As she notes, constraints on movement imply constraints on political power and agency. In each chapter, Gotman confronts the many ways choreomania works as an extension of discourses shaping colonialist orientalism, which alternately depict riotous bodies as dangerously infected others, and as curious bacchanalian remains. Through her research, Gotman also shows how beneath the radar of this colonial discourse, men and women gathered together to repossess on their terms the gestures of social revolt.

Introduction: Choreomania, Another Orientalism
Part I: Excavating Dance in the Archives
1. Obscuritas Antiquitatis: Institutions, Affiliations, Marginalia
2. Madness after Foucault: Medieval Bacchanals
3. Translatio: St. Vitus’s Dance, Demonism and the Early Modern
4. The Convulsionaries: Antics on the French Revolutionary Stage
5. Mobiles, Mobs and Monads: Nineteenth-Century Crowd Forms
6. Médecine Rétrospective: Hysteria’s Archival Drag
Part II: Colonial and Postcolonial Stages: Scenes of Ferment in the Field
7. “Sicily Implies Asia and Africa”: Tarantellas and Comparative Method
8. Ecstasy-belonging in Madagascar and Brazil
9. Ghost Dancing: Excess, Waste and the American West
10. “The Gift of Seeing Resemblances”: Cargo Cults in the Antipodes
11. Monstrous Grace: Blackness and the New Dance “Crazes”
12. Coda: Moving Fields, Modernity and the Bacchic Chorus

Saul Newman, Political Theology: A Critical Introduction – Polity Oct 2018

God is dead, but his presence lives on in politics. This is the problem of political theology: the way that theological ideas find their way into secular political institutions, particularly the sovereign state.

In this intellectual tour-de-force, leading political theorist Saul Newman shows how political theology arose alongside secularism, and relates to the problem of legitimising power and authority in modernity. It is not about the power of religion so much as the religion of power.  Examining the current crisis of the liberal order, he argues that recent phenomena, such as the rise of populism, the renewed demand for strong national sovereignty and the return of religious fundamentalism may be understood through this paradigm. He illustrates his argument through an exploration of themes such as sovereignty, democracy, economics, technology, ecological catastrophe, messianism and the future of radical politics, engaging with thinkers ranging from Schmitt and Hobbes to Stirner, Foucault, and Agamben.

This book will be a crucial text for all students, scholars and general readers interested in the meaning and significance of political theology for political theory.