Progressive Geographies

Kelly Oliver, Earth and World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions – thanks to John Protevi for the link.

Critically engaging the work of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida together with her own observations on contemporary politics, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of a just and sustainable world, Kelly Oliver lays the groundwork for a politics and ethics that embraces otherness without exploiting difference. Rooted firmly in human beings’ relationship to the planet and to each other, Oliver shows peace is possible only if we maintain our ties to earth and world.

Oliver begins with Immanuel Kant and his vision of politics grounded on earth as a finite surface shared by humans. She then incorporates Hannah Arendt’s belief in plural worlds constituted through human relationships; Martin Heidegger’s warning that alienation from the Earth endangers not only politics but also the very essence of being human; and Jacques Derrida’s meditations on the singular worlds individuals, human and otherwise, create and how they inform the reality we inhabit. Each of these theorists, Oliver argues, resists the easy idealism of world citizenship and globalism, yet they all think about the earth against the globe to advance a grounded ethics. They contribute to a philosophy that avoids globalization’s totalizing and homogenizing impulses and instead help build a framework for living within and among the world’s rich biodiversity.

• Terry Eagleton, The Slow Death of the University
• Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy – forthcoming in 2016 from Verso with introduction by Stuart Elden
• Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
• Heidegger, National Socialism and the editing of the Gesamtausgabe
• Call for Applications for Society and Space Editors and Review Editors
• Warwick Uni to outsource hourly paid academics to subsidiary
• How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco – reviewed at Impact of Social Sciences
• “Foucault insults the police”, photo from 1972
• Lauren Berlant Society and Space lecture at the AAG
• Where to start with reading Peter Sloterdijk?

A bit late linking to this, but there is an interesting interview with my Warwick colleague Marijn Nieuwenhuis in the ‘Geopolitical Passport’ series at Exploring Geopolitics.