Mark Kelly, Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality Volume I, The Will to Knowledge’

Posted on February 28, 2013 by stuartelden

KellyMark Kelly’s guide to Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality Volume I, The Will to Knowledge’ is now out. Mark is the author of the very good The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault – I examined the PhD that was based on – so I’m sure this book will be equally useful.

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Posted on February 28, 2013 by stuartelden

The second of Latour’s Gifford lectures.

dmf's avatarANTHEM

Once nature and the natural sciences are fully ”secularized”, it becomes possible to revisit also the category of the supernatural. Then, a different landscape opens which can be navigated through an attention to agencies and their composition. Such a freedom of movement allows the use of the rich anthropological literature to compare the ways different “collectives” manage to assemble and totalize different sets of agencies.

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Foucault Studies 15

Posted on February 28, 2013 by stuartelden

FS15Foucault Studies issue 15, a theme issue on religion with a number of essays on that topic and an interview with James Bernauer, is now available.

Also a number of other essays and reviews.

Full contents list – and links to all papers (open access) here.

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Doctor of Letters

Posted on February 28, 2013 by stuartelden

I’ve been awarded a DLitt degree (Doctor of Letters) from Durham University, on the basis of publications post-PhD. This is a so-called ‘higher doctorate’. I submitted three books – Understanding Henri Lefebvre, Speaking Against Numberand Terror and Territory – along with a statement linking them to my research as a whole. This was then all assessed by three external examiners. Durham’s regulations state that

A Higher Doctorate is awarded in consideration of work which is of high distinction, constituting a substantial and original contribution to scholarship in the field and which has already been published or accepted for publication, or in the case of musical compositions, of outstanding merit. Higher Doctorates are normally awarded only to those with distinguished work of considerable scholarly impact.

Posted in My Publications, Speaking Against Number, Terror and Territory, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, Universities | 3 Comments

The Birth of Territory proofs

Posted on February 28, 2013 by stuartelden

The Birth of Territory proofI’ve recently received the proofs for The Birth of Territory, due out later this year. It looks good and I’ve not spotted anything serious as yet.

It’s a strange experience to be reading this in very-near-final form, looking like a book. I’ve written other books, and had this experience before, but nothing I’ve done has taken anything like this long to research, think and write. I can look at pages and remember when and where I first read the text being discussed, thought through the things I would say, and found the right formulation to convey it. Some of the endnotes represent days or weeks of work. I remember how long it took, and how difficult it was, to track down some references. There are sections of this book that were drafted in 2000, and parts finalised in 2012. It was researched in libraries in North America, Europe, Singapore and Australia. I gave lectures or seminars on the content in fourteen countries. The book is 488 pages long, without index. It could have been much longer, and there were some cuts I found hard to make. Nonetheless it’s the book I wanted to write, without the shortcuts that might have been necessary had I not had the Leverhulme major research fellowship. I’m looking forward to it being available later this year.

Posted in Books, Politics, Territory, The Birth of Territory | 4 Comments

Posted on February 28, 2013 by stuartelden

Review of Roppongi Crossing at the Society and Space open site.

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Race, affect and alterity: rethinking climate change and migration – Workshop at Durham

Posted on February 27, 2013 by stuartelden

Call for Papers/Announcement

Race, alterity and affect: rethinking climate change-induced migration and displacement

18-19 June 2013, Durham University

Organisers – Andrew Baldwin (Durham University W.A.Baldwin@durham.ac.uk) and Katherine E. Russo  (Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale)

As policy and scholarly debates about climate change and migration gather pace, to date very few interventions have addressed how such debates are shaped by notions of race and alterity. The imperative to address this lacuna is further emphasised by the twinned observations that climate change is expected to amplify the incidence of environmental/natural disasters i.e., landslides, extreme weather events and droughts, and that narratives of disaster very often contain explicit and/or implicit racist sentiment. Such a context suggests that now is a propitious moment to begin a concerted interrogation of these themes.

