Object Lessons: The hidden meaning of ordinary things, Wednesday 13th July, London

Posted on June 2, 2016 by stuartelden

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Object Lessons: The hidden meaning of ordinary things, 6pm, Wednesday 13th July, Bloomsbury Publishing, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Where does a password end and an identity begin? Do our desires really go on holiday in a hotel? Does wearing a hood mean that rappers and Little Red Riding Hood share the same cultural significance?

Continuing the tradition of Roland Barthes in his 1957 ground-breaking Mythologies, Bloomsbury’s new Object Lessons series analyses the popular culture of today. With titles ranging from ‘Hair’ to ‘Hood’, and ‘Refrigerator’ to ‘Remote Control’, in examining such objects of daily life the books argue that we find new meaning in the world around us.

Join the authors of ‘Password’, ‘Hotel, ‘Hood’ and ‘Earth’ as they discuss the stories & inspirations behind everyday objects. They debate that they are more than just objects and instead become animated with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. By debating these fascinating details and histories our panel will bring objects in our everyday worlds to life.

Join us for drinks and a chance to buy books from a series at an exclusive discount. Listen to our panel unearth the hidden stories behind these objects in a fascinating and lively discussion!

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Reading Capital: The Complete Edition by Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière

Posted on June 2, 2016 by stuartelden

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Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, by Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière, now published by Verso.

A classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged for the first time

Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, maintained that Marx’s project could only be revived if its scientific and revolutionary novelty was thoroughly divested of all traces of humanism, idealism, Hegelianism and historicism. In order to complete this critical rereading, Althusser and his students at the École normale supérieure ran a seminar on Capital, re-examining its arguments, strengths and weaknesses in detail, and it was out of those discussions that this book was born.

Previously only available in English in highly abridged form, this edition, appearing fifty years after its original publication in France, restores chapters by Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière. It includes a major new introduction by Étienne Balibar.

Posted in Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Call for papers for The Body of War: Drones and Lone Wolves, University of Lancaster on 24-25 November 2016

Posted on June 2, 2016 by stuartelden

Call for papers for The Body of War: Drones and Lone Wolves,  University of Lancaster  on 24-25 November 2016.  This workshop is part of the ongoing States of Exceptions project (for Part I, see here). Derek Gregory will be giving one of the keynotes. Full details at Derek’s blog Geographical Imaginations.

We invite potential participants to submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by 31 July 2016 drawing upon, but not limited to, such issues as:

  • Theatres of War: The New Spatialities and Temporalities of Warfare
  • Mirror Images? Drones vs. Suicide Bombers
  • Phenomenology of Drones
  • New Perspectives on Ethics, Horror & Terror
  • The Ubiquity of the Enemy: Lone Wolves and Self-Representing Terror
  • The Collapse of International Law: What Enemy? Which Proportionality?
  • The Body as a Weapon: The Immanentization of Martyrdom
  • Phenomenology of Lone Wolves
  • The End of Law: Rethinking Limitation, Proportionality and Discrimination

Please send abstracts with “States of Exception II” in subject line to bisagroup.cript@gmail.com

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Lee Braver (ed.), Division III of Heidegger’s Being and Time: The Unanswered Question of Being reviewed at NDPR

Posted on June 2, 2016 by stuartelden

9780262029681Lee Braver (ed.), Division III of Heidegger’s Being and Time: The Unanswered Question of Being is reviewed at NDPR by Sacha Golub. Here’s the book’s description:

Heidegger’s Being and Time is one of the most influential and important books in the history of philosophy, but it was left unfinished. The parts we have of it, Divisions I and II of Part One, were meant to be merely preparatory for the unwritten Division III, which was to have formed the point of the entire book when it turned to the topic of being itself. In this book, leading Heidegger scholars and philosophers influenced by Heidegger take up the unanswered questions in Heidegger’s masterpiece, speculating on what Division III would have said, and why Heidegger never published it.

