There is lots of stuff of Foucault on Youtube, but I’d not seen this before.
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=2490966830447709021&hl=en&fs=true
It’s Foucault at l’Université Catholique de Louvain in 1981, at the time he gave the “Mal faire, dire vrai” lectures. Many thanks to Clare at Foucault News for the alert.
It led me to this documentary on Heidegger – in German, with French subtitles
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1967292671839979823&hl=en&fs=true
Another day with the Sloterdijk book. Comments on the last of the chapters in first draft, plus comments on two chapters that came back from the authors after first revisions.
There is lots of fiddly editorial stuff – sorting out and standardising references, advising on translation of key terms, checking things, trying to make the chapters flow so that this isn’t just a collection of papers but a proper book. Nietzsche’s Kritische Studienausgabe came off the shelf for the first time in several years to check a few things – I haven’t worked on Nietzsche in a long time, but he was very important in the early years of my PhD.
Paul Ennis with news of his book
So I just received an email from Zero that Continental Realism is off to the printers. I think those who have read it so far seemed to have enjoyed it and I did manage to secure two endorsements that should give readers some idea of what to expect:
‘Paul J. Ennis has given us the first general overview of the theses of After Finitude, and of their reception in the Anglo-American philosophical field. The theses in question – speculative and correlationist – are here exposed with clarity and fidelity. An indispensable introduction to speculative realism.’
– Quentin Meillassoux, Le Département de philosophie, École normale supérieure‘In its brief compass Ennis’s book gives a lively, sympathetic though critical account of a newly emergent movement of thought – speculative realism – that looks set to transform received ideas of what counts as “continental” philosophy.’
– Christopher Norris, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff UniversityAll that is left now is the cover and so I imagine that the book might be released around March just in time for my viva. From then on I’ll finally be in a position to defend something recognizable as my own stance.
Those are great endorsements. But Paul has really been impressive – I can’t think of any other PhD students who have written a book, edited one (Post-Continental Voices), and founded a journal (Speculations) before their viva…
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
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…
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)
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.
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…
