Progressive Geographies

Le Système de Leibniz was published during the heady anni mirabiles of late 1960s French thought. It appeared in 1968, the same year as Roland Barthes’s short essay ‘The Death of the Author’, one year after Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, and two years after Foucault’s The Order of Things. Like Derrida’s and Deleuze’s volumes Le Système was written as a major doctoral thesis (French doctoral candidates submit a major and a minor thesis), the fruit of research under the supervision of Jean Hyppolite at the Ecole Normale Suprérieure, Rue d’Ulm. Like those other works it stands both as a rich and sinuous study in its own right and also as a radical declaration of philosophical intent from a philosopher elaborating the shapes of thought that will accompany him through his subsequent writings.

The importance of the work can be summarised under three headings. First, it…

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, coming from Princeton this September, details here.

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?

A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist…

This symposium on Parting Ways is just out in the print version of the journal Political Theology. It includes contributions by Sarah Hammerschlag, Larisa Reznik, Martin Kavka, Vincent Lloyd, and myself with a response by the author, Judith Butler.

There is something uncomfortable about the entire exchange. At points frustrated by the political polemics roused by her book, Butler would clearly have preferred to have focused the discussion around purely philosophical problems raised by Levinas, Benjamin, Arendt, Darwish, and her readings of them. But there seems to have been no way to get past the problem of Jewish identity, given the polemical contexts that stage her readings. It has been suggested to me by a dear friend that Butler did not seem to want to theorize Jewish identity, i.e. her own Jewish identity, which she takes as a given matter of biographical fact.

What I would suggest is that…