Progressive Geographies

I missed this when it came out last year, but Matthew Hannah briefly and generously reviews The Archaeology of Foucault (Polity, 2023) in Cultural Geographies. It’s restricted access, unfortunately. Here’s the opening paragraph.

Throughout his impressive body of work in intellectual history, Stuart Elden has been content to remain in the background, leaving others to traffic in major interpretive gambits. His readers are typically offered a fine mesh of specific bibliographic insights spread like dew-laced morning spiderwebs over the writings of Foucault, Heidegger or Canguilhem. The Archaeology of Foucault, though, breaks subtly with this self-effacing tendency in Elden’s work, and quietly reveals a bit more of his scholarly commitments than do the other volumes. It is not marked by a bold step into the limelight. But it is telling that it is the only one of the four volumes with a title that names its method…

Marx 13/13 – Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory seminar series

Karl Marx’s writings contain many of the most impactful ideas that have transformed—and still today continue to transform—the course of human history. Marx’s ambition for philosophy, namely to change the world, has inspired critical thinkers and activists for over a century now and around the globe. His ideas have motivated social movements and stirred political action in progressive directions ranging from revolutionary class struggle and worker autonomy movements to feminist, Black, queer, transgender, and other forms of Marxist and progressive thought.

Today, there is still so much more to mine in Marx’s work for the advancement of solidarity, equality, social justice, and cooperation. In these times of crisis, with the mounting threat of right-wing extremism, the weakness of liberal centrist parties, and the cataclysmic risks associated with global climate change, it is essential to return to Marx to rethink and catalyze what is to be done and how to move forward.

In Marx 13/13, we turn to Marx’s key texts and read them through the lens of world-historical interpretations that pushed Marxian thought and praxis in new directions: toward operaismo or workerism, Black Marxism, feminist, queer and transgender theories, postcolonialism, cultural studies, Freudian or Foucauldian strands of Marxism, as well as Leninist, Maoist, and social democratic forms of Marxism. This public seminar series will reread the original Marx texts chronologically, in conversation with formative interpretations of the texts that have shaped different branches of Marxism or progressive thought, with the guidance of brilliant contemporary critical philosophers…

… And then, of course, to triangulate and illuminate these pairing of texts, we will hear from brilliant living critical philosophers to comment on the Marx readings and provide a contemporary, cutting-edge take on these paired works. We will be joined by eminent critical philosophers, including Amy Allen, Cinzia Arruzza, Étienne Balibar, Tithi Bhattacharya, Bruno Bosteels, Jean Louise Cohen, Jules Joanne Gleeson, Michael Hardt, Rahel Jaeggi, Sandro Mazzadra, Nancy Fraser, Judith Revel, Martin Saar, Renata Salecl, Gayatri Spivak, Brandon Terry, and Kendall Thomas.

Mark Neocleous, Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police – Verso, February 2025

No publisher page yet, but in online bookstores and Google books.

Update December 2024: the publisher page is here.

In his new book, critical theorist Mark Neocleous engages in a sustained critique of the theory and practice of pacification. Combining philosophical analysis with historical detail, Neocleous analyses the development of pacification as a key concept through which capitalist modernity has been organised, offering readers the first book that treats pacification as an important concept in the history of state power and capitalism. Neocleous’s approach is fourfold, examining pacification as social warfare carried out through the ideology of peace; as a form of social police carried out through mechanisms of security; as law and order exercised through the permanent wars of class society; and as the myriad practices of power designed to counter insurgency.

Making use of official documents of state, the writings of counterinsurgency thinkers and the ideas perpetuated by practitioners of counterrevolution, the book unravels the complex ways through which pacification generates new forms of social war and new modes of policing that reproduce capitalist order and fabricate obedient subjects.

Through expansive accounts of war and police, and engaging with a range of topics from debt to death, from stasis to civil war, and from the police kettle to the politics of fear, the book offers a provocative analysis of the ways in which state and capital combine to build a pacified social order.

E-International Relations interview – Klaus Dodds

Klaus Dodds is Executive Dean and Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 1994 and took up a position at the University of Edinburgh. Thereafter he joined Royal Holloway. He has held a Visiting Erskine Fellowship at Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury (2002) and been a Visiting Fellow at St Cross College, University of Oxford (2010-11) and St Johns College, University of Oxford (2017-18). In 2005 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Geography and a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust (2017-2020) for a project concerned with the ‘Global Arctic’. He has published many books and articles concerned with the geopolitics and governance of the Polar Regions, as well as the cultural politics of ice and border geopolitics. These include The Scramble for the Poles (2016), Ice: Nature and Culture (2018) and Border Wars (2022). His latest book, co-written with Mia Bennett is provisionally titled Unfrozen: The Battle for the Future of the Arctic (Yale University Press 2025). 

Frédéric Keck, How French Moderns Think: The Lévy-Bruhl Family, From “Primitive Mentality” to Contemporary Pandemics – HAU books, April 2024

This book traces the contributions of the Lévy-Bruhl family to social and political thought and expertise in 20th-century France, shaping the anticipation of economic and health crises.

How French Moderns Think tells the story of the French sociological tradition through four generations of the Lévy-Bruhl family: Lucien, who founded the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris; his son Henri, who founded the Institute of Roman Law; his grandson Raymond, who took part in the creation of the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies; and his great-grandson Daniel, a vaccine specialist at the Institute of Public Health. This family history casts a new light on the philosophical debates about “primitive mentality” and the “savage mind.” By drawing on the expert knowledge inherent in this family genealogy, the articulation between the logical and the “pre-logical” is not a cognitive question but rather a problem of anticipating unpredictable events. By relating Lévy-Bruhl’s engagements from the Dreyfus Affair to the Minister of Armaments during the First World War, Keck narrates the confrontation of the socialist ideal of justice and truth with the French colonial experience and its transformations in global technologies preparing for pandemics.

Henk van Houtum, Free the Map: From Atlas to Hermes: A New Cartography of Borders and Migration – nai010, January 2024 (e-book and print)

‘Map attack! In Free the Map, a new publication by Henk van Houtum, traditional maps are challenged and new cartographic stories and representations are discussed and encouraged. A must for our readership.’ Defactoborders 

> An innovative cartography on borders and migration 
> With exciting mapping assignments for Maplabs and education
> On counter-maps showing human relations, experiences, and connections

A map is a visual story of the world. It feeds our imagination and shapes our view of the world. A standard atlas, however, predominantly tells only one story, that of the nation-state. It depicts a world in which people are uniformly packed into national containers, enclosed by borders, and in which migration is often represented as threatening invasion arrows. 

Free the Map goes beyond this narrow, state-centric cartography. The book argues for a new cartographic story: a Hermes – the grandson of Atlas and the god of mobility and human connections. To this end, it discusses several visually compelling, alternative cartographic representations of borders and migration. 

Free the Map ends with a call to action. Various artists and cartographers offer exciting ready-to-use Hermes challenges for education and public Maplabs. 

Let’s free the map from its territorial trap!