Derek Gregory’s tribute to Edward Soja

Posted on November 5, 2015 by stuartelden

A lovely piece by Derek Gregory remembering Edward Soja at Geographical Imaginations.

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Books received – Nietzsche, Sloterdijk, Han, Saramago, Shakespeare, Couture, Dardot and Laval

Posted on November 4, 2015 by stuartelden

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A mix of books recently received. Nietzsche’s Le livre du philosophe, Sloterdijk’s Stress and Freedom, Han’s The Transparency Society and The Burnout Society, Saramago’s The Notebook, the Penguin Macbeth, Jean-Pierre Couture’s book on Sloterdijk (which I endorsed), and Dardot and Laval’s The New Way of the World. The Sloterdijk was in recompense for review work, the Couture was complimentary, as were the two Han books. The rest I bought.

Posted in Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Sloterdijk, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

Is Reviewer Fatigue a Real Thing?

Posted on November 4, 2015 by stuartelden

Some interesting discussion of why people decline review requests, based on data from American Political Science Review.

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Eyal Weizman, “Forensic Architecture” video of 2015 Wall Exchange lecture at UBC

Posted on November 4, 2015 by stuartelden

Eyal Weizman, “Forensic Architecture” video of 2015 Wall Exchange lecture UBC (via Derek Gregory’s Geographical Imaginations.)

Can architecture provide new tools of political analysis and intervention? This question is central to the work of Eyal Weizman, Israeli architect and scholar. By examining buildings, ruins, maps, satellite imagery and citizen images and video, his research teams investigate the sites of contemporary conflicts and monitor the crimes of states. Weizman unpacks state violence from the frontier regions of Pakistan, through the forests of South America to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Weizman visited Vancouver to deliver the fall 2015 Wall Exchange lecture, presented by UBC’s Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

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Foucault and Visual Art- links and resources at Heterotopian Studies

Posted on November 4, 2015 by stuartelden

affiche-204x300-204x300The Heterotopian Studies site has a useful resource page on ‘Foucault and Visual Art‘, providing links to images which Foucault discusses, along with a bibliography. As well as the obvious – Magritte, Picasso, Velázquez – it also has links to Foucault’s discussions of Paul Rebeyrolle, Duane Michels and Gérard Fromanger.

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Pierre Macherey, ‘The Productive Subject’ in Viewpoint magazine

Posted on November 3, 2015 by stuartelden

arton2202Pierre Macherey, ‘The Productive Subject‘ in Viewpoint magazine – an interesting discussion of Foucault’s relation to Marx.

[Update: a French version is here]

Posted in Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Pierre Macherey | 3 Comments

Remembering Edward Soja (1940-2015)

Posted on November 2, 2015 by stuartelden

leadImage_largeMurray Low has passed on the sad news of the death of Edward Soja. I first heard him talk on Postmodern Geographies in 1995 – this would have been work that ended up in Thirdspace – and the talk really motivated me to examine the spatial aspects of Foucault and Lefebvre. A review of Thirdspace was my first academic publication. I only met Ed a few times, but he was always very kind to me, despite the criticisms I’d made of his readings of those thinkers.

We first met at a Foucault conference in Dublin, and when he realised who I was (I think I must have self-identified when asking a question), he almost literally grabbed me at the next break, we headed outside and talked for over an hour, missing the next session, while he smoked furiously.

We met again at the 2007 San Francisco AAG, when Derek Gregory organised some sessions on his work. I talked about ‘The Political Organisation of Space’, his very interesting 1971 AAG report on territory and territoriality. Some of my ideas on territory that I developed over the next several years stem from my critically appreciative reading of this piece of his work. As I say in The Birth of Territory “it remains one of the best single pieces written about territory”.

I was at UCLA for a quarter in 2007, teaching in the Geography department, so I got to see Ed a few times, and saw him present on what became Seeking Spatial Justice. I remember one long lunch with him, and Neil Brenner, Jing Tsu and I had a lovely evening with him at his home and a local restaurant in Mar Vista.

