Progressive Geographies

Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds, edited by Maayan Amir and Ruti Sela, is now available from Punctum books.

The concept of extraterritoriality designates certain relationships between space, law, and representation. This collection of essays explores contemporary manifestations of extraterritoriality and the diverse ways in which the concept has been put to use in various disciplines. Some of the essays were written especially for this volume; others are brought here together for the first time. The inquiry into extraterritoriality found in these essays is not confined to the established boundaries of political, conceptual, and representational territories or fields of knowledge; rather, it is an invitation to navigate the margins of the legal–juridical and the political, but also the edges of forms of representation and poetics.

Within its accepted legal and political contexts, the concept of extraterritoriality has traditionally been applied to people and to spaces. In the first case, extraterritorial arrangements could either exclude or exempt an individual or a group of people from the territorial jurisdiction in which they were physically located; in the second, such arrangements could exempt or exclude a space from the territorial jurisdiction by which it was surrounded. The special status accorded to people and spaces had political, economic, and juridical implications, ranging from immunity and various privileges to extreme disadvantages. In both cases, a person or a space physically included within a certain territory was removed from the usual system of laws and subjected to another. In other words, the extraterritorial person or space was held at what could be described as a legal distance. (In this respect, the concept of extraterritoriality presupposes the existence of several competing or overlapping legal systems.) It is this notion of being held at a legal distance around which the concept of extraterritoriality may be understood as revolving.

This volume is a part of Amir and Sela’s Exterritory Project, an ongoing art project that wishes to encourage both the theoretical and practical exploration of ideas concerning extraterritoriality in an interdisciplinary context. The project aims not only to draw on existing definitions of extraterritoriality but seeks also to charge it with new meanings, searching for ways in which the notion of extraterritoriality could produce a critique of discriminating power structures and re-articulate new practical, conceptual, and poetical possibilities.

The book is divided into sections – Extraterritorial Ethics/Geographies/Crimes/Poetics/Objects. I have a piece in the second entitled ‘Outside Territory’, originally given as a lecture in Paris in 2012. There are also contributions from Zygmunt Bauman, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, Robert Bernasconi, Steven Galt Crowell, Anselm Franke + Eyal Weizman + Ines Weizman, Angus Cameron, Victoria Bernal, Mireille Hildebrandt, Julien Seroussi, Cedric Ryngaert, Ed Morgan, Martin Jay, Matthew Hart + Tania Lown-Hecht, Gerhard Richter, Homi Bhaba, Caryl Emerson, Theodor Adorno, and Graham Harman.

In six months time the book will be available entirely free to access; for now it’s available as print-on-demand or a pdf for a minimum price of $5.

I’m sorry to hear the news of the death of Michael Sheringham –  obituary in The Guardian.

Michael Sheringham, who has died of prostate cancer aged 67, was a leading figure in the field of French studies in Britain, Ireland and the US. In France, too, he earned widespread recognition for his achievements as a literary and cultural critic of the first order….

Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (2006) proved to be another landmark publication in French literary criticism in the anglophone world. Sheringham put together this wide-ranging, pioneering work with creativity, energy and patience. He drew fruitfully on the philosopher Michel de Certeau’s view set out in L’Invention du Quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life) that routines like walking, talking and reading – the very things that are central to daily living – are somehow held outside specialised, established forms of knowledge. Sheringham’s critical manoeuvre was to analyse the “practitioners” of the everyday, among them Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec and Annie Ernaux.

Everyday Life was the work of his I knew best, and we had a brief correspondence about his work on Lefebvre. I didn’t know that he was working in his last years on Foucault, as this part of the obituary notes:

By the time of his death, he had come close to completing a new book on Michel Foucault and a 19th-century French archive, with the title The Afterlives of Pierre Rivière: Foucault/Archive/Film.

Hopefully some of this work might see the light of day – sounds intriguing. There is also an obituary in Le monde, though most is behind a paywall.