Update 27 Feb: the video has unfortunately been removed.
Althusser, an Intellectual Adventure – a film by Bruno Oliviero.
The entire film is available on Youtube. Thanks to Irina Culic for the link.
The interview with Althusser is in Italian, with French subtitles. Most of the film is in French. YouTube makes French subtitles available – but they are automatic and not at all reliable [updated]. Includes interviews with Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, Lucien Sève, etc.
Some insights into the Trump administration’s tactics – it’s been quite a week.
A week into Trump’s presidency it is already clear how the new administration is going prosecute its election promises and objectives. Here’s a short mapping of twenty-odd tactics in play or are muted to come into play shortly. While protests and individual acts of resistance may have some effect, it is clear that those opposed to Trump will need their own organized playbook of tactics to counter each of those listed below. And these need leadership and coordination as the more fragmented and dispersed the response, the less effective it will be. Please feel free to use the comments section to add to the list of tactics and to suggest responses.
Objectives
Strategy
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A stunning film of the US-Mexico border – ‘Best of Luck with the Wall’, from 2o16. A great insight into the interactions of the geopolitical and the geophysical landscape. Thanks to Natalie Oswin for the link.
Eyal Weizman video interview on ‘Forensic Architecture – Investigating the Blueprint of War Crimes’ on Russia Today. A fascinating discussion of what his Goldsmiths research agency Forensic Architecture does, and a robust response to hostile questioning.
Eyal writes:
A few weeks ago Russia Today (RT) got in touch proposing to do a piece on Forensic Architecture. I responded that I’d be happy to take part on condition that the examples we’d discuss would be Russian air strikes on hospitals in Syria. I thought they’d never agree. They did and we discussed our collaboration with MSF analysing strikes on their supported hospitals, in particular on the hospital near Ma’arat al-Nu’man.
Society and Space is part of the Environment and Planning family of journals, now published by Sage. Environment and Planning C – formerly ‘Government and Policy’ is being relaunched as ‘Politics and Space’.
New editors Patrica Daley, Eugene McCann, Alison Mountz and Joe Painter have a piece describing this new purpose as ‘Reimaging Politics & Space: Why here, why now?‘ Here’s one key paragraph:
Our starting point in the project of re-visioning this journal is that no one owns the political in political geography and, therefore, while we are editors, we hope you will join us in building the future of Politics & Space. Send us your papers! Send us something new, different, something that you need to see in these pages.
Deborah Cowen on ‘Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance‘ at the Verso site.
Two reviews of Ben Golder’s Foucault and the Politics of Rights – Andrew Dilts at NDPR (open access) and Marcelo Hoffman in New Political Science (requires access).
Four books from OUP in recompense for review work (Thomas Nail, Theory of the Border; Cynthia Weber, Queer International Relations; Jemina Repo, The Biopolitics of Gender and Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671), the long-awaited English translation of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives, a working copy of Henri Lefebvre’s Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and a little collection edited by Georges Canguilhem.
Series editor copies of Francisco Klauser, Surveillance and Space have arrived. This is the second book in the Society and Space series, closely following Dan Bulley’s Migration, Ethics and Power: Spaces Of Hospitality In International Politics. Here’s the description of Francisco’s book:
The digital age is also a surveillance age. Today, computerized systems protect and manage our everyday life; the increasing number of surveillance cameras in public places, the computerized loyalty systems of the retail sector, geo-localized smart-phone applications, or smart traffic and navigation systems. Surveillance is nothing fundamentally new, and yet more and more questions are being asked:
Who monitors whom, and how and why?
How do surveillance techniques affect socio-spatial practices and relationships?
How do they shape the fabrics of our cities, our mobilities, the spaces of the everyday?
And what are the implications in terms of border control and the exercise of political power?
Surveillance and Space responds to these modern questions by exploring the complex and varied interactions between surveillance and space. In doing so, the book also advances a programmatic reflection on the very possibility of a ‘political geography of surveillance’.
And the series description as a whole is:
The Society and Space series explores the fascinating relationship between the spatial and the social. Each title draws on a range of modern and historical theories to offer important insights into the key cultural and political topics of our times, including migration, globalisation, race, gender, sexuality and technology. These stimulating and provocative books combine high intellectual standards with contemporary appeal for students of politics, international relations, sociology, philosophy, and human geography.
Other books under contract include Marcus Doel’s Violent Geographies, Shiloh Krupar and Greig Crysler’s The Waste Complex and Ross Exo Adams’s Circulation and Urbanization. Plenty more in development and discussion. If you’d like to talk to me about the series, please email me.
Althusser, an Intellectual Adventure – a film by Bruno Oliviero. I missed seeing this in Paris last week, and hope other screenings will take place.
Philosopher, Marxist, professor, murderer. More than a quarter century after his death, Louis Althusser, one of the most influential leftist thinkers of the 20th century, remains an enigmatic figure: a man whose work rejuvenated Marxist theory through books such as For Marx and Reading Capital, a Communist who strove to create a new framework following the revelations of Stalinist terror… and a victim of mental illness who, in his darkest moment, strangled his wife of more than 30 years.
ALTHUSSER, AN INTELLECTUAL ADVENTURE traces the development of Althusser’s thought, which influenced a who’s who of French philosophers, including Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. Credited with reinterpreting Marx in a way that encouraged readers to engage directly with his work, Althusser brought the Freudian concept of overdetermination to Marxist theory, and argued that Marx’s work should not be read as one consistent whole, because there was a clear ‘break’ between his earlier and later writings. But Althusser’s most enduring contribution may be the concept of ideological state apparatuses: institutions and social structures including schools, churches, and families, that serve to reinforce the capitalist state.
The film also delves into Althusser’s little-understood struggles with the mental illness that would see him hospitalized numerous times throughout his life. In intimate letters to his wife, Hélène Rytmann, and mistress, Franca Madonia, Althusser describes his treatment and mental states. As Yves Duroux says, in order to understand the man, one must look not only at his philosophy and relationship with the Communist Party, but to “his own madness” which in some ways linked the two.
ALTHUSSER, AN INTELLECTUAL ADVENTURE captures the man, and the implications of his work, in interviews with friends and colleagues such as Lucien Sève, who served more than 30 years on the central committee of the Communist Party of France, and with philosophers and former students including Etienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Ranciere.
Throughout his life Althusser avoided the spotlight, preferring to be a behind-the-scenes theoretician arguing the case for Marxist revolution. But included in this film is the only TV interview he gave, shot on a rooftop in Rome in 1980—just weeks before he would kill Hélène.
Update 28 Jan: the entire film is available here:
Update 27 Feb: the video has unfortunately been removed.
