Progressive Geographies

UChicago Professor Helps Uncover Lost Lectures by French Philosopher Foucault, 7 February 2013
Source Newsroom: University of Chicago

Newswise — More than 30 years ago, French philosopher Michel Foucault gave a landmark series of seven lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium In them, Foucault linked his early and late work—exploring the role of confession in the determination of truth and justice from the time of the Greeks forward to the 1970s.

While the lectures had been mythic among Foucault scholars, only a partial, poorly transcribed account had survived. Recently rediscovered, details of the lectures have been published in a new book co-edited by Prof. Bernard E. Harcourt.

“These 1981 lectures form a crucial link between Foucault’s earlier work on surveillance in society, the prison and neoliberal governmentality during the 1970s, and his later work on subjectivity and the care of the self in the 1980s,” said…

DUST (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought) presents:

Weaponising Speculation Conference

2-3 March, Independent Colleges, 60-63 Dawson Street, Dublin 2.

This gathering is the signature event organized by D.U.S.T (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought), an art/theory collective recently founded by Michael O’Rourke, Paul Ennis and Fintan Neylan. The primary aim of DUST is to stage conversations between disparate groups of people—artists, aestheticians, philosophers, non-philosophers, theorists—who find themselves at the fringes of academic institutions and disciplines and who are also broadly interested in speculative realism and post-continental philosophy.

“Weaponizing Speculations” is a non-traditional assembly which has as its impetus the opening up of a dialogue between artists, para-academics and the Speculative Realist “community” here in Dublin and elsewhere. Here is the description:

“Distinct from the norm. Distinct even from the academic norm. Twice removed the para-academic is doubly unwanted. The ones you have trained are set loose and they know your secrets…

Read Teju Cole’s essay “A Reader’s War,” which tries to square Obama’s reputation as a man “widely read in philosophy, literature, and history” with the White House’s policies of drone warfare. From the essay:

How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

Alessandro Fontana 1939 -2013

Alessandro Fontana was Emeritus Professor of Italian Studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the author of numerous essays which were partially collected in Il vizio occulto (1989) and La polizia dell’anima (1990). He  collaborated with François Furet (Livre et société au XVIII^e siècle, 1970) and Michel Foucault (I, Pierre Rivière… 1973). He contributed to the Storia d’Italia Einaudi (La scena, 1972), the Einaudi Enciclopedia (La scena, 1972) and the Einaudi Letteratura Italiana (Piazza, corte, salotto e caffè, 1986). On the bicentenary of the fall of the Venetian Republic, he edited a collective work Venise 1297-1797. La république des castors (ENS Éditions, 1997), as well as the collection Venise et la Révolution Française (Éditions Laffont, 1997).  He was general editor with François Ewald of the volumes of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France (Gallimard –…

Social Science Bites has a podcast and interview transcript of an interview with Doreen Massey up. You can listen to the interview here or view the transcript and other info here. Here is the teaser from the site:

“Doreen Massey has made her reputation by studying space, not outer space, space here on planet Earth. Professor Massey is a geographer who wants us to rethink many of our assumptions about space, including the assumption that it is simply something we pass through. She believes that an analysis of spatial relations between, for example, people, cities, jobs, is key to an understanding of politics and power.”