Carceral Notebooks 13 – Foucault and the Politics of Resistance in Brazil – forthcoming in 2018
Edited by Marcelo Hoffman, this looks fascinating. Foucault made several visits to Brazil and gave some important lectures there. This issue looks to provide some important historical and political background to those visits.
As I said at the end of the last update on this book project, after the week in the Paris archives I took a week away on a kind of writing/cycling retreat. It started as the idea of a holiday, but became more of a working break with some hilly rides in the Peak District and quite a bit of writing. For the most part the weather was awful with high winds and heavy downpours. I did clock up some miles, but not as many as I’d hoped.
The writing was good, though for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I don’t seem to be able to make substantial progress on one particular chapter, which is on the things Foucault actually published in the 1950s. I keep messing around with bits of it, but really need to sit down with the texts and put something down. In some ways, this ought to be the most straight-forward chapter to write – almost all the others are dependent on archive material, more arcane sources, reports and so on. Perhaps it’s the ease with which I should be able to write it that is the barrier. Perhaps it’s because it’s the chapter that retreads reasonably well-known ground, and so is less interesting to write, though there is limited work on these pieces.
In any case, there is plenty of other work to do. Simply for my own reference, I put together a timeline of Foucault’s early career. It relies heavily on the ‘Chronology’ Defert wrote for Dits et écrits, but also draws on the biographies and other sources, and includes all the detail I know of the early courses at Lille and the ENS. I did the same for his later career when I was researching Foucault: The Birth of Power and Foucault’s Last Decade, and it was an invaluable source for me. We know so much more about Foucault in the 1970s and 1980s than the 1950s, but with all these periods there are discrepancies in dates, and lining things up – with marked up uncertainties and disagreements – is helpful to me. As with the one I did for the later period, I imagine I’ll continue to add to it over the writing of this book.
In terms of the book itself, I wrote a little about Foucault’s short book notice from 1954 (rediscovered in 2011 and omitted from Dits et écrits); sketched out a small section on Foucault’s first encounter with Raymond Roussel’s work in 1957; and one on the dispute with Presses Universitaires de France about Maladie mentale et personnalité being reissued. I did a bit more work on the discussion of Jean Barraqué, mainly through discussions of his work and Hermann Broch. Although I’ve not yet really written about the 1950s publications, I do have a discussion of the dates they were written and their publication history. This question is discussed in all the biographies, and the order is not at all clear. I don’t think I’ve fully resolved it, but I’ve done a fairly thorough search of material, and have found a couple of other bits of evidence. My checking of original sources wherever possible also paid off in finding a discrepancy between the first version and the one reprinted in Dits et écrits. I also found a fascinating source about Foucault’s father quite by chance.
Yet generally one thing I’m finding with much of this work is how limited the sources are. For Foucault’s work in a psychiatric hospital and a prison in the early 1950s, for example, the biographies already cover the key material, informed by Foucault’s few recollections in interviews. They also had the benefit of being able to talk to Georges and Jacqueline Verdeaux. But there is not much to go on. With this, and other things, I’m searching for the tiniest bits of evidence.
I then had a week in London, where I ordered a range of things in the British Library. I also made short trips to Senate House, UCL and the Wellcome Library to check some things not at the BL. Among other things this involved some pieces about Barraqué in old music newspapers, early translations of Ludwig Binswanger in French and English, news reports after Foucault’s death in which friends and colleagues reminisced about his early years, and more extensive memoirs from Jean-Paul Aron and Maurice Pinguet. Of course, checking one thing often throws up something else to check; reading one thing gives a list of other things to look at. And while I can resolve many of these things in London or at Warwick, many more are added to a list of things to do when next in Paris. Some might need to be done further afield. This reference checking and extra reading will likely continue right until I finish this book, but it’s always good to chip away at it as I go.
Term begins on Monday, and I have a couple of short pieces I need to work on in the first week or two. But I’m determined to keep writing for this book and the Canguilhem one during term, even though that’s going to mean a shift to writing in the fairly early mornings before I go into work. It’s great to have the Shakespeare book in production, as I reported last week, as that is one of the multiple book projects off my desk. But I’m still writing two books and co-editing another.
The previous updates on this project are here; and Foucault’s Last Decade and Foucault: The Birth of Power are now both available from Polity. Several Foucault research resources such as bibliographies, short translations, textual comparisons and so on are available here. On the related Canguilhem project, see this page.
A few recently received books received – Sibylle Lacan’s book about her father, Jean-Paul Aron, Les modernes, Carceral Notebooks #12, Arun Iyer, Towards an Epistemology of Ruptures, and Jeannette Colombel’s book on Foucault. The Iyer was sent in recompense for review work, and the Carceral Notebooks was kindly sent by the editors, Andrew Dilts and Perry Zurn. It looks at the work of the GIP and Foucault, but brings the themes uptodate in the concluding section. The individual papers are available open access here. The other books were picked up second-hand.
Dan Webb, Critical Urban Theory, Common Property, and “the Political”: Desire and Drive in the City
Dan Webb explores an undervalued topic in the formal discipline of Political Theory (and political science, more broadly): the urban as a level of political analysis and political struggles in urban space. Because the city and urban space is so prominent in other critical disciplines, most notably, geography and sociology, a driving question of the book is: what kind of distinct contribution can political theory make to the already existing critical urban literature? The answer is to be found in what Webb calls the “properly political” approach to understanding political conflict as developed in the work of thinkers like Chantal Mouffe, Jodi Dean, and Slavoj Žižek. This “properly political” analysis is contrasted with and a curative to the predominant “ethical” or “post-political” understanding of the urban found in so much of the geographical and sociological critical urban theory literature. In order to illustrate this primary theoretical argument of the book, Webb suggests that “common property” is the most useful category for conceiving the city as a site of the “properly political.” When the city and urban space are framed within this theoretical framework, critical urbanists are provided a powerful tool for understanding urban political struggles, in particular, anti-gentrification movements in the inner city.
