Progressive Geographies

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition (Bloomsbury, 2018) is reviewed at NDPR by Donald A. Landes. Here’s the publisher description:

A thought-provoking contribution to the renaissance of interest in Bergson, this study brings him to a new generation of readers. Ansell-Pearson contends that there is a Bergsonian revolution, an upheaval in philosophy comparable in significance to those that we are more familiar with, from Kant to Nietzsche and Heidegger, that make up our intellectual modernity.

The focus of the text is on Bergson’s conception of philosophy as the discipline that seeks to ‘think beyond the human condition’. Not that we are caught up in an existential predicament when the appeal is made to think beyond the human condition; rather that restricting philosophy to the human condition fails to appreciate the extent to which we are not simply creatures of habit and automatism, but also organisms involved in a creative evolution of becoming.

Ansell-Pearson introduces the work of Bergson and core aspects of his innovative modes of thinking; examines his interest in Epicureanism; explores his interest in the self and in time and memory; presents Bergson on ethics and on religion, and illuminates Bergson on the art of life.

Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations, edited by Felix Rösch and Atsuko Watanabe – forthcoming in September 2018

In an ever more globalized world, sustainable global development requires effective intercultural co-operations. This dialogue between non-western and western cultures is essential to identifying global solutions for global socio-political challenges.

Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations critiques the formation of non-western International Relations by assessing Japanese political concepts to contemporary IR discourses since the Meji Restoration, to better understand knowledge exchanges in intercultural contexts. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of this dialogue, from international law and nationalism to concepts of peace and Daoism, this collection grapples with postcolonial questions of Japan’s indigenous IR theory.

Goldsmiths Annual Philosophy Lecture – Alienation & Freedom: Frantz Fanon – 1 June 2018, 4pm – free, but registration required

Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young give the first Goldsmiths Annual Philosophy Lecture, on the hitherto unpublished and unavailable works of Frantz Fanon.

Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon’s work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals, philosophers and activists seeking to radically interrogate our understandings of violence, race, political subjectivity, mental illness and the challenges of decolonization. In CPCT’s first annual lecture, we are joined by the editors of the landmark collection Alienation and Freedom. This volume collects together unpublished and unavailable works comprising around half of Fanon’s entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. Khalfa and Young will explore how these writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanon’s entire oeuvre, revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. The talk will shed new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, and on newly available texts which oblige us to take a fresh look at the intellectual history of anti-colonial and post-colonial thought, as well as to address with Fanon some of the most pressing theoretical issues of our time.

The lecture will be followed by a response by Jane Hiddleston and will also feature a performance-reading of excerpts from the two plays by Fanon included in Alienation & Freedom: The Drowning Eye and Parallel Hands.

Jean Khalfa is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He is the editor of the first complete edition of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (2006) and author of Poetics of the Antilles (2016) and an upcoming work on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

Robert J. C. Young, FBA, is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, USA. He is the author of White Mythologies (1990), Colonial Desire (1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008), Empire, Colony, Postcolony (2015).

Jane Hiddleston is Exeter College Professor of Literatures in French at the University of Oxford, and the author, most recently of Writing after Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition.

All welcome.

https://cpct.uk/

https://www.gold.ac.uk/cpct/