Kingston Shakespeare Series Conference: Shakespeare and Derrida, 1 September 2018, Garrick’s Temple, Hampton – details here; full programme here. Registration required (£20).
Papers by Nicholas Royle, Tina Chanter, Christopher Prendergast, John Joughin, Andrew Cutrofello and Howard Caygill.
This is part of the Kingston Shakespeare Seminar – follow the blog here.
Details of Derek Gregory’s Antipode lecture this week, and a number of related papers made open access from the journal’s archive.
Update: Derek’s keynote (‘Sweet target, sweet child: Aerial violence and the imaginaries of remote warfare’) at the conference on Drone Imaginaries and Society at the University of Southern Denmark in June is now available online here. (via Geographical Imaginations)
The 2018 Antipode Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Lecture
Trauma Geographies: Broken Bodies and Lethal Landscapes
Derek Gregory
Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and Department of Geography
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
We’d be delighted if you could join us at the RGS-IBG annual international conference on Wednesday 29 August at Cardiff University for Derek Gregory’s Antipode Lecture, “Trauma Geographies: Broken Bodies and Lethal Landscapes”. The lecture starts at 16:50 (Shared Lecture Theatre, Sir Martin Evans Building), and will be followed by a reception sponsored by Wiley.
Elaine Scarry reminds us that even though “the main purpose and outcome of war is injuring” this “massive fact” can nevertheless “disappear from view along many separate paths”. This presentation traces some of those paths, exploring the treatment and evacuation of the injured and sick in three war zones: the Western Front in the First…
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Mattias Leanza reviews Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity, 2016) in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (requires subscription). It’s a generous and positive review which ‘highly recommends’ the book.
All the reviews of this book, and of Foucault: The Birth of Power (Polity 2017) are listed here.
It’s taken longer than anticipated for me to return to the work on The Early Foucault. The last update was back in April. Through the spring the book on Canguilhem was drafted, revised and then submitted to Polity Press on 4 May. Following the reader reports the revision was sent off on 13 July, and the book is now in production with a scheduled publication in early 2019. Much of the research time in May and June was taken up with work on Shakespeare, part for some summary pieces about Shakespearean Territories (here and here), and some the continuation of a side-project of putting Foucault and Shakespeare in relation. It was only in late July, following a holiday, that I was really able to return to the work on the early Foucault.
The materials I’d drafted were in fairly good shape, although some sections are more note-like than finished prose. I reread everything, making some minor changes but overall I was quite pleased with how the pieces were shaping up. I was struck, again, with how limited the sources are for this period. In the later years, almost everything Foucault said was preserved in some form, and published either in his lifetime or posthumously, and there is extensive commentary. In this earlier period, before he was famous, he was rarely interviewed, lectures were not recorded, many materials were not preserved, and he published little. There are few people still alive who knew him in the 1950s. The archives help enormously, but often it’s a case of patching together the smallest bits of evidence, and weighing up sometimes conflicting sources.
A lot of time was taken up with some relatively small things. Foucault cites Roland Kuhn quite a bit in the early 1950s, but one I was interested in was not given a page reference. Finding that – in a two-part German article of 90 pages, when my only clue was Foucault’s own translation – took a while. Others were more mechanical – filling in all the references to an interview which had first appeared online, but is now more officially published in a book; chasing up references, including locating libraries that might have the text; double-checking the biographies for details, and so on. I have worked on the dating of the early publications before, which is an issue raised by all the biographers though is generally said to be unresolvable. But newly available material seems to clarify things, and I think I’ve constructed a plausible timeline, though this, as much else, is provisional.
When I proposed a book on the early Foucault to Polity in January 2017, I said that the timescale for completion would be dependent on the publication of some of his first lecture courses from the 1950s. Although we agreed a provisional deadline of December 2018, this was before I agreed to write a book on Canguilhem for them, and it was also subject to change based on the lecture schedule. Although the order of the publications is not yet clear, the first of the pre-Collège de France volumes will comprise two 1960s courses on sexuality from Clermont-Ferrand and Vincennes. It may be some time before the others appear – there are quite a few volumes planned. As such I’ve told Polity it is likely to be 2020 before I submit this manuscript.
But the plan for the publication of 1960s courses, including notably from his time in Tunisia, means that I’m beginning to think beyond The Early Foucault to the next, and last volume of my intellectual history of Foucault. These books have been written in the order they have because of the availability of material. The first to be written covered the final period – Foucault’s Last Decade – and was followed by one on the period immediately before – Foucault: The Birth of Power. The Early Foucault is the first in the sequence, and likely the third to be completed and published. The plan is to write one final book to complete the sequence, looking at 1962-69, the period between The Birth of the Clinic and The Archaeology of Knowledge. So as I continue work on The Early Foucault, I’m already seriously thinking about this book on ‘Foucault in the 1960s’.
I’m now away for two weeks on a writing/cycling ‘retreat’ – an extended form of what I tried out last September, and in the Peak District again. I’m hoping to clock up some miles, tackle some climbs, and make further progress on this book. I’ll be back in Paris in September to go over some archival materials again. Hopefully there will be a bit more substance in the next updates.
The previous updates on this project are here; and the previous books Foucault’s Last Decade and Foucault: The Birth of Power are both available from Polity. Canguilhem is forthcoming in early 2019, and is discussed a bit more here. Several Foucault research resources such as bibliographies, short translations, textual comparisons and so on are available here.
Arjen Kleinherenbrink, Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism – Edinburgh UP, Jan 2019
Against Continuity is the first book to demonstrate that the beating heart of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is a systematic ontology of irreducible, singular entities. This requires a radical break with decades of Deleuzian orthodoxy, according to which Deleuze’s metaphysics revolves around the dissolution of discrete entities into a continuous world of flows and events.