A very useful roundup of resources for applying for jobs and being interviewed by Charlotte Mathieson.
This post is a follow-up of resources for those who attended The Voice of the Academic: Vocal Training for Academic Success at the University of Surrey on 22nd September, although the links may also be helpful to others preparing for academic interviews.
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Peter Gratton links to John Gray’s critical review of Sloterdijk in the NYRB, and offers a few thoughts in response.
Alas, behind a paywall, but John Gray goes through a tremendous number of his works—if he’s read all listed, he might be one of the few to get through all of those pages. He hits scathing points others have made before: Sloterdijk makes claims that seem thunderous but are on second thought vacuous; his erudition means you get a blizzard of examples that hide relatively simple arguments (e.g., cultures have an interior cohesion–a bubble if you will), if any are to be found; he is a political reactionary whose ideas are both horrible (his views on European refugees) and often silly (we should replace taxes with philanthropy), which then within a few pages turn quite dangerous (liberal democracies are under-raged—an idea that has not aged well). Sloterdijk often just offers warmed over thinking from others: Nietzsche’s ressentiment plays a prominent role in his thinking and his considerations of rage reads…
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Interesting call for papers at the next AAG meeting
Call for Papers: “Anxious/Desiring geographies.”
AAG Annual Conference New Orleans April 10-14, 2018
Organizers: Jeremy W. Crampton (Kentucky, USA), Nick Robinson (RHUL, UK), Mikko Joronen (Tampere, Finland).
At this political moment we seem beset by anxieties from every direction. Automation is identified as an existential threat to jobs. Vulnerabilities from political violence increase anxieties of the subaltern. Climate change and the inauguration of the Anthropocene threaten our wellbeing. Nast (2017) credits the financial crisis with being “psychically traumatic.”
At least since Gregory’s identification of the inadequacy of representation, which he dubbed “cartographic anxiety” (Gregory, 1994), geographers have meaningfully contributed to understandings of the affective politics of anxiety. Attention has been paid to a geopolitics of fear that is experienced on both an everyday and global level (Pain and Smith, 2008), and to sexual desires and identities (Bell and Valentine, 1995). Brown and Knopp (2016) identified a biopolitics of the state’s…
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Rob Weatherill, The Anti-Oedipus Complex: Lacan, Critical Theory and Postmodernism – now out with Routledge. Thanks to Sebastian Budgen for the link.
The Anti-Oedipus Complex critically explores the post-‘68 dramatic developments in Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and cultural theory. Beginning with the decline of patriarchy and the master, exemplified by Freud’s paean for the Father, the revolutionary path was blown wide open by anti-psychiatry, schizoanalysis and radical politics, the complex antinomies of which are traced here in detail with the help of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Levinas, Steiner, Žižek, Badiou, Derrida and Girard, as well as theologians, analysts, writers, musicians and film makers.
In this book, Rob Weatherill, starting from the clinic, considers the end of hierarchies, the loss of the Other, new subjectivities, so-called ‘creative destruction’, the power of negative thinking, revolutionary action, divine violence and new forms of extreme control. Where does this leave the psychoanalytic clinic – adrift in postmodern indifference? Does the engagement of the Radical Orthodoxy movement offer some hope? Or should we re-situate psychoanalysis within a ‘genealogy of responsibility’ (Patočka / Derrida) as it emerges out of the sacred demonic, via Plato and Christianity?
The Anti-Oedipus Complex will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory and theology.
Nick Megoran, Nationalism and Central Asia: A Biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary now out from University of Pittsburgh Press.
Nick Megoran explores the process of building independent nation-states in post-Soviet Central Asia through the lens of the disputed border territory between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In his rich “biography” of the boundary, he employs a combination of political, cultural, historical, ethnographic, and geographic frames to shed new light on nation-building process in this volatile and geopolitically significant region.
Megoran draws on twenty years of extensive research in the borderlands via interviews, observations, participation, and newspaper analysis. He considers the problems of nationalist discourse versus local vernacular, elite struggles versus borderland solidarities, boundary delimitation versus everyday experience, border control versus resistance, and mass violence in 2010, all of which have exacerbated territorial anxieties. Megoran also revisits theories of causation, such as the loss of Soviet control, poorly defined boundaries, natural resource disputes, and historic ethnic clashes, to show that while these all contribute to heightened tensions, political actors and their agendas have clearly driven territorial aspirations and are the overriding source of conflict. As this compelling case study shows, the boundaries of the The Ferghana Valley put in succinct focus larger global and moral questions of what defines a good border.
Shahar Hameiri, Caroline Hughes, and Fabio Scarpello, International Intervention and Local Politics: Fragmented States and the Politics of Scale, now out with Cambridge University Press.
International peace- and state-building interventions have become ubiquitous in international politics since the 1990s, aiming to tackle the security problems stemming from the instability afflicting many developing states. Their frequent failures have prompted a shift towards analysing how the interaction between interveners and recipients shapes outcomes. This book critically assesses the rapidly growing literature in international relations and development studies on international intervention and local politics. It advances an innovative approach, placing the politics of scale at the core of the conflicts and compromises shaping the outcomes of international intervention. Different scales – local, national, international – privilege different interests, unevenly allocating power, resources and political opportunity structures. Interveners and recipients thus pursue scalar strategies and socio-political alliances that reinforce their power and marginalise rivals. This approach is harnessed towards examining three prominent case studies of international intervention – Aceh, Cambodia and Solomon Islands – with a focus on public administration reform.
