Progressive Geographies

If you read French, this is an interesting discussion of what is called ‘a new Heidegger affair’ – the comments on antisemitism in a forthcoming volume of the Gesamtausgabe.

[Update: I mistakenly said this was Volume 73; it is rather Volumes 94-96.]

[Update: some more links at Enowning – thanks to Philippe Theophanidis for pointing me there. I think we need to be careful in how this affair is described. Enowning suggests that ‘professional haters’ are probably getting ready to weigh in. I’m sure that there will be plenty of dismissive contributions. But Peter Trawny (who edited the volume in question) is a serious scholar who has edited four other volumes of the Gesamtausgabe, and for that at least should be distinguished from Victor Farias or Emmanuel Faye. It doesn’t serve anyone’s interests to deny that Heidegger said and did some deeply unpleasant things. The question – as it always was – is how the thought and the actions interrelate, and to what extent.]

A short video linked to a paper in Society and Space, with the paper open access for a short time in recompense for the authors’ additional material for the open site. This is something we are trying to do more often at the journal.

via critical-theory.com

The launch issue of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies is now available open access.

A previously unpublished manuscript by Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment is forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press. Edited by Łukasz Stanek and translated by Robert Bonnano, this is going to be a significant moment in the discussion of his work, especially since the manuscript remains unpublished in French.

The relationship between bodily pleasure, space, and architecture—from one of the twentieth century’s most important urban theorists

Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, the first publication of Henri Lefebvre’s only book devoted to architecture, redefines architecture as a mode of imagination rather than a specialized process or a collection of monuments. Lefebvre calls for an architecture of jouissance—of pleasure or enjoyment—centered on the body and its rhythms and based on the possibilities of the senses.

Alain Badiou’s “The Althusserian Definition of Theory” lecture is available as an audio recording here.

Althusser seeks to destroy the opposition between theory and practice and seeks to replace the Real of production with practice. By destroying the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, Althusser develops a new form of materialism of production, not one based on social relations. For Althusser, theory is the result of practices. It is the abstract result of practices. Thus, the Althusserian discovery of theory is an immanent discovery of truth within the field of theoretical processes.

This lecture was given at Princeton University on December 6th, 2013. The conference was dedicated to the 50 year anniversary of the publication, “Reading Capital” by Louis Althusser.

Nina Power has a challenging piece in The Guardian on students and the right to protest, and the role lecturers need to take.