Progressive Geographies

Ege Selin Islekel, Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance – Northwestern University Press, September 2024

Offering a political epistemology of collective mourning

Focusing on forms of improper burial in Turkey and Latin America, Ege Selin Islekel argues that a political technology of mourning is fundamental to contemporary politics. This technology of necrosovereignty shapes not only individuals’ and populations’ lives but also their epistemic and political afterlives. Local practices of mourning, however, contain resistant capacities, opening alternative ways of knowing, remembering, and assembling. “Nightmare knowledges,” Islekel posits, are resistant modes of knowing tied up with grief that challenge the contemporary politics of death and those politics’ archival boundaries. Seen in mothers’ movements across the globe, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina to the Saturday Mothers of Turkey, nightmare knowledges produce counterarchives that mobilize traditionally ignored epistemic categories.

Nightmare Remains forges a new dialogue between post-Foucauldian political theory and decolonial thought and brings a fresh critical perspective to the theoretical discourse of enforced disappearances.

Paul Simpson, Coexistence: Spacings, Dis-positions, and Being-with Others – Routledge, December 2024

very expensive hardback only unfortunately

This book aims to develop an account of living together with difference which recognises the tension that we are inescapably with others – both human and non-human – but at the same time are always differing from and with those with whom we find ourselves.

A concern for coexistence and questions over how we might live together have been raised and approached from a host of conceptual starting points in recent times, including via calls for a rethinking of communism today, the articulation of forms of ‘cosmopolitics’ or ‘pluralism’, the re-figuring of understandings of ecology as dark or feminist, amongst others. This book responds to such questions of coexistence by developing what it calls a ‘co-existential analytic’. In doing so, this book introduces a range of post-phenomenological thought which offers means for thinking about such questions of living together with difference. The thought of Emanuel Levinas on the face of the other, Jean-Luc Nancy on being as being-with, Roberto Esposito on the munis, and Michel Henry on pathic auto-affection are introduced and critically reflected upon in terms of what they offer for thinking about such coexistence. Alongside these conceptual starting points, a series of encounters – with cinema, everyday life, politics, and literature – are used to animate and illustration the discussion.  Ultimately, the book argues for a ‘spacing’ of subjectivities with that world and those encountered within it.

This book is intended primarily for researchers and postgraduate students interested in questions of identity, difference, and subjectivity. It will be of interest to those in the fields of social and cultural geography, sociology, social theory, and cultural studies.

Jeremy F. Lane, Rancière’s Counter-sociology. Politics, History, Education – Palgrave, September 2024

Jacques Rancière is almost unique amongst contemporary thinkers in his consistent hostility to sociologically informed modes of interpretation. This hostility is not limited to his detailed critiques of Pierre Bourdieu—it characterises his thinking about politics, emancipation, democracy, history, aesthetics, and social class; it extends into a rejection of Marxist or marxisant modes of analysis. For Rancière’s harshest critics, this hostility to sociology reflects an interpretative negligence on his part, an intellectual, political, or moral flaw. Even his more favorable commentators typically upbraid him for failing to specify the historical conditions of possibility of democratic emancipation.

This book argues that such reactions are fundamentally mistaken and fail to grasp what is at stake in Rancière’s rejection of sociological modes of enquiry. This rejection is attributable neither to his negligence nor to some moral flaw, and nor is it merely incidental to his thought. On the contrary, Rancière understands sociology to constitute a problematic, a set of assumptions and interpretative procedures whose blind spots must be identified and thought through in order that the possibility of intellectual and political emancipation, of democracy, and of history can be thought at all. Rancière’s thought thus represents a counter-sociology and his rejection of the sociological problematic serves as the positive condition of possibility of his theory of democracy, equality, and emancipation. This new study both clarifies the nature of Rancière’s critique of the sociological problematic and shows what his counter-sociology allows him to think in the domains of politics, history, and education.

“A dialogue between Bernard Geoghegan and Jussi Parikka”

Thanks to dmf for the link.

