Progressive Geographies

Isabelle Stengers’ new book, In Catastrophic Times, is available for free as a .pdf download at this site. Here is a description of the book (which you can also buy in hard copy as well following the link above):

There has been an epochal shift: the possibility of a global climate crisis is now upon us. Pollution, the poison of pesticides, the exhaustion of natural resources, falling water tables, growing social inequalities – these are all problems that can no longer be treated separately. The effects of global warming have a cumulative impact, and it is not a matter of a crisis that will “pass” before everything goes back to “normal.”

Our governments are totally incapable of dealing with the situation. Economic warfare obliges them to stick to the goal of irresponsible, even criminal, economic growth, whatever the cost. It is no surprise that people were so struck…

Latour on Paris Attacks: 

What is so discouraging about the terrorist acts is that our discussion of what motivated the operations is as insane as the acts themselves. With each attack of this nature, we restage the grand war drama, the nation in peril and the protector-state purporting to rise up against barbarity. This is what states do, we say: we should have a basic expectation of security, and the state should have the means to provide it. End of story.

But what makes the current situation so much more dismaying is that the crimes committed on 13 November have occurred within a few days of another event about to take place that involves tragedies of a different kind, ones that will require that we come up with very different answers to wholly different threats that have nothing to do with ISIS/Daech. I am referring, of course, to the World…

Michel Foucault, Against Himself: Arlette Farge Remembers Foucault on the Streets of Paris, Literary Hub, 16 Nov 2015

The following conversation with French historian Arlette Farge is excerpted from Michel Foucault, Against Himself, a collection of interviews and essays exploring the contradictions and conflicts at the heart of Michel Foucault’s life and work.

You met Foucault after the events of May 1968.

Arlette Farge: I first became acquainted with him through his work in 1975, when Discipline and Punish came out. Back then I was a teacher for young educators who wanted to work in the penitentiary system, so I knew a lot about what Michel Foucault was discussing, and the way, for example, he would go into prisons to read Discipline and Punish out loud to the prisoners. I admired him. Back then, street demonstrations, anything concerning freedom, utopia, the prison system, happiness, life that’s…