‘Assessing Ten Years of the War on Terror’

Posted on July 5, 2011 by stuartelden

I’ve just agreed to be one of the speakers at an event entitled ‘Assessing Ten Years of the War on Terror”, organised by the Tyneside Stop-the-War Coalition and the Newcastle University Place/Space/Politics research cluster.

Of course, one of the themes of my Terror and Territory was to challenge any straight-forward ‘beginning’ to the ‘war on terror’. I’ll probably say a few words about that, and then look at events in the past few years – especially in Georgia, Pakistan, Yemen and Libya. I well know that some, particularly in US and UK administrations, would not want to have these places associated with Iraq and Afghanistan, but I’m interested in the logics of intervention and wider questions of the sovereignty/territory relation, and then the links become more evident.

It will be held in Newcastle on 5 October 2011, 7-9pm.

Posted in Conferences, Politics, Terror and Territory | Leave a comment

A few more free downloads

Posted on July 5, 2011 by stuartelden

I’ve updated the Free Downloads page. This now includes all the pieces I’m aware of that are available online without subscription, plus links to the audio and video I know about.

Posted in My Publications | 2 Comments

Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

Posted on July 5, 2011 by stuartelden

In working on my lecture on Foucault’s 1970-71 course I have been rereading some related texts, including the “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” essay. I know this text well, as I’ve taught it and it was a fundamental text in my PhD thesis, which was on Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault (and was reworked into Mapping the Present).

The final lines particularly struck me in relation to the newly available course. This is where Foucault is suggesting that the three modalities of history in Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation are reworked within genealogy. The key one, for me, is the third. The translation in the Aesthetics volume of the ‘Essential Works’ (itself a modification of the earlier translation in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice) reads:

The critique of the injustices of the past by a truth held by men in the present becomes the destruction of the man who maintains knowledge [connaissance] by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge.

My standard practice is to check all quotes to the original language. That reads:

La critique des injustices du passé par la vérité que l’homme détient aujourd’hui devient destruction du sujet de connaissance par l’injustice propre à la volonté de savoir.

I’m not convinced that’s very good. It is a bit clunky in the summary of the 1874 notion;  but it gets downright misleading in the understanding of genealogy. Sujet is translated as man; ‘maintains’ appears for nowhere to make sense of that choice, when sujet de connaissance has a very different meaning; and propre is something of a false-friend in this context. Here’s another attempt (comments welcome).

The critique of past injustices by the truth held by man today becomes the destruction of the subject of connaisssance by the injustice specific to the will to knowledge.

The last phrase, forming both the 1970-71 course title and the title of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, is itself complicated. Depending on context it also means ‘the will to know’, and Foucault clearly means both senses to be in play.

[Update: Clare O’Farrell has kindly posted this retranslation and comments to her Foucault site]

Posted in Friedrich Nietzsche, Mapping the Present, Michel Foucault | 3 Comments

Foucault’s History of Sexuality

Posted on July 5, 2011 by stuartelden

I’ve been planning another book on Foucault for many years. The idea is to write a history of the ‘History of Sexuality’ – tracing the emergence of the project, the original plan, and the various revisions before it was left incomplete at Foucault’s death. I’ve published a number of pieces over the past decade that will be utilised in this planned book, beginning with a review essay of Les Anormaux and continuing through pieces on most of the other lecture courses and some on his collaborative projects of the mid 1970s. Recently, and somewhat to my surprise, I’ve been looking at the materials again with a view to working on this book alongside the planned one on The Space of the World. All the chapters will be new, though a few will utilise previously published material in reworked, updated and developed form.

In 2005 I published a piece entitled ‘The Problem of Confession’, freely available here. which had a lot of discussion of the different plans and the issues that revolved around them. That piece had a summary table of the plans, the lecture courses and related material. I’ve updated the table in the light of new publications and information. It’s in a pdf here; or click on the image below for a larger version (updated 2013). It might be useful to others.

History of Sexuality table 2013

 

Posted in Michel Foucault | 4 Comments

Terror and Territory Review Symposium

Posted on July 4, 2011 by stuartelden

The latest issue of the new journal Dialogues in Human Geography has a review symposium on my Terror and Territory. It comprises the papers initially given at an ‘Author meets Critics’ session at the Association of American Geographers conference in Washington, D.C, last year, along with a response by me and a brief introduction by Barney Warf. The commentators are Katharyne Mitchell, Adam Ramadan, Michael D. Smith and Gunnar Olsson. Thanks to them all, and Christian Abrahamsson who organised it. The best line is by Gunnar:

To the claim that war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, I now retort that Terror and Territory is Stuart Elden’s way of telling God that his tricks have been stripped bare, that his secret machinations are no secrets any more.