With reference to all of Deleuze’s work, including published and untranslated seminars, as well as the recently published Lettres et autres textes, Arjen Kleinherenbrink critically compares Deleuze’s ontology to seven related contemporary thinkers: Levi Bryant, Maurizio Ferraris, Markus Gabriel, Manuel DeLanda, Graham Harman, Tristan Garcia and Bruno Latour. These comparisons establish Deleuze as an important precursor to object-oriented speculative realism and open up exciting new avenues of thought for critics and supporters of Deleuze alike.
Derek P. McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment – OUP, July 2018
Introduction available here
In Atmospheric Things Derek P. McCormack explores how atmospheres are imagined, understood, and experienced through experiments with a deceptively simple object: the balloon. Since the invention of balloon flight in the late eighteenth century, balloons have drawn crowds at fairs and expositions, inspired the visions of artists and writers, and driven technological development from meteorology to military surveillance. By foregrounding the distinctive properties of the balloon, McCormack reveals its remarkable capacity to disclose the affective and meteorological dimensions of atmospheres. Drawing together different senses of the object, the elements, and experience, McCormack uses the balloon to show how practices and technologies of envelopment allow atmospheres to be generated, made meaningful, and modified. He traces the alluring entanglement of envelopment in artistic, political, and technological projects, from the 2009 Pixar movie Up and Andy Warhol’s 1966 installation Silver Clouds to the use of propaganda balloons during the Cold War and Google’s experiments with delivering internet access with stratospheric balloons. In so doing, McCormack offers new ways to conceive of, sense, and value the atmospheres in which life is immersed.
Jeremy Crampton shares Bill Bunge’s Nuclear War Atlas poster – and appeals for someone/a library to make a higher-resolution scan.
Bill Bunge, 2008 AAG (Boston). Source.
Bill Bunge’s Nuclear War Atlas was published in two formats, a book from Basil Blackwell published in 1988, and a poster published in June 1982, with 28 maps on one side, and extensive text on the other,
just one week too late for the great United Nations demonstration in New York City. The first edition of the atlas was designed for field use among the unemployed of Detroit’s black slum ghetto (who hold my loyalty but who were vulnerable to the false slogan ‘war means work’ when today it clearly means death), but my work proved far too technical. So I surrendered to the fact that the market for the atlas, the potential readership, would be intellectuals, and put in the earlier and continuing abstract work mentioned, especially in chapter 2.
The original edition was in the tradition of Lobeck’s Physiographic Diagram of…
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Editorial
- The World Is (Not) Heated
Benjamin Tallis
Special Section
- The Prague Agenda
Michal Smetana, Anastasia Kazteridis, Matthew Kroenig, Sadia Tasleem, Richard Price, Jeffrey Fields, Jason Enia, Angela Kane, Dieter Fleck
Research articles
- Writing Kafka’s Soul: Disciplinary Power, Resistance & the Authorship of the Subject
Nicholas Dungey
- History, Nationalism, and Democracy: Myth and Narrative in Viktor Orbán’s ‘Illiberal Hungary’
Michael Toomey
- The Fourth Generation: From Anti-Establishment to Anti-Systém Parties in Slovakia
Oľga Gyárfášová
Cultural Cut
- HHhH & The 7th Function of Language
Laurent Binet
Spaces of Crisis and Critique: Heterotopias Beyond Foucault, edited by Anthony Faramelli, David Hancock, Robert G. White – Bloomsbury 2018. Unfortunately only hardback and expensive e-book.
In Of Other Spaces Foucault coined the term “heterotopias” to signify “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture” which “are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” For Foucault, heterotopic spaces were first of all spaces of crisis, or transformative spaces, however these have given way to heterotopias of deviation and spaces of discipline, such as psychiatric hospitals or prisons.
Foucault’s essay provokes us to think through how spaces of crisis and critique function to open up disruptive, subversive or minoritarian fields within philosophical, political, cultural or aesthetic discourses. This book takes this interdisciplinary and international approach to the spatial, challenging existing borders, boundaries, and horizons; from Claire Colebrook’s chapter unpacking the heterotopic spaces of America and Mexico that lie beyond reductive ideological spaces of light and darkness, to a Foucauldian reading of the Zapatista resistance.
With essays on politics, philosophy, literature, post-colonial studies, and aesthetics from established and emerging academics, this book answers Foucault’s call to give us a better understanding of our present cultural epoch.
Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a Modern Political Technology, edited by Irit Katz, Diana Martin, and Claudio Minca – Rowman International, December 2018
Facing the current growing global archipelago of encampments, this book project intends to develop a geographical reflection on ‘the camp’, as a modern institution and as a spatial bio-political technology.
This book focuses on past and present camp geographies and on the dispositifs that make them an ever-present spatial formation in the management of unwanted populations characterizing many authoritarian regimes as well as many contemporary democracies. It also offers and investigates possible ways to resist the present-day proliferating manifestations of camps and ‘camp thinking’, by calling for the incorporation of ‘camp studies’ into the broader field of political geography and to consider the geographies of the camp as constitutive of much broader modern geo-political economies.
By linking spatial theory to the geopolitical and biopolitical workings and practices of contemporary camps, the contributions in this collection argue that the camps seem to be here-to-stay, like a permanent/temporary presence giving shape to improvised, semi-structured and hyper-orderly structured spatialities in our cities and our countryside. Camps are also a specific response, for example, to the changing conditions of European borders due to the ‘refugee crisis’ and the rise of nationalism in many countries affected by such crisis.
