Progressive Geographies

Chronicles from an eternal present. A review of “Critiquer Foucault”, edited by Daniel Zamora – part I, part II.

The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas – new collection from Duke University Press. Includes essays by Sandro Mezzadra, Walter  D. Mignolo, Benjamin Noys and others.

The contributors to The Anomie of the Earth explore the convergences and resonances between Autonomist Marxism and decolonial thinking. In discussing and rejecting Carl Schmitt’s formulation of the nomos—a conceptualization of world order based on the Western tenets of law and property—the authors question the assumption of universal political subjects and look towards politics of the commons divorced from European notions of sovereignty. They contrast European Autonomism with North and South American decolonial and indigenous conceptions of autonomy, discuss the legacies of each, and examine social movements in the Americas and Europe. Beyond orthodox Marxism, their transatlantic exchanges point to the emerging categories disclosed by the collapse of the colonial and capitalist frameworks of Western modernity.

The piece I published yesterday was on Foucault’s second lecture course at the Collège de France. I have also published reviews of the first and third, which form an initial triptych on the linked themes of measure, inquiry and examination.

Update September 2025: the Berfrois site is now closed and the archive has been removed. My piece can now be found at the updated links below. All my pieces are listed here.

“Power, Nietzsche and the Greeks: Foucault’s Leçons sur la volonté de savoir” (1970-71).

“Peasant Revolts, Germanic Law and the Medieval Inquiry” on Théories et institutions pénales (1971-72).

“Discipline, Punish, Examine and Produce: Foucault’s La société punitive” (1972-73).

These three courses will be a major focus of the second of the books I’m currently writing on Foucault, The Birth of Power.

With Berfrois I have also published a piece on the 1979-80 course at the Collège, On the Government of the Living, and the  1981 course at Louvain, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: “Confession, Flesh, Power and Truth”.

And finally I’ve also written for them on Kant’s Natural Science and Ralph Fiennes’s film of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

Thinking Spatial Practices with & against law

An Interdisciplinary Workshop Funded by: Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

Birkbeck School of Law, University of London, 19^th June 2015

Birkbeck College, Malet Street│Room 414

Across various disciplines, a resurgent interest in questions of spatial justice is prompted by a diverse range of developments such as the Arab Spring and occupy movements, drone warfare, the criminalisation of squatting in Europe, restriction of the uses of public space under securitisation, surveillance and disciplinary architecture, the housing crisis in the UK and elsewhere.

This interdisciplinary colloquium explores the specific role of law, not only in terms of its functions of disciplining, ordering and controlling, but also in terms of the possibilities it offers for critical spatial practices. Law holds a special relationship to spatiality as the latter is ingrained in its historical formation and logics of ordering and control.

At the intersection with approaches that focus predominantly on the so-called negative effects of legal spatial ordering and control, and posit themselves as working against the law, we would like to also consider what positive markers may be offered in the law and with the law in such modalities of spatial practice and thought. And this not only in the sense of legal doctrinal possibilities and established jurisprudence, but crucially so in terms of encountering the creative force of the (legal, political and architectural) imagination.

PLEASE REGISTER HERE:

Programme and Abstracts here: