Progressive Geographies

Brook Ziporyn, Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond – University of Chicago Press, October 2024

A new approach to the theism-scientism divide rooted in a deeper form of atheism.

 Western philosophy is stuck in an irresolvable conflict between two approaches to the spiritual malaise of our times: either we need more God (the “turn to religion”) or less religion (the New Atheism). In this book, Brook Ziporyn proposes an alternative that avoids both totalizing theomania and atomizing reductionism. What we need, he argues, is a deeper, more thoroughgoing, even religious rejection of God: an affirmative atheism without either a creator to provide meaning or finite creatures in need of it—a mystical atheism.

In the legacies of Daoism and Buddhism as well as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille, Ziporyn discovers a critique of theism that develops into a new, positive sensibility—at once deeply atheist and richly religious. Experiments in Mystical Atheism argues that these “godless epiphanies” hold the key to renewing philosophy today.

Foucault Studies 36: Special Issue – Foucault’s Legacy in Contemporary Thinking: Forty Years Later (1984-2024)

The issue is edited by Valentina Antoniol and Stefano Marino – all open access and able to download either individual essays or the issue as a whole.

Tuomo Tiisala, Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons: Elaborating Foucault’s Pragmatism – Routledge, July 2024 (open access)

Update: Colin Koopman reviews it at NDPR

This book argues that the received view of the distinction between freedom and power must be rejected because it rests on an untenable account of the discursive cognition that endows individuals with the capacity for autonomy and self-governed rationality.  

In liberal and Kantian approaches alike, the autonomous subject is a self-standing starting point whose freedom is constrained by relations of power only contingently because they are external to the subject’s constitution. Thus, the received view defines the distinction between freedom and power as a dichotomy. Michel Foucault is arguably the most important critic of that dichotomy. However, it is widely agreed that Foucault falls short of justifying the alternative view he develops, where power and freedom are essentially entangled instead. The book fills out the gap by investigating the social preconditions of discursive cognition. Drawing on pragmatist-inferentialist resources from the philosophy of language (Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), it presents a new interpretation of Foucault’s philosophy that is unified by his overlooked idea of “the archaeology of knowledge.” As a result, the book not only explains why and how power and freedom must be entangled but also what it means ethically to pursue and gain autonomy with respect to one’s own understanding. 

Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, critical theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.

Shaina Potts, Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the Expansion of American Empire – Duke University Press, September 2024

Introduction open access at this link

In Judicial Territory, Shaina Potts reveals how the American empire has benefited from the post-World War II expansion of United States judicial authority over the economic decisions of postcolonial governments. Introducing the term “judicial territory” to refer to the increasingly transnational space over which US courts wield authority, Potts argues that law is an essential tool for US geopolitical and economic interests. Through close examination of cases involving private US companies, on the one hand, and foreign state-owned enterprises, nationalizations, and sovereign debt, on the other, she shows that technical changes relating to the treatment of foreign sovereigns in domestic US law allowed the United States to extend its purview over global financial and economic relations, including many economic decisions of foreign governments. Throughout, Potts argues, US law has not become divorced from territoriality but instead actively remapped it; it has not merely responded to globalization, but actively produced it—making the whole world part of US economic space in the process.

Manon Mathias, Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine – Routledge, April 2024

Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine offers a new way of conceptualizing food in literature: not as social or cultural symbol but as an agent within a network of relationships between body and mind and between humans and environment. By analysing gastrointestinal health in medical, literary, and philosophical texts, this volume rethinks the intersections between literature and health in the nineteenth century and triggers new debates about France’s relationship with food. Of relevance to scholars of literature and to historians and sociologists of science, food, and medicine, it will provide ideal reading for students of French Literature and Culture, History, Cultural Studies, and History of Science and Medicine, Literature and Science, Food Studies, and the Medical Humanities. Readers will be introduced to new ways of approaching digestion in this period and will gain appreciation of the powerful resources offered by nineteenth-century French writing in understanding the nature of connections between gut, mind, and environment and the impact of these connections on our status as human beings.

Luke O’Sullivan, Categories: A Study of a Concept in Western Philosophy and Political Thought – Edinburgh University Press, July 2024

Just an expensive hardback and e-book at the moment.

Establishes an enduring relationship between theories of categories and ideas about knowledge, politics, and history

• Explores the concept of a category and contemporary debates on category politics, category mistakes and the imperialism of categories
• Shows how the ideas of classic thinkers on categories, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, have informed three distinct modern schools of thought on the subject including thinkers in both analytical and continental traditions
• Explains modern thought on categories as a tension between a desire for a single dominant perspective, whether scientific (as in logical empiricism) or phenomenological (as in Heidegger), and a belief in irretrievable fragmentation (as in Nietzsche and later post-modern thought), with a minority of thinkers (like Cassirer and Ricoeur) trying to find a middle ground
• Addresses debates on categories in wide range of different fields in the humanities including the history of philosophy, political philosophy, critical theory, phenomenology, and the philosophy of history

In ancient and modern Western thought, the problem of the nature of categories has been inseparable from arguments about the nature of selfhood; about how knowledge is organised; about how power should be distributed; and about how history should be understood. For Plato, Forms belonging to a timeless order of being played the role of categories or fundamental concepts; for Aristotle categories were immanent in things; for Kant they were a priori logical structures of our consciousness; and for Hegel they were dynamic, dialectical inter-related ideas. In Categories, O’Sullivan shows how these answers have gone forward into the contemporary era, and identifies three key schools of thought that have developed since Hegel in particular. He explains modern thought as a tension between a desire for a single dominant perspective, whether scientific or phenomenological; a belief in irretrievable fragmentation; and an effort to find a middle ground.

Maan Barua, Plantation Worlds – Duke University Press, August 2024

The Introduction is open access at this link

In Plantation Worlds, Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region’s landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the Global South, Barua offers an alternative grammar for articulating environmental change. In so doing, he prompts a rethinking of multispecies ecologies and how they are structured by colonialism and race.