Progressive Geographies

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem is not yet as well known in the Anglophone world as some of the other important younger French thinkers, in part due to the absence of English translations of his work (a situation we can hope will be remedied shortly).

There will be a symposium on his work from March 22-24 at the École normale supérieure in Paris. A detailed program can be found HERE.

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…