It’s been up online for some time, but this article is now finally published, and you can find the version with page numbers etc. here.
It’s strange that I wrote this as the first thing within my three-year Leverhulme major research fellowship, and it’s coming out as I come to the end – both of the time and the project. It did take me a while to send it off – I gave spoken versions of this paper many times before I felt it sat quite right – but it still feels a long time coming out.
Some interesting advice from Tim Morton here – a sequence of posts so scroll down to see more.
Peter Hallward on the protests last week – here.
I’d planned to spend time over the last week or so on the Sloterdijk Now manuscript, but a couple of chapters are delayed so that has been put back to the New Year. I’m also without internet at home which makes some other work difficult.
So instead I got ahead with a small job I’d agreed to some time back – to write the entry on ‘Space’ for the Foucault Lexicon John Naylor and Leonard Lawlor are editing for Cambridge UP.
There is a brief overview of some of Foucault’s shorter pieces on space and then a discussion of how spatial concerns run through his major works and a little on the lecture courses. Nothing massively new for me, but an opportunity to revisit some familiar themes and something of a warm-up for work I plan to do in late 2011.
Just finished doing the proofs of Reading Kant’s Geography. It’s a long book (ix + 372 pages without index), but I think it’s a good read – I feel I can be slightly objective since I co-edited it, rather than wrote it.
One thing that is sometimes missed about edited books is that they are not simply compilations of already existing work. This book exists because Eduardo and I went after people and actively encouraged them to write about this topic. Few of them had written about it before, and several said that this book gave them the reason or opportunity to tackle it. We held two workshops on the book – one in Manhattan, one in Durham – where initial versions of the chapters were presented and discussed. Most of the contributors attended one; some both. They were really positive and intellectually interesting events. It might seem unfair to single out one contributor, but learning of the Herculean labours of Werner Stark was a highlight. Werner has been working on the volumes of the Akademie edition of Kant’s work for many years, producing critical editions of Kant’s lectures on anthropology and geography from extant student transcripts.
After an introduction by me, the book comprises chapters by Michael Church, Charles W.J. Withers (setting the lectures in the context of physical and human geography, respectively), Werner Stark on editing the lectures, Olaf Reinhardt and Max Marcuzzi on translating them, Robert Louden, Holly Wilson, David Morris on their relation to Kant’s Anthropology and work on nature and teleology, Jeff Malpas and Karsten Thiel on Kant’s geography of reason more generally, Onora O’Neill on orientation in thinking, Jeffrey Edwards on acquisition of land in Kant’s legal thought, David Harvey and Edward Casey discussing his cosmopolitanism, Robert Bernasconi on race, Walter Mignolo on the ‘darker side of the Enlightenment’, and Eduardo Mendieta on sex, race and geography.
Nina Power alerted me to this story about yesterday [see also here]. This should be much higher up the news headlines. The Guardian is still leading with the royal issue, but in its live blog it now reports that:-
The police watchdog launched an independent investigation today after a 20-year-old student was left unconscious with bleeding on the brain after being hit on the head with a police truncheon.
The Liberal Democrats justify breaking their pre-election pledge by claiming that compromises have to be made in coalition. But the Liberal Democrats were never going to form an administration on their own. They therefore knew that they would not be bound by any manifesto promises or this pledge. Which raises the question of why they made it in the first place, other than that it was a likely vote winner.
Abstention is the choice of the weak, or for those to weak too chose. Legislators are elected, and paid, to decide. Yes, things are sometimes not clear, but they are supposed to weigh the legislation up, and come down on one side or the other. Abstention is a cop-out. Abstention is saying that you don’t want to approve but you don’t want to disapprove. If those who abstained yesterday had voted against the government then the majority would have been cut to near single figures.
The media coverage was unsurprising, but still disappointing. (See the BBC roundup here.) The most important story is what has happened to universities, and the protests and occupations against; not the protests in themselves, as an opportunity to talk about ‘violent Britain’. And if the protests are the focus, then it should be on something other than what happened to a royal car. [Update 12.43 – such as this and this (see also this)]
Am I the only one to find politicians’ use of the term ‘violence’ to condemn protests inappropriate given the systematic violence being done to higher education and social mobility? Or the violence of the wars initiated or supported by those doing the condemning?
Yesterday York and Durham (where I live and work) felt a long way from London. Until just a couple of months ago this would have been right on my doorstep. Some good photos here. Some more and analysis here. Quite a difference to the BBC gallery here.
The NUS, the UCU, and Universities UK have not come out of this with any credit.
Audio files of lectures on Foucault’s 82-83 course on The Government of Self and Others are available here. This was a workshop at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, now at Kingston, on 2nd December 2010.
