Progressive Geographies

David Garland, Bars and stripes. Review of The Punitive Society. The Times Literary Supplement, 27 January 2016.

The thinking and rethinking that led Michel Foucault to write his finest book.

Le Collège de France, founded in 1530 and located in Paris’s Latin Quarter, is one of France’s elite institutions. It is a public institution of higher education but it enrols no students and grants no degrees. Instead, it requires its professors to give an annual course of lectures – free of charge and open to all – reporting on their on­going research. Michel Foucault, who was admitted to the Collège in 1970 as professor of “The History of Systems of Thought”, took this obligation very seriously, preparing his lectures with exquisite care and presenting them to a packed amphitheatre at 5:45 pm each Wednesday from January to March. His lectures were intense, austere performances. Reading aloud from…

Today I was given a copy of this edition of the Magazine Littéraire from September 1977 (thank you Philip).

Its centrefold is a diagram seeking to represent flows of influence between contemporary philosophers. The table provides a fascinating snapshot…

• Marx is top and centre, flanked by Freud and Nietzsche.
• Influences are split between the two poles of ancient Greece and German idealism.
• No Beauvoir (no women at all!), no Camus. Merleau-Ponty and Sartre are supposed to have influenced each other (there is no way of representing mutual antipathy here, though a diagram of philosophical rivalries would be a fascinating project for someone…).
• The generation of the 1960s-1980s includes Axelos, Althusser, Desanti, Serres, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida and Barthes.
• The latest generation to be represented reads like the betting card of a punter who backs a winner one time out of every two: Balibar, Lecourt, Glucksmann, Dollé, Benoist, Jambet-and-Lardreau, Lévy. The nouveaux…

Writing for the sake of publishing work in journals is one of the hardest things academics do. There is the strain of putting everything together in a way you hope will convince the reviewers. Then there is the revising, the pushing around of text, the addition of new materials, the nod to work you didn’t cite fully in the first place, and then the final decision – often delayed – to finally re-send it, ideally with the end result that the reviewers and editor(s) accept your changes. Some time thereafter your work appears on the journal’s web site, or in print form, and bingo: your work is ‘out there.’

This whole process takes time. And it can be exhausting, not least in an emotional sense: reviews can be harsh. Even when they aren’t, that moment of seeing what your peers make of your work can be tough going. To…

An updated website is now live with videos from the first 8 panels, as well as the links to the upcoming livestreams.

This looks to be interesting: 2016 Summer Academy: Intersecting Derrida « London Graduate School