Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning the Thing’ lecture course – new translation forthcoming in September 2018

Posted on June 7, 2018 by stuartelden

Martin Heidegger’s Die Frage nach dem Ding was one of the courses he published in his lifetime (in 1962), and then was later included in the Gesamtausgabe. There was an English translation as What is a Thing? in 1967, but that’s long been out of print. (This should not be confused with the 1949 lecture ‘The Thing’). A new translation by James D. Reid, and Benjamin D. Crowe is forthcoming in September 2018 with Rowman and Littlefield International as The Question Concerning the Thing: On Kants Doctrine of the Transcendental Principles.

The Question Concerning the Thing presents a full English translation of a lecture course first delivered by Heidegger at Freiburg University during the Winter Semester of 1935-36 (originally published in German as volume 41 of the Gesamtausgabe).

The text presents with particular clarity Heidegger’s distinctive approach to issues of general philosophical interest. Heidegger shows how a litany of classical metaphysical problems flow from the basic question ‘what is a thing?’, revealing the historicity of these problems and, thus, the ways in which they implicate further issues of cultural significance. He examines issues regarding the history and philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and logic that are still debated today. Moreover, the lecture course as a whole is framed by questions regarding the nature of philosophy itself. Along the way, Heidegger provides sensitive and often provocative discussions of historically significant figures, in particular Kant.

It’s a long time since I’ve worked on Heidegger, but this course was important both for Mapping the Present and especially Speaking Against Number, as it has discussion of space, modern science, calculation, measure and mathematics as well as the themes mentioned above.

Posted in Martin Heidegger, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

‘Little Stars and Galloping Steeds: Sex in Shakespeare’ – Rose Theatre Kingston, June 22, 2018

Posted on June 7, 2018 by stuartelden

The day before the Foucault and Shakespeare event, there is a day-long workshop at Kingston’s Rose Theatre.

Little Stars and Galloping Steeds: Sex in Shakespeare – Friday June 22, 2018, Rose Theatre Kingston. It’s free, but registration is required.

9.30am: Registration

10am: Opening remarks, Christian Smith (Kingston University)

10.15am: Desire

Nell McKeown (King’s College London)

Emilia’s Phoenix Love: Female Eroticism in The Two Noble Kinsmen

Elena Pellone (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)

How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?: Shakespeare and the female gaze

Phoebe Murphy-Brown (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)

Queer Theory and Cross Gender Casting in Modern Adaptations of Shakespeare

11:35am: Coffee

12pm: Jonathan Dollimore

Shakespeare and Sex at Sussex University

1pm: Lunch

2pm: Language and Form

Jerzy Limon (University of Gdańsk)

Visiting Netherlands: verbal and visual sexual punning in Shakespeare and contemporary art

Richard O’Brien (University of Birmingham)

No gentle chase: Venus and Adonis in a post-Weinstein world

3.20pm: Theory

Christian Smith (Kingston University)

Dialectical Eros, or Do Bottom and Titania have sex?

Paul Hamilton (Kingston University)

The perverse dynamic and state power

4.30pm: Tea

5pm: David Schalkwyk (Queen Mary University London)

Ever a merry war: Love, sex and war in Shakespeare

6pm: Closing remarks: Richard Wilson (Kingston University)

There will be another Kingston Shakespeare Series Conference: Shakespeare and Foucault on Sat 23 Jun at Garrick’s Temple, Hampton, for more information about this event, click here.

Posted in Conferences, Michel Foucault, Uncategorized, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

Terror und Territorium – podcast with Stuart Elden, Gudrun Harrer and Saskia Stachowitsch (in German)

Posted on June 6, 2018 by stuartelden

Terror und Territorium – podcast with me (dubbed in German), Gudrun Harrer and Saskia Stachowitsch. The rest of the series is here.

https://soundcloud.com/user-962332806/episode-6-terror-und-territorium

Die Verbindung von Staat und Territorium galt lange als fixiert, die Welt geteilt durch Grenzen, die klar und unveränderlich sind. Diese Staatsgrenzen markieren scheinbar klare Linien zwischen Innen- und Außenpolitik. Nach dem 2. Weltkrieg versuchte die Internationale Gemeinschaft, diese Grenzen auf Dauer zu stellen und Interventionen ins Territorium souveräner Staaten zu ächten. Die Welt nach dem Kalten Krieg sah eine fortschreitende Schwächung der Verbindungen zwischen diesen Ideen – unter anderem die Intervention im Kosovo und in der Folge eine Reihe von Interventionen, die auf George W. Bushs Erklärung des „Krieg gegen den Terror“ in Afghanistan, Irak, Libyen und kürzlich in Syrien folgten. Diese Interventionen stellen die Souveränität von Staaten innerhalb ihrer Hoheitsgebiete auf die Probe, auch wenn die meisten von ihnen Versuche darstellen, den territorialen Status zu wahren. Die Rede schildert den historischen Hintergrund und stellt die Frage, ob die Staat-Territoriums-Relation dadurch porös wird und was das letztlich bedeuten würde.

