Progressive Geographies

You can listen to it HERE.

This is the most serious critical engagement with my work so far, and I look forward to reading Gratton’s FORTHCOMING BOOK ON SPECULATIVE REALISM. I deal with quite a lot of vacuous or untutored criticism in the blogosphere, so it’s refreshing to hear from a critic who has actually done quite a lot of background reading.

The strongest part of the lecture, I think, is Gratton’s dead-on intuition that Levinas may be the key to understanding my work. Yes indeed, and for me Levinas has always been immeasurably more important than Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, or Lacan– his early work in particular. Gratton goes into this link in some detail in the lecture, and I didn’t hear anything that seemed obviously off base.

As for the conclusions of the lecture, I am less positive. It is completely implausible to read me as a…

The well-known Political Science blog The Monkey Cage, now owned by the Washington Post (now owned by Jeff Bezos; we all work for Amazon now) posted earlier today a concise 3 graph summary of what our De Facto State Research Survey reveals about likely attitudes amongst different ethnic groups in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria (we left out our research results from Nagorny Karabakh since it is not directly supported by the Russian Federation and has its own unique features). We want to thank The Washington Post and particularly Erik Voeten of Georgetown for his assistance in swinging open the door of the Monkey Cage sufficiently to let two Irish political geographers propel some hopefully useful place-based knowledge into the maelstrom of debate that engulfs us post-Crimea. It is painful to summarize years of research into a few paragraphs but at least we didn’t have to write…

It was wonderful to meet some good friends in Dublin–a really incisive collective of people. (Greatly, Paul Ennis turned out to be as nihilistic and funny as I found him in email contact.) Paul suggested I give a talk to the (mostly) art students on object oriented ontology, in which they were interested, and it was an excellent crowd. I borrowed a bit from a chapter on that in Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects, but also moved out the paper as much as I could for ad hoc comments. Here is the audio. In the beginning, I’m really in front of the audience pointing to this diagram and working through it:

Thank you to Fintan Neylon for setting this up. There’s a good scene there in Dublin and I miss it already. (Also there are references to Deleuze: I came to an earlier reading group where some people…