I’ve just received my advance copy of The Birth of Territory, and additional copies have been sent by the warehouse. The Chicago page for the book has the book listed as published, and orders from them direct will be sent now (there are also electronic copies available). I guess online bookstores will take a few more days to receive copies.
[Update 9th September: the Kindle edition is now available. Amazon have the physical copy down for release on 13th September]
I’ve mentioned the lecture (4th October) and workshop (5th October) A Feeling for Things: A Conversation around the work of Jane Bennett before, but further details are now available. Places are going fast and booking is required. (Lots of good speakers, and I’ll be chairing session 2 and part of the concluding roundtable).
I now have a webpage on the University of Warwick site.
I’ve had to put the Foucault work to one side – first because of moving, with the Foucault books somewhere in the piles of book-boxes, and now because I have a couple of upcoming talks. The first is at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference, on “Terricide: Lefebvre, Geopolitics and the Killing of the Earth” (abstract here and a little more here). A paper at the RGS is short, so I don’t have time for much elaboration. The ‘Terricide’ section was originally written for the ‘Earth’ paper I delivered at the CityState Lexical-Political workshop in Tel Aviv (audio recording here), but was not read due to limits on time. The RGS sessions are going to be published in a book with Punctum (Rory Rowan has the details here), so it will end up as a short, separate piece. As a result, I’ve not just made a Powerpoint presentation, but also written a text. It still needs some work, but the core of the piece is there.
I then moved to the paper I’ll be delivering in Canada at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at a workshop on ‘Regimes of Calculation and Global Governance‘ (19-20 September). The title of this talk is ‘Geo-metrics’ and it’s all part of this project of rethinking, or as I’m now suggesting regrounding, geopolitics. The abstract for the ‘Geo-metrics’ talk is here. I’ll be reusing parts of the ‘Earth’ paper, but developing some of the claims in more detail, and have revisited some of the arguments I made in my 2006 book Speaking Against Number. More work to do on that paper, but it is getting somewhere.
I’ll also be giving versions (and hopefully elaborations) of this material at the University of Warwick in October, and probably at the University of Zurich in November, under the title ‘Earth – Regrounding Geopolitics’.
Jesse Proudfoot reviews Todd Meyers’s The Clinic and Elsewhere.
More detail on Bruce Braun’s Antipode lecture at the RGS-IBG conference, and details of a linked virtual theme issue.
*** Bruce’s lecture can now be viewed online – http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291467-8330/homepage/lecture_series.htm***
We announced last week that Bruce Braun will be presenting the 2013 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture on Wednesday 28th August between 16:50 and 18:30 in the Ondaatje Theatre. The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception between 18:45-20:00 in the Map Room, and our colleagues at Wiley will be filming the lecture and will make it available as a part of our Lecture Series videos.
We can now announce that Bruce’s lecture is entitled Vital Materialism and Neoliberal Natures. Here’s what Bruce has to say about it:
This talk traces a relation between two distinct literatures that have largely ignored each other. First, a dynamic literature on ‘vital materialism’ that counts complex systems theory among its influences and proposes a non-dualistic and non-deterministic understanding of nature; and, second, a vast literature on ‘neoliberal natures’ that explores the commodification…
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Radio 4 on Foucault.
Thinking Allowed: Michel Foucault (2013)
Program on BBC Radio 4
Duration: 28 minutes
First broadcast: Wednesday 21 August 2013
Michel Foucault – Laurie Taylor presents a special programme on the life and work of the iconoclastic French philosopher and theorist. He’s joined by Professor Stephen Shapiro, Professor Vikki Bell and Professor Lois McNay.
Stephen Shapiro
Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick
How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish
Anne Schwan, Stephen Shapiro (authors)
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN-10: 0745329810
ISBN-13: 978-0745329819
The Anti-capitalist Foucault (forthcoming)
Vikki Bell
Professor of Sociology and Convenor of MA in Critical & Creative Analysis at Goldsmiths College, London
The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN-10: 0415717337
ISBN-13: 978-0415717335
Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN-10: 0415101042
ISBN-13: 978-0415101042
Lois McNay
Professor of Theory of Politics and Fellow, Somerville College, University of…
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The last of the series of excellent posts on Foucault, Habermas and the Enlightenment.
Michel Foucault began the first of his 1983 lectures on The Government of Self and Others with a few comments on the peculiar challenges of lecturing to a public with whom — given the nature of the Collège de France — he could have little direct contact, went on to offer a concise (and elegant) review of the line of research he had been pursuing, and closed with a few comments on the text he had chosen as his point of departure:
This week I would like to start with, how to put it, not exactly an excursus: a little epigraph (exergue). As epigraph, I would like to study a text which may not be situated exactly within the reference points I will choose for most of this year. Nevertheless, it appears to me to be very exactly in line with, and to formulate in rigorous terms…
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‘Security and the Everyday’
31 October – 1 November 2013, University of Warwick (via PAIS news)
Keynote: Professor Jutta Weldes (University of Bristol); Professor François Debrix (Virginia Tech)More and more research in critical security studies pays attention to the realm of everyday experience, popular culture and fictional narratives, and how they produce and reproduce discourses of security and representations of identity. At the same time, distinctions between politics and entertainment seem increasingly tenuous in a world of globalized spaces of hyper-reality. From the real-time images of remote controlled drone strikes to the imagined realities of video game franchises, and from the realpolitik of TV shows and comic books to the narratives of IR textbooks, virtual and actual realities blend into each other. This conference explores the interconnections and implications of this inter-textuality of security and image, narrative and identity, and power and fiction.
If you are interested in participating please send details of your affiliation, an indicative title, and an abstract of no more than 250 words to Georg Löfflmann(g.lofflmann@warwick.ac.uk).
Deadline for abstracts: 9 September 2013
Frédéric GROS discusses Foucault’s 1973 course “La société punitive” in relation to Discipline and Punish. The course is coming out later this year.
Frédéric GROS, “Foucault et « la société punitive »”, Pouvoirs, revue française d’études constitutionnelles et politiques, n°135, 135 – La Prison, p.5-14. URL : http://www.revue-pouvoirs.fr/Foucault-et-la-societe-punitive.html
The full text of this article is available on the “Nouveau millénaire, Défis libertaires” site
Surveiller et Punir de Michel Foucault , publié en 1975, constitue sans aucun doute une des plus importantes contributions, à la fois historique, sociologique et philosophique, au problème de la prison. Le livre est devenu assez vite une référence et un classique, et on continue encore aujourd’hui à s’y référer largement. D’innombrables commentaires, exégèses, critiques, numéros spéciaux ont tenté, depuis bientôt un demi-siècle qu’il est paru, d’explorer ses enjeux théoriques et pratiques [1]. Alors plutôt que d’ajouter encore à cette masse critique, on voudrait, dans le cadre de cet article, présenter un ensemble d’analyses foucaldiennes peu connues, mais qui furent pourtant décisives pour l’écriture du livre de 1975. Il s’agit…
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