Posted in terrain, Territory, Terror and Territory, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Klaus Dodds, Ice: Nature and Culture – out soon in Reaktion’s Earth series

Posted on May 30, 2018 by stuartelden

9781780239057The next book in Reaktion’s excellent Earth series will be Klaus Dodds, Ice: Nature and Culture – due in June 2018.

Ice has played a prominent role in the history of the earth and its living communities for millennia. We have had fun with and on ice, battled over ice, imagined ice, struggled with ice and made money out of ice. It has transformed our relationship with food, and our engagement with ice has been captured in art, literature, popular film and television, as well as made manifest in sport and leisure. Our lakes, mountains and coastlines have been indelibly shaped by the advance and retreat of ice and snow. Beyond Planet Earth, ice can be found in meteors, planets and moons, and scientists think that ice-rich asteroids played a pivotal role in bringing water to Earth.

In Ice: Nature and Culture Klaus Dodds provides a wide-ranging exploration of the cultural, natural and geopolitical history of ice, revealing how throughout history human communities have made sense of ice. For those who are intrigued about our relationship with ice, this book will provide an informative and thought-provoking guide.

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Foucault and Shakespeare (2018)

Posted on May 30, 2018 by stuartelden

The programme for the Foucault and Shakespeare event next month.

Clare O'Farrell's avatarFoucault News

KINGSTON SHAKESPEARE SEMINAR AT GARRICK’S TEMPLE

SATURDAY JUNE 23 2018

FOUCAULT AND SHAKESPEARE

10.00: Chair: Richard Wilson (Kingston University)

Jonathan Dollimore
‘Foucault, Shakespeare and Cultural Materialism’

11.00: Coffee (Temple Pavilion)

11.30:Chair:

Kélina Gotman (King’s College University of London)
‘Foucault, Theatre, Critique’

Thomas Brockelman (Le Moyne College)
‘Foucault and Lacan Interpret Las Meninas: On the virtues and limitations of philosophical reading’

13.00: Lunch (Bell Inn, Hampton)

14.30: Chair:

Duncan Salkeld (University of Chichester)
‘King Lear and Foucault’s History of Madness’

Jennifer Rust (Saint Louis University)
‘Of Government the Properties to Unfold:Foucault’s Genealogy of Governmentality and Measure for Measure’

16.00: Tea (Temple Pavilion)

16.30: Chair:

Stuart Elden (University of Warwick)
‘Contagion in Troilus and Cressida’

17.30: Round Table Discussion

To register for this event go to:
https://foucaultandshakespeare.eventbrite.co.uk

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Transcribe Bentham – papers from UCL and British Library completely digitised

Posted on May 29, 2018 by stuartelden

DeCdtMFW0AIx8zcJeremy Bentham’s papers from the collections of UCL and the British Library are now all digitised. Full update here, but here’s the first part.

The digitisation of Bentham’s writings has always been a central element of the Transcribe Bentham initiative, in order to make his philosophy more accessible to researchers and members of the public.  We have achieved something tremendous – thousands upon thousands of images of Bentham’s manuscripts are now available in electronic form.

We owe special thanks to UCL Digital Media Services (Tony Slade and Raheel Nabi especially), UCL Library Special Collections (Mandy Wise, Dan Mitchell and the rest of their team) and The British Library (Sandra Tuppen, Neil Mcowlen and their team) for taking care of the digitisation.  I would also like to thank present and past staff of Transcribe Bentham for the work that they have done to support the digitisation.

We now have digital images from the 173 boxes of Bentham Papers held in Special Collections at UCL, which include Bentham’s thoughts on his Constitutional Code, the Panopticon prison and the Church of England amongst other subjects.   A further 20 boxes of material from The British Library have also been digitised, some of which comprise letters to and from Bentham and his family.  In total, we now have a whopping collection of over 95,000 digitised images (around 80,000 from UCL and 15,000 from The British Library).  These images are linked to detailed metadata prepared by Bentham Project researchers, some of which is available online via the Bentham Papers Database.

Lots of this material is already available online via our Transcription Desk and the digital repository of UCL Library.  Over the coming months, the rest of the digitised papers will be uploaded to the websites of UCL and The British Library.

Thanks to Melissa Pawelski and Duncan Bell for the link to the story.

Posted in Jeremy Bentham, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Italian Limes project – Andrea Bagnato, Marco Ferrari and Elisa Pasqual, A Moving Border – Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change, forthcoming with Columbia University Press

Posted on May 29, 2018 by stuartelden

9781941332450I’ve talked about the amazing work of the Italian Limes project before, and I’m pleased to say that their book will be published in December 2018.

Andrea Bagnato, Marco Ferrari and Elisa Pasqual, A Moving Border – Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change, Columbia University Press.

Italy’s northern border follows the watershed that separates the drainage basins of Northern and Southern Europe. Running mostly at high altitudes, it crosses snowfields and perennial glaciers—all of which are now melting as a result of anthropogenic climate change. As the watershed shifts so does the border, contradicting its representations on official maps. Italy, Austria, and Switzerland have consequently introduced the novel legal concept of a “moving border,” one that acknowledges the volatility of geographical features once thought to be stable.

