The Space of the World

A la limite, le problème qui se pose c’est celui des rapports de la pensée à la culture : comment se fait-il que la pensée ait un lieu dans l’espace du monde, qu’elle y ait comme une origine, et qu’elle ne cesse, ici et là, de commencer toujours à nouveau.

Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses, p. 64.

Ultimately, the problem that presents itself is that of the relations between thought and culture: how is it that thought has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and that it never ceases, in this place or that, to begin anew?

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 50.

Le paysage urbain medieval inverse l’espace antérieur, celui du «monde». Il muliplie les lignes brisées, les verticales. Il bondit hors du sol ; il se hérisse de sculptures.

Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, p. 296.

The urban landscape of the Middle Ages turned the space which preceded it, the space of the ‘world’, upon its head. It was a landscape filled with broken lines and verticals, a landscape that leapt forth from the earth bristling with sculptures.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 256.

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Sean Kohingarara Sturm's avatarTe Ipu Pakore: The Broken Vessel

Simon Critchley, “Mystical Anarchism,” Adbusters, 1 June 2012.

Politics is perhaps no longer, as it was in the so-called anti-globalization movement, a struggle for and with visibility. Resistance is about the cultivation of invisibility, opacity, anonymity, and resonance.

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Writing Advice

Via Paul Ennis, a post on writing advice that uses some quotes (including from me) from Paul’s edited collection Post-Continental Voices.

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Henri Lefebvre – Debates and Controversies

Strong piece by Stefan Kipfer, Parastou Saberi and Thorben Wieditz in Progress in Human Geography surveying Lefebvre’s contributions and recent scholarship (requires subscription). The material on the state and social movements is particularly useful.

Aided with French and German scholarship, this paper takes stock of Henri Lefebvre’s relevance in contemporary English-speaking urban research on social movements, postcolonial situations, the state, scale, gender, urban political ecology, regulation, and the right to the city. What becomes clear from this survey is that Lefebvre’s capacity to contribute to cutting-edge urban research requires a selective translation of his work. While the modalities of translating Lefebvre vary depending on the subject matter, transfiguring Lefebvre for today is most plausible when taking into account the dialectical nature of his urbanism and the open-ended and integral character of his marxism.

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Peter Hallward on the Quebec student protests

In The Guardian. My colleagues at Society and Space are trying to get some pieces on this topic for the journal’s open site. I’ll link to them when there.

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Verso’s reading list – ‘Against Patriotism, Against Monarchy’

Are you drowning in deluded celebrations of a reactionary political system, a country facing economic collapse and a sporting spectacle sucking funds from our welfare system?

Are you disgusted by pleas for everyone to ‘pull together in this time of austerity’ when the only thing that isn’t being cut is the Queen’s flotilla?

After you’ve torched the street party and hung an effigy of ‘our’ monarch you may want to read these:

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Foucault archive as a ‘National Treasure’

Clare O’Farrell’s Foucault News blog has been really helpful for updates on the archival status of Foucault’s papers – notes, lecture drafts, manuscripts, etc. Les aveux de la chair is in there.

See these two recent pieces she has linked to – in Le nouvel observateur, and Le monde des livres. The latter raises some critical questions about the designation and what this means, especially in the light of what Foucault said about these kinds of issues.

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Léopold Lambert's avatarThe Funambulist

Visualizing Palestine is an open collective which attempts to demonstrate graphically the injustice to which the Palestinians are subjected to in the current apartheid -or colonization depending on whether you consider the territory Palestine/Israel as one sovereignty or two. After an historical document on the hunger strike to support Khader Adnan who was doing one to protest against his detention in an Israeli prison without having been charged with anything, they just released a map of Israel/Palestine (see above) illustrating the segregative characteristics of the road system on this territory. The West Bank and East Jerusalem are indeed full of highways that are forbidden to Palestinian cars as they link the Israeli territory to the numerous illegal civil settlements in the occupied territories (see my previous article about the Route 443). In addition to that, the map shows how the totality of roads accessible to Palestinians to link their…

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More downloads

It’s been a while since I put a few papers up online. Here are five more –

Elden, S. Reassessing Kant’s Geography. Journal of Historical Geography. 2009;35:3-25.

Elden, S. Taking the measure of the Beiträge: Heidegger, National Socialism and the Calculation of the Political. European Journal of Political Theory. 2003;2:35-56.

Bialasiewicz, L., Elden, S. & Painter, J. The Constitution of EU territory. Comparative European Politics. 2005;3:333-363.

Elden, S. The Problem of Confession: The Productive Failure of Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality’. Journal for Cultural Research. 2005;9:23-41.

Elden, S. The State of Territory Under Globalization: Empire and the Politics of Reterritorialization. In Margaroni, M. & Yiannopoulou, E. Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics. Amsterdam: Rodopi; 2006:47-66.

The full list is here.

Posted in Antonio Negri, Felix Guattari, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Michael Hardt, Michel Foucault, My Publications, Territory | Leave a comment