The aim of this workshop is thus to bring debates about climate change and migration broadly defined into dialogue with contemporary critical race theory and postcolonial theory. Recent interventions (Baldwin 2012; Baldwin forthcoming) have suggested that racialisation in the context of debates about climate change and migration unfolds through at least three interrelated tropes: naturalisation, the loss of political status, and ambiguity. This work also argues that given its historiographical emphasis, theories of the postcolonial appear to be insufficient for properly theorising the alterity of the climate change migrant, since the discourse on climate change and migration is written almost exclusively in the future-conditional tense. In contrast, others (Farbotko 2010) have very productively embraced theories of the postcolonial to interpret issues of climate change and mobility.

Thus one of the aims of this workshop is to consider how critical race theory and theories of the postcolonial might be usefully reinterpreted to address the future-conditionality of climate change and migration discourse. At this stage, we are particularly interested in innovative contributions from post-graduate scholars.

Topics that might be addressed in the workshop include but are not limited to:

  • race and affect
  • xenophobic and nationalist reactions to environmental disaster
  • environmental change, ethnicity and internal displacement
  • critical race theory, climate change and migration/displacement
  • postcolonial theory, climate change and migration/displacement
  • ecocritique
  • climate change and cultural media/arts
  • environmental change, states of emergency and the suspension of citizenship rights
  • ontologies of difference and the future-conditional
  • disaster risk reduction/disaster risk management, climate change and difference

Keynote Speakers – David Theo Goldberg (University of California, Irvine) Uma Kothari (Manchester University)

Partners: COST Action IS1101 Climate change and migration; Institute for Advanced Studies (Durham University); Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale

Abstract Submission deadline: 15 March 2013

Registration: This is an open event, although space is limited. If you wish to register for this workshop please, notify Ellie Whittles (e.c.whittles@durham.ac.uk) by the registration deadline 3 May.

Event website: http://www.climatemigration.eu/

Posted in Boundaries, Conferences, Politics, Territory | 1 Comment

David Harvey at Warwick – The Contradictions of Capital

Posted on February 27, 2013 by stuartelden

warwick-harvey
The Contradictions of Capital, University of Warwick, Distinguished Lecture Series, 14 February 2013 (via Reading Capital).

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Posted on February 27, 2013 by stuartelden

The first of Latour’s Gifford lectures available on video.

dmf's avatarANTHEM

Lecture 1: ‘Once Out of Nature’ – Natural Religion as a Pleonasm
The set of questions around the two words “natural religion” implies that only the second word is a coded and thus a disputed category, the first one being taken for granted and uncoded. But if it can be shown that the very notion of nature is a theological construct, we might be able to shift the problem somewhat: the question becomes not to save or resurrect “natural religion”, but to dispose of it by offering at last a ”secular” version of nature and of the natural sciences.

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Foucault – Lectures on the Will to Know

Posted on February 27, 2013 by stuartelden

Graham Burchell’s transiton of Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know is scheduled for publication in June 2013 (via Foucault News). You can read my review of the French text at Berfrois. Here’s the publisher blurb:

will-to-knowThis volume gives us the transcription of the first of Michel Foucault’s annual courses at the Collège de France. Its publication marks a milestone in Foucault’s reception and it will no longer be possible to read him in the same way as before.

In these lectures the reader will find the deep unity of Foucault’s project from Discipline and Punish (1975), dominated by the themes of power and the norm, to The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (1984), devoted to the ethics of subjectivity.

Lectures on the Will to Know remind us that Michel Foucault’s work only ever had one object: truth. Discipline and Punish completed an investigation of the role of juridical forms in the formation of truth-telling, the preparatory groundwork for which is found here in these lectures. Truth arises in conflicts, in rival claims for which the rituals of judicial judgment provide the possibility of deciding between who is right and who is wrong.

At the heart of ancient Greece there is a succession of different and opposing juridical forms and ways of dividing true and false into which the disputes between sophists and philosophers are soon inserted. In Oedipus the King, Sophocles stages the peculiar force of forms of telling the truth: they establish power just as they depose it. Against Freud, who will make Oedipus the drama of a shameful sexual desire, Michel Foucault shows that the tragedy articulates the relations between truth, power, and law. The history of truth is that of the tragedy.

Beyond the irenicism of Aristotle, who situated the will to truth in the desire for knowledge, Michel Foucault deepens the tragic vision of truth inaugurated by Nietzsche, who Foucault, in a secret dialogue with Deleuze, rescues from Heidegger’s reading.

After this course, who will dare speak of a skeptical Foucault?

Posted in Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault | 4 Comments