A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change builds upon the Italian Limes project by Studio Folder, which was devised in 2014 to survey the fluctuations of the boundary line across the Alps in real time. The book charts the effects of climate change on geopolitical understandings of border and the cartographic methods used to represent them. Locating the Italian condition alongside a longer political history of boundary making, the book brings together critical essays, visualizations, and unpublished documents from state archives. By examining the nexus of nationalism and cartography, A Moving Border details how borders are both material and imagined, and the ways global warming challenges Western conceptions of territory. Even more, it provides a blueprint for spatial intervention in a world where ecological processes are bound to dominate geopolitical affairs.

A Moving Border features a foreword by Bruno Latour and texts by Stuart Elden, Mia Fuller, Francesca Hughes, and Wu Ming 1.

Marco Ferrari, an architect, and Elisa Pasqual, a visual designer, are the founders of Studio Folder, a design and research studio based in Milan. Andrea Bagnato is an architect, researcher, and editor.

Posted in Boundaries, Bruno Latour, terrain, Territory, Uncategorized, Wu Ming | 1 Comment

Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh – audio recording of talk at Goldsmiths, 9 May 2018

Posted on May 29, 2018 by stuartelden

hs-iv.jpgI gave a talk about Foucault’s Les aveux de la chair on May 9th at the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths University. Full details here.

The talk was based on my review essay on the book, published on the Theory, Culture & Society website. If you’ve read that review, then there is little in the talk beyond it, but since a couple of people asked, an audio recording of the talk is available here.

 

In February 2018 the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality was finally published. Les Aveux de la chair [Confessions of the Flesh] was edited by Frédéric Gros, and appeared in the same Gallimard series as volumes 1, 2 and 3. The book treats the early Christian Church Fathers of the 2nd-5th century. This talk will discuss the book in relation to Foucault’s other work, showing how it sits in sequence with volumes 2 and 3, but also partly bridges the chronological and conceptual gap to volume 1. It will discuss the state of the book and whether it should have been published, despite Foucault’s stipulation of ‘no posthumous publications’. It will outline the contents of the book, which is in three parts on the formation of a new experience, on virginity and on marriage. There are also some important supplementary materials included. The talk will discuss how it begins to answer previously unanswered questions about Foucault’s work, and will also say something about how the book might be received and discussed.

Posted in Foucault's Last Decade, Michel Foucault, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Derrida’s Margins: Inside the personal library of Jacques Derrida

Posted on May 26, 2018 by stuartelden

downloadDerrida’s Margins: Inside the personal library of Jacques Derrida

For Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), reading was an active process: he read texts by thinkers like Rousseau, Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss, Hegel, and Husserl with a writing utensil in hand.  As Derrida affirmed in a late interview, the books in his personal library bear the “traces of the violence of pencil strokes, exclamation points, arrows, and underlining.”

Derrida’s Margins invites scholars to investigate these markings while unpacking the library contained within each of Derrida’s published works, beginning with the landmark 1967 text De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology).  Additional Derrida works will be added as the project continues.

The website catalogues each reference (quotation, citation, footnote, etc.) in De la grammatologie and allows users to explore Derrida’s personal copies of the texts he cites. Due to copyright restrictions, only annotated pages corresponding to references in De la grammatologie are shown here; users may also view external images of each book as well as images of the numerous insertions (post-it notes, bookmarks, calendar pages, index cards, correspondence, notes, etc.) Derrida tipped in to his books.

The website includes the following sections, accessible via the links in the four corners of this page: Derrida’s Library, where users may browse or search Derrida’s copies of the books referenced in De la grammatologie; Reference List, where users may browse or search the nearly one thousand references to other texts found in the pages of De la grammatologie; Interventions, where users may browse or search Derrida’s annotations, marginalia, and markings that correspond to the references in De la grammatologie; and Visualization, which provides users with alternative ways of exploring the references in De la grammatologie.  Users may search a particular section or the entire site at any time by using the search field at the top of every page.  

The Library of Jacques Derrida is housed at Princeton University Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections.

Posted in Jacques Derrida, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

David Beer on the process of writing The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception

Posted on May 26, 2018 by stuartelden

92857_9781526436924The next book in the Society and Space book series will be David Beer, The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception. Dave has an interesting post on the process of writing the book at Medium.

A significant new way of understanding contemporary capitalism is to understand the intensification and spread of data analytics. This text is about the powerful promises and visions that have led to the expansion of data analytics and data-led forms of social ordering.

It is centrally concerned with examining the types of knowledge associated with data analytics and shows that how these analytics are envisioned is central to the emergence and prominence of data at various scales of social life.  This text aims to understand the powerful role of the data analytics industry and how this industry facilitates the spread and intensification of data-led processes. As such, The Data Gaze is concerned with understanding how data-led, data-driven and data-reliant forms of capitalism pervade organisational and everyday life.

Using a clear theoretical approach derived from Foucault and critical data studies the text develops the concept of the data gaze and shows how powerful and persuasive it is. It’s an essential and subversive guide to data analytics and data capitalism.

Posted in Society and Space, Uncategorized | Leave a comment