Newsnight’s Paul Mason offers some generalisations on the recent global unrest here.
He stresses the importance of social media, the decline of ideologies, the role of women, the importance of memes, and so on. Mentions Foucault, Chomsky, Hardt and Negri, and Deleuze briefly. He says that it was generated for a discussion on Newsnight that didn’t take place. Would make for the beginning of an interesting seminar though…
In 1977, shortly after the first volume of The History of Sexuality came out, Foucault published an essay entitled ‘The Lives of Infamous Men’. It was supposed to be the introduction to a book, or series of books, but it never quite worked out like that. In the 2009 collection Archives de l’infamie it is described as a “parenthesis that was opened, but never closed” (p. 34).
Archives de l’infamie takes material that was previously an exhibition (flyer here; website here), and includes Foucault’s own essay. It is authored by the ‘Collective Maurice Florence’, which includes Philippe Artières and Judith Revel. The contextualising essay aside, I found this a little disappointing, but it did get me thinking about Foucault’s project again. If we look at the books he devoted to the stories of Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin, or the study he and Arlette Farge produced entitled Le désordre des familles (surely a contender for Foucault’s least known book), it’s clear that Foucault didn’t really abandon this work. The Rivière book predates the essay, but is clearly part of the same motivation of taking obscure stories from archives for what they show of uses of power and systems of knowledge. There are some examples in some of the lecture courses too – for instance in The Abnormals. Foucault described the idea of an ‘anthology of existences’. Farge continued the project with her own book Fragile Lives.
When I return to Foucault for the planned book on his History of Sexuality project, these stories and Foucault and his colleagues’ analyses of them will form a small but important part.
The Birth of Territory book project now has a separate page, in the bar above, or here. There’s an updated table of contents; links to the posts I wrote while redrafting the chapters; links to video and audio; and the pieces that have been published in different form as journal articles.
I’ve agreed to give a few more talks. On March 11th, the day after I speak at the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, I will head across town to the Law Faculty at University of New South Wales, as part of this new project on Public Law and Legal Theory. This too will be on The Birth of Territory.
While at ANU, I’ll be giving a couple of talks. The new one in the diary is on March 29th to their ‘work in progress’ seminar. So that will be about where I’m then at with ‘The Space of the World’ project. The working title for the talk is ‘Fossils’. There will also be one on 28th April, on the project more generally.
I return to the UK in late May, and a few days later there are tentative plans for an event in London to discuss William Connolly’s A World of Becoming, with a range of commentators and Bill responding. Nathan Widder is organising this, and I was pleased to be asked, especially given the relation to my own work on ‘world’. More details when it’s fixed up.
I’ll then be back in London for England vs Sri Lanka at Lord’s, but head over to the Cambridge University Geographical Society on June 6th. That will probably be about territory in some form – not sure the format or exact topic as yet.
As ever, full details of talks etc. are here.
A student offers their considered opinion of Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) at amazon.com
I had to purchase this material for a class which was extremely boring but somewhat thought provoking in the end it wasn’t worth the money or the class time so much more could’ve come out of the this piece. I would rather sell this book back to amazon.com if I can
Even though he is no longer in Egypt, Graham Harman’s blog is a good source of up-to-date information, both from media sources and personal contacts. Particularly moving is the category of links to photographs of those who have died. As ever the mere enumeration of body counts cannot do them justice, and arguably does further violence. Juan Cole is a great source of information and links too. This recent post is very helpful. Chomsky weighs in here.
(thanks to Kanishka for the link)
Thanks to Nina Power for the link – an interesting piece by Jody McIntyre in the New Statesman. Jody was the man pulled from his wheelchair by police in the student fees protests in London late last year, who was then interviewed by the BBC in a way that provoked widespread anger (interview and other links here).
Interesting looking new book from Columbia UP with a very impressive contributor list – Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Žižek (via the Continental Philosophy blog).
“Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?”
In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Rancière highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it.
Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate.
Vol 29 No 1 of Society and Space is now available – here
It includes five papers on counterterror culture – films, novels, internet discussions – and papers on a range of other topics including animal research, urban planning in China, geographies of discard, and one by Nigel Thrift on lifeworlds. It also has news of an award the publisher, Pion, has received from the Association of American Geographers. Here’s the bit on Society and Space:
Environment and Planning Series D: Society and Space was to be the journal of social theory in geography. Very quickly it became clear that it was not only geographers that were interested in issues of space and social theory – a whole raft of social sciences and humanities were keen to join the conversation too. Environment and Planning Series D has become a pre-eminent site for interdisciplinary discussions around space and theory and involving among others philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and cultural and science-studies theorists.