Yuk Hui, Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking – University of Minnesota Press, October 2024

Developing a new political thought to address today’s planetary crises

What is “planetary thinking” today? Arguing that a new approach is urgently needed, Yuk Hui develops a future-oriented mode of political thought that encompasses the unprecedented global challenges we are confronting: the rise of artificial intelligence, the ecological crisis, and intensifying geopolitical conflicts. 

Machine and Sovereignty starts with three premises. The first affirms the necessity of developing a new language of coexistence that surpasses the limits of nation-states and their variations; the second recognizes that political forms, including the polis, empire, and the state, are technological phenomena, which Lewis Mumford terms “megamachines.” The third suggests that a particular political form is legitimated and rationalized by a corresponding political epistemology. The planetary thinking that this book sketches departs from the opposition between mechanism and organism, which characterized modern thought, to understand the epistemological foundations of Hegel’s political state and Schmitt’s Großraum and their particular ways of conceiving the question of sovereignty. Through this reconstruction, Hui exposes the limits of the state and reflects on a new theoretical matrix based on the interrelated concepts of biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity. 

Arguing that we are facing the limit of modernity, of the eschatological view of history, of globalization, and of the human, Hui conceives necessary new epistemological and technological frameworks for understanding and rising to the crises of our present and our future.

Nitzan Itzhak Lebovic, Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time – Cornell University Press, January 2025

thanks to John Raimo for this link

Homo Temporalis focuses on the importance of temporal concepts for four German Jewish thinkers who profoundly shaped twentieth-century intellectual history: Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. By analyzing the concept of time, Nitzan Lebovic explores Buber’s stress on the temporality of the dialogue between I and Thou; Benjamin’s now-time and “dialectics in standstill”; Arendt’s understanding of democracy as “natality” or a “permanent revolution”; and the “breathturn” that informs Celan’s poetry. Framing the reception of German Jewish thinking in the second half of the twentieth century as a parallel story to the rise of the modern humanities, Homo Temporalis also highlights how these foundational temporal concepts illuminate the causes of the present crisis in the humanities and its disciplinary limitations in the age of biopolitics and the Anthropocene.

Giorgio Agamben, Self-Portrait in the Studio – The Paris Review, August 2024

A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that might be, is always in the studio, always in its studio.

Its—but in what way do that place and practice belong to it? Isn’t the opposite true—that this form of life is at the mercy of its studio?

In the mess of papers and books, open or piled upon one another, in the disordered scene of brushes and paints, canvases leaning against the wall, the studio preserves the rough drafts of creation; it records the traces of the arduous process leading from potentiality to act, from the hand that writes to the written page, from the palette to the painting. The studio is the image of potentiality—of the writer’s potentiality to write, of the painter’s or sculptor’s potentiality to paint or sculpt. Attempting to describe one’s own studio thus means attempting to describe the modes and forms of one’s own potentiality—a task that is, at least on first glance, impossible.

How does one have a potentiality? One cannot have a potentiality; one can only inhabit it.

An excerpt from Self-Portrait in the Studio, trans. Kevin Attell – Seagull Books, October 2024

A rare autobiographical glimpse into the life and influences of one of Europe’s greatest living philosophers.

This book’s title, Self-Portrait in the Studio—a familiar iconographic subject in the history of painting—is intended to be taken literally: the book is a self-portrait, but one that comes into view for the reader only by way of patient scrutiny of the images, photographs, objects, and paintings present in the studios where the writer has worked and still works. That is to say, Giorgio Agamben’s wager is to speak of himself solely and uniquely by speaking of others: the poets, philosophers, painters, musicians, friends, passions—in short, the meetings and encounters that have shaped his life, thought, and writing, from Martin Heidegger to Elsa Morante, from Herman Melville to Walter Benjamin, from Giorgio Caproni to Giovanni Urbani. For this reason, images are an integral part of the book, images that—like those in a rebus that together form another, larger image—ultimately combine with the written text in one of the most unusual self-portraits that any writer has left of himself: not an autobiography, but a faithful and timeless auto-heterography.