Posted in My Publications, Terror and Territory | 1 Comment

Radical Philosophy new website

Posted on July 1, 2011 by stuartelden

Radical Philosophy has a new website. Almost forty years of content has been digitised and is available to subscribers, and unlike most academic journals it’s affordable – £24 a year for six issues. In addition, the message I was sent said:

Non-subscribing readers will enjoy free access all the commentaries, obituaries, conference and news reports, plus highlights from back issues and new access to hundreds of items from the expanded archive. A new feature of the website will also allow non-subscribers to purchase and download pdfs of individual items from the archive at an affordable price of £3 for any article or interview and £2 for the reviews sections from recent issues.

Posted in Publishing | Leave a comment

Reading Kant’s Geography

Posted on June 30, 2011 by stuartelden

The editor copies have arrived. Been receiving some nice messages from contributors as their own copies make it across the world… Publisher site here – one for libraries in the first instance.

Posted in Eduardo Mendieta, Immanuel Kant, My Publications | Leave a comment

theory@buffalo theme issue on Territory and reviews of Terror and Territory

Posted on June 29, 2011 by stuartelden

The journal theory@buffalo has a new issue on ‘Territories of Thought’. Interesting mix of papers on the theme, including papers on Heidegger, Plato and the animal. It includes a very careful and generous review essay of my Terror and Territory by Guy Witzel. The original call for the issue is here and it gives a good sense of what the aim was. You can find more about the journal here, though the site is rather out-of-date.

There is also a nice review of my book in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Vol XXII No II, pp. 77-78 by Mejgan Massoumi.

An in-depth analysis of the war on terror through a genealogy of territory as well as its connections to sovereignty, violence and power. As the title might indicate, the term ‘territory’ is much more complicated than it seems; and certainly after reading this book, Elden will convince you of it…

The relationship between territory and sovereignty is the real challenge of this book – and what makes Elden’s analysis particularly compelling…

Overall, Elden’s book deserves wide and careful reading. It will appeal to geographers, historians and political theorists… an important and timely book, making a strong case for the presence of territory as a continuing theme in global politics.

 

Posted in Territory, Terror and Territory | Leave a comment

Reading Foucault in Nigeria

Posted on June 29, 2011 by stuartelden

The key work I did in Nigeria, aside from editing Society and Space, was on Foucault. This is for two, interrelated, projects. The first is to to write a chapter for the book coming out of The Foucault Effect 1991-2011 conference. My discussant comments were not intended to be the basis for a published paper, so instead I’ll be writing a piece on how Foucault contributes to the project of writing a history of the concept of territory, of which The Birth of Territory is the key output. I used this as an opportunity to work through the Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics lectures again. The intention is to discuss Foucault in two registers – first, how his explicit comments on territory are often misleading, which I will illustrate drawing upon the work I’ve conducted myself; but also how he is indispensible to such a project in terms of approach and in related questions. I did something not entirely dissimilar in my essay ‘Governmentality, Calculation, Territory’ which was published in 2007 and based on papers delivered in early 2005, using the French texts. The chapter will be a new text, but there will inevitably be some relation. This was my first time reading the English translations, so there will be some changes on the basis of that, as well more substantial ones on the basis of the much more detailed reading I have of the history of the tradition on the basis of writing The Birth of Territory. The second register will hopefully treat the relation between different approaches to writing the history of thought, of which Quentin Skinner, Reinhart Koselleck and Foucault will be key figures.

The second project was for my lecture to the Radical Foucault conference in September. So I worked through Leçons sur la volonté de savoir in detail (see my earlier notes on a fast, first reading here), and took extensive notes. I’m now reshaping these into a lecture. After some opening remarks on the text, how this complicates Foucault’s chronology, and the structure of the course, I’ll be talking about how power emerges as a theme in these lectures, out of the knowledge/truth/power relation, through the engagement with Nietzsche, and the reading of the Greeks. The last is the one I’m most interested in, especially in terms of juridical and political practice.

Posted in Conferences, Michel Foucault, Quentin Skinnner, Reinhart Koselleck, The Birth of Territory | 3 Comments

Sloterdijk Now copyediting done

Posted on June 29, 2011 by stuartelden

That was easy – refreshing to have a copyeditor who doesn’t take it upon themselves to rewrite the book. I’ve said it before, but Polity have been excellent to work with. Still on progress for a late 2011 publication, though with a 2012 date.

Posted in Peter Sloterdijk, Publishing | Leave a comment