An intriguing map of Africa, imaging how it might have looked had it not been colonised. This might be a good spur to class discussion, though one thing that should immediately be noted is that it’s not just that boundaries would have been in different places but that there may not have been boundaries at all, or at least not ones in our modern sense. Thanks to Nitasha Kaul for the link.
As I said I would last week, I’m preparing a detailed post on why we need a new translation of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir, and was thinking of other major works of twentieth-century theory that exist in more than one translation. There are frequently multiple translations of earlier works, of course. These are the ones I came up with, but additional suggestions welcome.
Heidegger – there are now two translations of Being and Time, by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, and by Joan Stambaugh; the latter of which also exists in a revised version by Dennis Schmitt. There are also recent editions of some of his essay collections – such as Pathmarks and Off the Beaten Track – which replace earlier translations of their essays; and two versions of his Contributions to Philosophy (Emad & Maly; Rojcewicz & Vallega-Neu), the second of which appeared with the same publisher only twelve years later because the first was so terrible and so widely-criticised.
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception has recently been reissued in a new translation by Donald Landes, though I’m not sure how much it is revised from the Colin Smith one.
Derrida’s Of Grammatology was reissued in a revised version in 1997, correcting some of the problems in Gayatri Spivak’s original version. [Update: Yoav Kenny has added Leonard Lawlor’s 2010 translation of Derrida’s La voix et le phénomène as Voice and Phenomenon replacing David Allison’s 1973 translation as Speech and Phenomena].
Foucault’s History of Madness replaced the much abridged Madness and Civilization – the latter was based on Foucault’s own abridged French version, with one chapter of the original also included.
Any other good examples? Or, a bigger question, which other major works really need a fresh translation?
[Update: Beauvoir’s Second Sex is mentioned in a comment below, and came up on Facebook too – a very good example. Interesting comment below about the variable quality of recent Benjamin translations, and a wish for better translations of Adorno.]
[Update 2: Mentioned in comments below and on Facebook are the following – Lacan’s Ecrits (Alan Sheridan-Smith and Bruce Fink) and Seminar XX; the complete translations of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks which re-do earlier versions and add previously untranslated texts; Debord’s Society of the Spectacle; Bataille’s Guilty; Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics; Sartre’s The Imaginary and The Imagination; and that Adorno’s Minima Moralia was supposed to be in progress. Thanks for all of these suggestions.]
A short article by me, entitled ‘Grégoire Chamayou’s Manhunts: From Territory to Space?’ has been posted as the 46th Funambulist paper (open access). In it I discuss Chamayou’s book Manhunts in relation to my own work on territory. Thanks to Léopold Lambert for inviting me to contribute to his excellent site.
Sloterdijk is interviewed in the LA Review of Books, mainly on Spheres I: Bubbles. Thanks to ANTHEM for the link. The interview was conducted by a reading group at UC Irvine, where Sloterdijk later gave the Wellek Library lectures. I don’t know what the theme of those lectures was, but the interview mentions his current project of “on the relationship between the “miraculous,” with its theological connotations, to the “wondrous,” with its connotations of pure aesthetics”.
Jon M. Mikkelsen (ed., tr.), Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth-Century Writings, SUNY Press, 2013 – reviewed by John Zammito at NDPR.
Durham’s IHRR blog on the heat waves in Australia – very close to (my temporary) home…
Australia has experienced severe heatwaves recently with temperatures reaching over 40C (104F). 2013 is currently the hottest year on record, but if trends continue 2014 could be not far behind.
The extreme heat has led to fire alerts throughout the country making people evacuate some areas. According to the BBC, lightning strikes in Victoria caused more than 250 fires on Tuesday night alone. Some matches at the Australian Open have come to a halt due to the heat wave, with some players suffering serious health effects from the intense heat. This year parts of Queensland and New South Wales have set new heat records.
This is a satellite image of land surface temperature in Australia taken by NASA’s MODIS satellite:
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I’ve spent the day in the State Library of Victoria, re-reading the first two chapters of Discipline and Punish and comparing them carefully to Surveiller et punir. This took me much longer than anticipated. I knew this text well – I’ve taught it quite a few times, in different contexts, and written about it in Chapter 5 of Mapping the Present. But this reading threw up lots of new perspectives and surprises, and I’m only two chapters in.
– Some of these new thoughts were in relation to reading it in the light of La société punitive, but also Lectures on the Will to Know, and what we currently know of Théories et institutions pénales. In particular, the discussion of proof, ordeal and examination trades on these courses.
– the discussion of supplice is absolutely fascinating, and rewards close reading. At times it appears Foucault is compressing what he had treated in much greater detail in Théories et institutions pénales. Indeed, there is a general sense of a confidence in broad assertion here that is in contrast to, but surely dependent on, the more hesitant and provisional claims in the lecture courses.
– Foucault’s discussion of medieval sovereignty is very interesting. Sovereignty is probably the wrong word, and it should be really be supremacy or other terms that are actually used in texts of the time, though Foucault seems to date this period until the French Revolution so there are some issues of periodisation to be examined. But there are some very pointed analyses. Foucault’s use of Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies is well-known, but I suspect he was also familiar with Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship.
– there is at least one reference to the time Foucault was writing, in the mention of the execution of Buffet and Bontemps at the Santé in 1972. These are the prisoners Foucault talks about in his short text ‘Pompidou’s Two Deaths’.
– Finally, it convinced me we really need a new translation of this text. Alan Sheridan’s translation was a major work, and he made some good choices in rendering difficult phrasings. We all owe him a huge debt for what he did in enabling work on Foucault – his Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth was also, I think, the first book in English on Foucault. But the translation has nevertheless, some significant issues. Most seriously, understandings of Foucault’s work have advanced dramatically in the last forty years (it was published in 1977, from a 1975 French original). In the light of the lecture courses, for example, many previously obscure things in the text become much clearer, but are not easily seen by looking just at the translation. In addition, the translation is riddled with small errors, questionable choices, clumsy phrasings, missing phrases and the like. Some of these are detailed on Clare O’Farrell’s michel-foucault.com site, but there are many more. I plan to write a much more detailed case for why we need a new translation, hopefully next week. [Update: this is now available here.] I may also post a bit more about rereading the book itself.
MIT Press/Semiotext(e) are publishing a two-volume collection entitled Schizo-Culture, which includes both the 1978 book and a reconstructed proceedings of the 1975 event that led to the book. Thanks to Nina Power for the link.
The legendary 1975 “Schizo-Culture” conference, conceived by the early Semiotext(e) collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-’68 France to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze’s first presentation of the concept of the “rhizome” to Foucault’s introduction of his History of Sexuality project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion “Schizo-Culture” revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture.
The “Schizo-Culture” issue of the Semiotext(e) journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants.
This slip-cased edition includes The Book: 1978, a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and The Event: 1975, a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Félix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvère Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Francois Peraldi, and John Cage.
Interesting review of a book that has sat unread on my shelf for too long.
This review is a bit late but gives a good history and lead-up to an important work by Lyotard: Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure » CSCP / SCPC.
Surveillance & Society
Call for Papers: Surveillance and Security Intelligence after Snowdon
Volume 13, Number 1, January 2015
Deadline for Submissions: May 31st 2014