The last time I saw him was at an AAG in Washington, DC, the year I won the Globe book award for Terror and Territory. Ed was with Allen Scott, and they both congratulated me, Ed almost crushing me with a bear-hug.

I thought of him the other day, when I heard he’d been awarded the Vautrin Lud prize (sometimes colloquially known as Geography’s Nobel). I really wish I’d made the effort to contact him to congratulate him – I was thinking I’d do it at the time of the ceremony. My sincere condolences to his family, friends and colleagues.

Posted in Edward Soja | 23 Comments

‘The Territories and Majesty of Shakespeare’s King John’ – talks at Warwick 3 November and UCL 23 November

Posted on November 2, 2015 by stuartelden

I’ll be giving a talk with the title of ‘The Territories and Majesty of Shakespeare’s King John’ twice over the next couple of weeks.

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This lecture will discuss Shakespeare’s play King John around two themes – the question of majesty and that of territories. Majesty is a continual concern throughout the play, described as ‘borrowed’, ‘banished’, ‘resembling’, ‘dangerous’ or ‘the bare-picked bone’. John is seen as a usurping monarch, denying Arthur his rightful inheritance, but by the end of the play majesty has been so diminished by events it is perhaps worth very little. But what is that majesty over? Among other things, it is the lands of the kingdom. King John is one of only a handful of Shakespeare’s plays in which the word ‘territories’ appears. There is one mention in the opening scene, and one in the final act. The first of these had caused editors much confusion, because it is used with a definite article – ‘the territories’ – rather than a possessive ‘his’, ‘her’, ‘its’ or ‘their’ territories. What might this mean, and what might it indicate? Thinking about these questions of majesty, land, and territories, the talk will discuss how King John and contemporary play The Troublesome Reign of King John anticipate the dual themes of domestic disorder and foreign conquest found in Shakespeare’s other history plays.

Tuesday 3rd November, 4pm, Sidelights on Shakespeare seminar, Graduate Space, 4th Floor, Humanities (annex), University of Warwick

Monday 23rd November, 6pm, IAS Talking Points seminar, Common Ground, University College London – with responses by Professor Helen Hackett, Department of English and Dr James Kneale, Department of Geography

The talks are both open to all, through free pre-registration is requested for the UCL one.

I’ve been working on the talk over the past couple of weeks, developing a few notes I had on the play into a presentation, but it’s already becoming much more than that. Initially I’d intended on there being a section on King John in a chapter on the history plays in the planned Shakespeare book, but I now think there is enough here for a chapter on just this play. I’ll also be giving a more general talk on this project at Cambridge University on 25th November – details to follow.

Posted in Conferences, Shakespearean Territories, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

Books received – Shakespeare, de Lagasnerie, Derrida, Harper and Bryers

Posted on November 2, 2015 by stuartelden

books received 2

The Penguin edition of Henry IV, Part One, Geoffrey de Lagasnerie’s L’art de la revolt: Snowden, Assange, Manning, Derrida’s Séminaire: La peine de la mort II (2000-2001), and Tom Harper and Tim Bryars, A History of the 20th Century in 100 Maps.

Posted in Jacques Derrida, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

David Farrell Krell, Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks reviewed at NDPR

Posted on November 2, 2015 by stuartelden

63264_covDavid Farrell Krell’s Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks is reviewed at NDPR.

This latest book by the distinguished scholar, translator, and author David Farrell Krell is a compilation of three different texts. Part I presents four Brauer Lectures he delivered at Brown University (2014) on Heidegger’s early thinking on the human being’s “ecstatic temporality.” Following is a brief “Interlude” in which he reflects on the vice of “polemical” criticism and the virtue of “giving oneself over” to a text in interpreting it. Part II is an extended essay on Heidegger agonistes as this emerges in the recently published Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks). Krell has insightful and suggestive things to say in each, but the three parts do not fit well together. [continues here]

Posted in David Farrell Krell, Martin Heidegger | 3 Comments