Judith Butler is interviewed by Aaron Aquilina and Kurt Borg in CounterText (requires subscription). It’s a fascinating interview with a particular focus on her interests in literature, especially Kafka, and then moves to a discussion of her career trajectory and relation to poststructuralism and ethics.
Nicholas de Genova (ed.), The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering now out with Duke University Press.
In recent years the borders of Europe have been perceived as being besieged by a staggering refugee and migration crisis. The contributors to The Borders of “Europe” see this crisis less as an incursion into Europe by external conflicts than as the result of migrants exercising their freedom of movement. Addressing the new technologies and technical forms European states use to curb, control, and constrain what contributors to the volume call the autonomy of migration, this book shows how the continent’s amorphous borders present a premier site for the enactment and disputation of the very idea of Europe. They also outline how from Istanbul to London, Sweden to Mali, and Tunisia to Latvia, migrants are finding ways to subvert visa policies and asylum procedures while negotiating increasingly militarized and surveilled borders. Situating the migration crisis within a global frame and attending to migrant and refugee supporters as well as those who stoke nativist fears, this timely volume demonstrates how the enforcement of Europe’s borders is an important element of the worldwide regulation of human mobility.
Contributors. Ruben Andersson, Nicholas De Genova, Dace Dzenovska, Evelina Gambino, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Clara Lecadet, Souad Osseiran, Lorenzo Pezzani, Fiorenza Picozza, Stephan Scheel, Maurice Stierl, Laia Soto Bermant, Martina Tazzioli
A brief English discussion of a French article about about a Polish book on Foucault’s time in Warsaw.
Does anyone have access to the Belgian newspaper in which the article appears?
Foucault in Warsaw, Durieux.eu blog, 31 August 2017.
Le Soir spends ample space on an article by Maya Szymanowska about a new Polish publication by sociologist Remigiusz Ryzinski, ‘Foucault W Warszawie’ (Foucault in Warsaw – no translations yet).
In 1955 Michel Foucault arrives in Uppsala, Sweden, where he will work on his doctoral dissertation. But then in October 1958, he moves to Warsaw, Poland, where he is going to direct the Centre de civilisation française at the local university. There he continues working on the manuscript he will eventually defend in 1961 in Paris as his so-called ‘principal thesis’. It is published originally as ‘Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique’.
The same issue of Parrhesia also includes an extract from Michel Serres’s The Birth of Physics. The translation is by David Webb, with an introduction by Bill Ross. The entire book is forthcoming in a new edition from Rowman and Littlefield International.
[Update: David tells me he and Bill did the translation together; and co-wrote the book’s introduction – though this excerpt is Bill’s alone]
Nicole Loraux’s essay “War in the Family” has been translated by Adam Kotsko, and is open access in the new issue of Parrhesia. As Adam writes, “This previously untranslated essay is discussed at length in the first half of Agamben’s Stasis”.
Some books received in recompense for review work for Palgrave and Bloomsbury – King Edward III, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, Peter Gratton’s Speculative Realism and Angelos Evangelou’s Philosophizing Madness from Nietzsche to Derrida. Although King Edward III has been edited before in Shakespeare series, this is the first version in the Arden Shakespeare. Its authorship is much disputed though it is increasingly being seen as a play by, in whole or in part, Shakespeare. I discuss it alongside King Henry V in one of the chapters of my Shakespeare manuscript, so glad to have this new edition.
New Perspectives has just published an open access essay by Peter Sloterdijk on ‘On Pseudonymous Politics: Regarding Implicit and Explicit Misconceptions of Democracy’
Editor Benjamin Tallis writes:
‘On Pseudonymous Politics: Regarding Implicit and Explicit Misconceptions of Democracy’ is an intervention into the state of democracy (and its discontents) today and a rejoinder to some of those discontents. Sloterdijk grounds his argument in extensive historical analysis of the ‘pseudonymous’ condition of democracy and identifies four noms de guerre: Oligocracy, Fiscocracy, Mobocracy and Phobocracy.
This article is a significant intervention into debates in contemporary politics in the context of ‘post-truth’, populism (on the left and right) and the battle for liberal democracy in the Western world and beyond. It treads deliberately onto the turf of Politics and International Relations and is a challenge to scholars in our field.
New Perspectives will therefore also be publishing a collection of responses to Sloterdijk’s article by IR scholars: Claudia Aradau, Friedrich Kratochwil, Barry J Ryan, Sassan Gholiagha and Benjamin Tallis. We also encourage the submission of further responses and articles on related matters in order to continue the conversation.
This text is a version of the ‘Cardiff Lecture’ delivered by Peter Sloterdijk as the keynote address for the European International Studies Association (EISA) European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS), Cardiff University, Wales, on 7 June 2017. The Cardiff Lecture was made possible by the initiative and perseverance of Christian Bueger and the support – financial and otherwise – of Cardiff University and the Learned Society of Wales, as well as the financial support of the Institute of International Relations Prague, the latter of which paid for the translation of the text from the original German. This translation was made in record time, with no detriment to quality, by Victoria Stiles, who is contactable at v.stiles.education@gmail.com. Additional bibliographical assistance was provided in fine fashion by David Steiner, an intern at the Institute of International Relations Prague.
There is a feature on Kostas Axelos in Iran’s Shargh Daily newspaper (pdf here). It was put together by Sahand Sattari, and includes a translation of my interview with him which appeared in 2005 in Radical Philosophy. The English version of the interview is available here. If you’re interested in finding out more about this interesting but neglected figure, there is a bibliography of Kostas Axelos in English on this site.
Update 1 September 2017: the issue appears to be open access
The proceedings of last year’s Spindel Conference at the University of Memphis on the topic “Critical Histories of the Present” have now been published in The Southern Journal of Philosophy. Edited by Verena Erlenbusch, it has contributions from Bilge Akbalik, Amy Allen, Shouta Brown, Andrew Daily, Andrew Dilts, Stuart Elden, Bryan Kimoto, Colin Koopman, Jordan Liz, Mary Beth Mader, Ladelle McWhorter, Maia Nahele, Kevin Olson, Tuomo Tiisala, Jasmine Wallace, and Jim Zubko. The issue requires subscription, unfortunately.
[Update 1 September 2017: the issue appears to be open access]
My contribution is entitled ‘Foucault and Shakespeare: Ceremony, Theatre, Politics‘. A preprint is available here. Here’s the abstract:
Foucault only refers to Shakespeare in a few places in his work. He is intrigued by the figures of madness that appear in King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. He occasionally notes the overthrow of one monarch by another…
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Out today…
David Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reasonforthcoming in August
Marx’s Capital is one of the most important texts of the modern era. The three volumes, published between 1867 and 1883, changed the destiny of countries, politics and people across the world – and continue to resonate today. In this book, David Harvey lays out their key arguments.In clear and concise language, Harvey describes the architecture of capital according to Marx, placing his observations in the context of capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. He considers the degree to which technological, economic and industrial change during the last 150 years means Marx’s analysis and its application may need to be modified. Marx’s trilogy concerns the circulation of capital: volume I, how labour increases the value of capital, which he called valorisation; volume II, on the realisation of this value, by selling it and…
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