Schmitt book cover

Posted on January 11, 2011 by stuartelden

Full book details here

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Book lovers

Posted on January 11, 2011 by stuartelden

Another one for the bibliophiles…

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Butler in London

Posted on January 11, 2011 by stuartelden

via crit-geog-forum

Centre for the Study of Democracy, Department of Politics & IR, University of Westminster presents:

An Encounter with Judith Butler

Friday 4th of February

Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Programme:

10.20am – 1pm: Morning round table 

Judith Butler’s contribution to contemporary ethical and political issues

chaired by Chantal Mouffe, with Isabell Lorey, Vikki Bell, Stewart Motha, Elena Loizidou

2pm – 4.30pm: Afternoon round table

Judith Butler’s contribution to gender theory

chaired by Harriet Evans, with Henrietta Moore, Mandy Merck, Leticia Sabsay, Terrell Carver 

5pm:

Public lecture by Judith Butler

“The Right to Appear. Towards an Arendtian Politics of the Street”

Followed by reception

The event is free but places are limited. To reserve a place contact: Jessica.Schmidt@my.westminster.ac.uk

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More editing

Posted on January 10, 2011 by stuartelden

Another day spent editing chapters for the Sloterdijk book, with some work on the front matter and my introductory chapter. I’ve now given initial comments on all but one of the chapters I have.

Also some minor copyediting queries for my chapter for Stephen Legg (ed.), Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos, and a little editing of my review of Leibniz’s Protogaea, which will be coming out in Society and Space.

I should also mention the exemplary work Eduardo Mendieta and Caitlin Woolsey did on the Reading Kant’s Geography index. I think that book might finally be done from our side – four and a half years after Eduardo and I dreamed up the project over a beer in Stony Brook, Long Island…

Posted in Carl Schmitt, Eduardo Mendieta, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Peter Sloterdijk | 1 Comment

Radical Foucault cfp

Posted on January 10, 2011 by stuartelden

CALL  FOR PAPERS 

Radical Foucault: A One Day Conference 

Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London (culturalstudiesresearch.org) 

The publication of Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-84 in English will be complete in April 2011 and his first Collège de France lecture course, La Volonté de Savoir will be published for the first time in February. The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London is holding a one-day conference on Friday, September 9th, 2011 which will re-assess Foucault’s contribution to radical thought and the application of his ideas to contemporary politics. What does it mean to draw on Foucault as a resource for radical politics, and how are we to understand the politics which implicitly informs his work?  

Many commentators today would seem to claim Foucault as  the theorist of a politics which eschews all utopian ambition in favour of a certain governmental pragmatism, while others would claim him for a rigorous but ultimately rather simple libertarianism: can either of these positions ever be adequate to the radicalism of Foucault’s  analyses? Does it matter?  

What is the significance of Foucault’s ideas of ‘governmentality’ and ‘biopolitics’ in understanding his later oeuvre and its implications; do either of these terms deserve to carry the weight attributed to them by some commentators? What is the ongoing relevance of Foucault’s account of disciplinarity: is, it, as Lazzarato has claimed, a historical category no longer fully applicable to contemporary forms of power?  

How can Foucauldian ideas be brought bear on the analysis of austerity politics? Is there a role for Foucault’s ideas in formulating effective resistance to the increasing erosion of civil liberties that operates both within countries and across state boundaries? Can the notion of bio-power account for contemporary forms of racism? How can Foucauldian epistemology enable an understanding of the biopolitics of contemporary scientific discourse?  

Confirmed Keynotes:

Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Geography, Durham University.

Mark Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy, Middlesex University. 

Abstracts of no more than 350 words are invited, to arrive no later than Tuesday, 1st March 2011. Subjects may include, but are not limited to: 

  • Foucauldian thought and contemporary subjectivation
  • Foucault and other thinkers
  • Governmentality and everyday life
  • Strategic discourses of war and terror
  • New technologies of the self
  • Foucault and new forms of resistance
  • Heterotopias  now and in the future
  • Foucault and the erosion of the state
  • Disciplinary society and the society of control
  • Foucault, British politics and the ‘big society’
  • Foucault, post-Fordism and post-democracy  

Email abstracts to Jeremy Gilbert (j.gilbert@uel.ac.uk) and Debra Benita Shaw (d.shaw@uel.ac.uk)

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Trevor Paglen – Invisible

Posted on January 10, 2011 by stuartelden

Trevor Paglen is one of the most interesting new voices to appear in geography recently. He received his PhD from Berkeley, where he was initially supervised by the late Allan Pred. He is also an artist. He has several books out, including most recently Invisible: Covert Operations And Classified Landscapes, which includes photographs taken during his research. Previous work looked at the CIA’s rendition flights; secret military unit patches; and the Pentagon’s dark geographies. Last year The Guardian produced a compilation of eight of the images from the Invisible book, entitled Nothing to See Here. There are a few pieces available to download from his website too.

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Berkeley talk

Posted on January 10, 2011 by stuartelden

I’ve just agreed to give a talk to Berkeley’s geography department on 14th September 2011. I may try to combine this with a talk to another US department that I didn’t get to while in Seattle – it’s a very long way to go to give a seminar…

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Michael Eldred e-book

Posted on January 10, 2011 by stuartelden

Michael Eldred, Social Ontology : Recasting Political Philosophy Through a Phenomenology of Whoness, second edition, is now available as a free e-book here.

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More Sloterdijk books

Posted on January 9, 2011 by stuartelden

In getting the link for Sloterdijk’s Sphären, I discovered that he has two more new books coming out. I’d already mentioned Die nehmende Hand und die gebende Seite, which draws on the recent pieces he wrote that so upset Axel Honneth and which came out last month. (There is also a compilation of pieces from that debate out in German). Then there is Die Großen Erzählungen – Ein Lesebuch which is billed as ‘Sloterdijk for beginners’ – an A-Z compilation of his meta-narratives. And a collection of his interviews across three decades in Lesen in den Eingeweiden des Zeitgeistes.

Even given that these are all drawn from previously published work, the man’s output is astonishing.

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Heidegger Among the Sculptors

Posted on January 9, 2011 by stuartelden

Just finished reading Andrew Mitchell, Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling. It’s an interesting read, discussing four places where Heidegger engages with sculpture and/or sculptors. This includes the best known piece ‘Art and Space’, inspired by the work of Eduardo Chillada; a piece on an Ernst Barlach exhibition; one on Bernhard Heiliger; and on Greek depictions of Athena. The book is nicely illustrated by examples of the sculptures, and has some good photographs of Heidegger, many of which I’d not seen before.

Part of the reason I read this brief book now is that I will be working on Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphären over the next couple of weeks, which Sloterdijk half-jokingly describes as Being and Space, and so I was interested in Mitchell’s book which touches on similar issues. One thing I liked about Mitchell’s book was the way that he gave generous credit to previous work on Heidegger and space – Edward Casey, Jeff Malpas, Alejandro Vallega, and my Mapping the Present included – before setting out his own interpretation, drawing on texts that these others didn’t discuss. The exception – as he notes – is that I do discuss ‘Art and Space’. In fact, I actually made a retranslation of that text as an appendix of my PhD thesis which was a first draft of Mapping the Present.

In summary: anyone interested in Heidegger and space should take a look at Mitchell’s book.

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