The contributors’ task—to produce a secondary literature on a nonexistent primary work—seems one out of fiction by Borges or Umberto Eco. Why did Heidegger never complete Being and Time? Did he become dissatisfied with it? Did he judge it too subjectivistic, not historical enough, too individualistic, too existential? Was abandoning it part of Heidegger’s “Kehre”, his supposed turning from his early work to his later work? Might Division III have offered a bridge between the two phases, if a division exists between them? And what does being mean, after all? The contributors, in search of lost Being and Time, consider these and other topics, shedding new light on Heidegger’s thought.

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Yanis Varoufakis in conversation with Noam Chomsky about Greece

Posted on May 31, 2016 by stuartelden

Yanis Varoufakis in conversation with Noam Chomsky about Greece (via Sociological Imagination).

Posted in Noam Chomsky, Uncategorized | Tagged | 2 Comments

Global Empire: Excavating Israel – Eyal Weizman interview with Tariq Ali

Posted on May 31, 2016 by stuartelden

Tariq Ali talks to Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures Goldsmiths, University of London, about the pressure being applied by Israel on the White House and EU to illegalise the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign.

Global Empire: Eyal Weizman: Excavating Israel from teleSUR English on Vimeo.

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Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory published

Posted on May 31, 2016 by stuartelden

9781474413633Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory has been published in the Speculative Realism series at Edinburgh University Press.

Clarifies and systematises the concepts and presuppositions behind the influential new field of assemblage theory

Manuel DeLanda provides the first detailed overview of the assemblage theory found in germ in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. Through a series of case studies DeLanda shows how the concept can be applied to economic, linguistic and military history as well as to metaphysics, science and mathematics.
DeLanda then presents the real power of assemblage theory by advancing it beyond its original formulation – allowing for the integration of communities, institutional organisations, cities and urban regions. And he challenges Marxist orthodoxy with a Leftist politics of assemblages.

Posted in Manuel deLanda, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

11 Critical Theory books that came out in May 2016

Posted on May 31, 2016 by stuartelden

Another roundup of recently published books at Critical Theory – including my own Foucault’s Last Decade, but also recent books by Rancière, Bidet, Weeks, Sloterdijk, Badiou….

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Posted in Alain Badiou, Foucault's Last Decade, Jacques Rancière, Peter Sloterdijk, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Derek Congram on “Digging for the Disappeared; Forensic Science After Atrocity” by Adam Rosenblatt

Posted on May 31, 2016 by stuartelden

Adam Rosenblatt’s book Digging for the Disappeared; Forensic Science after Atrocity is reviewed at the Society and Space open site.

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History in the making: Celebrating the work of Raphael Samuel – essays in HWJ open access

Posted on May 27, 2016 by stuartelden

From the Verso blog:

Screen_Shot_2016-05-25_at_15.22.02-a6274dbbe882a837a71984eac9b91d6a.pngRaphael Samuel was one of the most influential historians to come out of the New Left generation. A founding member of the History Workshop Journal which pioneered the “history from below” approach to historical scholarship, Samuel’s work helped to democratise and move historical scholarship of the confines of the academy. His major work, Theatres of Memory, sought to celebrate the “unnofficial knowledge” that formed from popular conceptions of the past and present against the pretension of the professional historians.

As Samuel himself wrote, this approach was motivated by “the belief that history is or ought to be a collaborative enterprise, one in which the researcher, the archivist, the curator and the teacher, the ‘do-it-yourself’ enthusiast and the local historian, the family history societies and the individual archaeologist, should all be regarded as equally engaged.”

Alongside the passionate plea to remember “what others forget” in Theatres of Memory, the wonderful, passionate political anthropology of the Communist Party in The Lost World of British Communism and Island Stories‘ analysis of the production and reproduction of national myths – much of Samuel’s greatest work was done for the History Workshop Journal. On the 20th anniversary of Samuel’s death, HWJ has released all of his work for free on via their website.

The essays include the stunning panorama of the industrial revolution in “The Workshop of the World”, as well as profiles of Raymond Williams, Ralph Miliband and Ewan MacColl. For the full list of articles visit the HWJ website.

Between 1st and 3rd June Queen Marys University London and the History Workshop Journal will be hosting a major conference on Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism. For more details and full programme click here.

 

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