The audio recording of my lecture “Foucault’s Third Course on Governmentality”, at Department of Political Economy/Centre for International Security Studies (CISS), University of Sydney is available here.
Thanks to Adam David Morton and his colleagues for the invitation and hosting this, and the audience for their engagement.
A good list of some recent theory books here.
Agir avec Henri Lefebvre: Altermarxiste? géographe radical? – new French collection, edited by Hugues Lethierry.
Three interesting books, now available open access online.
Lectures de Michel Foucault
3 volumes originally published by ENS editions, now available in their entirety as open access at Open Edition books
Les interventions et discussions réunies dans les trois volumes des Lectures de Michel Foucault sont issues de trois rencontres. La première, organisée à l’initiative de l’association Autrement dit, de l’association pour le centre Michel-Foucault et du Centre de recherches en rhétorique, philosophie et histoire des idées (CERPHI – ENS Fontenay / Saint-Cloud) eut lieu à Chauvigny les 31 mai, 1er et 2 juin 1996. La seconde était organisée à Fontenay-aux-Roses par le Centre de recherche sur la pensée politique italienne (CERPPI – ENS Fontenay / Saint-Cloud) le 14 décembre 1996, à l’occasion de la parution du cours de 1976 au Collège de France « Il faut défendre la société ». Enfin la troisième rencontre, consacrée aux Dits et écrits, était organisée conjointement par le CERPHI et…
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Derek Gregory ‘The Natures of War’ forthcoming in Antipode, and early version available to download from his site.
One of my tasks this past week has been to complete the revisions to ‘The Natures of War’ which, to my delight, Antipode has agreed to publish in its entirety (and with a handful of illustrations too). I’ve added a discussion of the ways in which the narratives on which I draw – for the Western Front, the deserts of North Africa, and Vietnam – were all, for various reasons, ‘white boy’s stories’. I had made it clear that there were troops from other continents fighting and dying on the Western Front, for whom the militarized nature of trench warfare in Europe would have been doubly strange (see also here), and I had also explained that in Vietnam there were at least two other stories to be told: most of the US memoirs were written by white soldiers so that the experiences of African-Americans were written out of the…
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Nicholas Crane’s review of Mustafa Dikeç’s forthcoming book.
Simon Dalby, “International Security in the Anthropocene” at E-IR.
Forthcoming from Verso in April:
In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other.
Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov.
The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway’s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought. Molecular Red proposes an alternative realism, where hope is found in what remains and endures.
Babette Babich’s book The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice, and Technology is now available at a much-discounted price.
This book studies the working efficacy of Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah in the context of today’s network culture. Especially as recorded on YouTube, k.d. lang’s interpretation(s) of Cohen’s Hallelujah, embody acoustically and visually/viscerally, what Nietzsche named the ‘spirit of music’. Today, the working of music is magnified and transformed by recording dynamics and mediated via Facebook exchanges, blog postings and video sites. Given the sexual/religious core of Cohen’s Hallelujah, this study poses a phenomenological reading of the objectification of both men and women, raising the question of desire, including gender issues and both homosexual and heterosexual desire.
A review of critical thinking about musical performance as ‘currency’ and consumed commodity takes up Adorno’s reading of Benjamin’s analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction as applied to music/radio/sound and the persistent role of ‘recording consciousness’. Ultimately, the question of what Nietzsche called the becoming-human-of-dissonance is explored in terms of both ancient tragedy and Beethoven’s striking deployment of dissonance as Nietzsche analyses both as playing with suffering, discontent, and pain itself, a playing for the sake not of language or sense but musically, as joy.
