Very interesting collection forthcoming in October – Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, edited by Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayet – book details here.
While on this topic, Kurt Iveson has put together a really helpful reading list on the ‘right to the city’ idea – Lefebvre, Soja, Harvey et. al.
A collection of audio recordings of Foucault – in both English and French – can be found here (via Clare O’Farrell’s Foucault News blog).
Some of these have been available before, and some of the dates are wrong. The last ’11 lectures’ are actually from 1966, and are the individual tracks of 2 radio lectures taken from a cd recording. The running order is messed up too. More details on those lectures here.
I would also be surprised if ‘L’herméneutique Du Sujet Le Courage De La Vérité’ was actually from 1978.
There are also some recordings available at foucault.info.
Oliver is a PhD student at UBC, and offers some detailed and interesting reflections here.
In 2011-12 Durham University is launching a new EU-sponsored Fellowship scheme (Durham International Fellowships for Research and Enterprise – DIFeREns) that will allow it to gather together scholars, researchers, policy makers or practitioners from around the world and across the full spectrum of science, social science, arts and humanities to address themes of global significance in collaboration with Durham’s Research Institutes and researchers.
As part of the DIFeREns scheme, Durham University is now recruiting two types of Senior Fellow for 2011-12:
- Senior Research Fellowships
- Policy and Enterprise Fellowships
Up to 9 Fellowships are available in 2011-12: 5 Senior Research Fellowships and 4 Policy and Enterprise Fellowships.
More details here
Fairly interesting piece in the London Review of Books – discussing the differences between Lukács and Jameson’s Marxist accounts of the historical novel and examples such as Tolstoy, Scott, Lampedusa and Dumas.
Juan Cole’s Informed Comment is always worth reading, and this piece from his blog and reprinted on the CNN blog on the ‘Top ten myths about the Libya war’ is worth a look (the CNN link comes via Graham Harman).
The 36th International Association for Philosophy and Literature conference will be held in Tallinn, 28 May – 3 June 2012. Further details here. The theme is ‘Archeologies of the Future: Tracing Memories, Imagining Spaces’.
To be held in Prague, August 6-10 2012. Further details here (website) and here (pdf). I went to the last one of these, held every three years, in Kyoto. It was a great conference, but I particularly appreciated the hospitality and the way that the conference was split in half by a field trip with a choice of three destinations (I went to Nara). Prague should be another interesting venue.
From the Tyneside Stop the War coalition:
The tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan on October 6th 2001 is fast approaching…
…and Tyneside Stop the War is organising/supporting two events in early October
1. Wednesday 5th October – public meeting
Afghanistan and the War on Terror – Ten Years On
7pm, Herschel Building, Lecture Theatre 1
Newcastle University
SPEAKERS
Lindsey German – National Convenor, Stop the War
Professor Stuart Elden – Author, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty
Organised by Tyneside Stop the War and Newcastle geography’s Place/Space/Politics research cluster
2. Saturday 8th October
Anti-War Mass Assembly in Trafalgar Square
(SEE: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/)
Sign the pledge: I will be there…
I pledge that if British Troops are still in Afghanistan on the tenth anniversary of the invasion I will join the mass assembly in Trafalgar Square on Saturday 8 October to make it clear to the government that they must not continue this brutal and pointless war in defiance of the will of the people.
Sign here: http://www.antiwarassembly.org
In borderlands, there is an odd review of Nathan Widder, Reflections on Time and Politics. Its strangest moment is in the final lines, when the author discredits their own review by pointing to a better one elsewhere, but the attempt to police what is ‘continental’ philosophy is also peculiar. My own, very brief, ‘book note’ on Widder’s book was published in Political Studies.
Nathan Widder’s Reflections on Time and Politics is an unusual book, both in argument and design. Comprised of 18 pieces of around 10 pages each, reflections that are ‘shorter than chapters but more sustained than aphorisms’ (p. ix), it ranges widely across classical, modern and contemporary philosophy and political theory. The threads holding things together, beyond the topics of the title, come from the work of Gilles Deleuze, and thoughts on ontology. It’s a striking combination, and, especially given the breadth of engagement within the book, an ambitious one.
Widder is a careful and generous reader, and offers some penetrating thoughts on, among others, Plato and Aristotle, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Foucault. It is in the some of the final sections, when he looks at the late Foucault in terms of not simply an ethics, but a politics, that he offers the most. These reflections pick up on the argument concerning Deleuze’s notion of time, which is seen as a ‘disjunctive synthesis’, as ‘time out of joint’ (p. 8). As such temporality is discontinuous and therefore unable to provide the grounding for a stable identity. Identities might be essential to make sense, but they are always interconnected, forged in opposition to things that they otherwise rely upon. Identities may appear stable, but this masks the continual making and remaking that is going on. The link between understandings of time and politics, while often somewhat muted, becomes clearer here. If time is not understood as a sequence, as structured by movement and continuity, then political projects as a whole lack the kind of secure grounding that traditional accounts assume that they do. The problem comes from the type of politics that might be constructed in its wake.
If I was left with a feeling that the reflections contained in this book did not quite gel into something broader than intriguing, provocative and insightful thoughts, then that is as Widder intends. It is not an attempt at a broad synthesis, political manifesto or philosophical programme. Rather it puts the responsibility onto the reader, who is expected to make a lot of connections themselves. For those well versed in the theorists Widder is engaging, this is a worthwhile challenge.
