A couple of links of interest that both relate to academic publishing and the modern university
Ian Bogost on Rice University Press being closed down and on the different printing models in publishing here (via Graham at OOP).
Stanley Fish arguing that plagiarism is not a moral, but a professional, issue; and then replying to his critics.
In The Shorter Leibniz Texts, edited by Lloyd Strickland, there are a few interesting excerpts from Leibniz’s writings on fossils. (See also Strickland’s translations of Leibniz site here.) Some of these come from the Protegaea, which was published in a bi-lingual edition a couple of years ago and is forthcoming in paperback.
The Protegaea was intended as the preface to his never finished history of the house of Brunswick. It’s an account of the pre-history of the earth. Leibniz changed his mind on fossils, initially suggesting that they were the product of earth processes – ‘tricks of nature’ – before conceding they were the remains of plants and animals.
One of the chapters in my planned next-but-one book – The Space of the World – will probably be entitled ‘fossils’. The idea is that it allows me to look at how fossils challenged older and Biblical accounts of the age of the world, but also because it will provide a way of looking at the claims of Quentin Meillassoux about arche-fossils, and the human-world issue. So, religion and relation, and a reason to return to Leibniz.
Michael Hardt reviews Foucault’s 82-83 and 83-84 lecture courses – Le gouvernement de soi et des autres and Le courage de la vérité – in the latest New Left Review.
Find it here – subscribers only.
Most of the first half of the review could have been written years ago, and doesn’t really say anything about the books. The second half does say some things but they are fairly general. The most intriguing part of the discussion is Hardt’s attempt to read a politics into Foucault’s last concerns:
The trajectory of the courses is thus incomplete; but through his analyses of these three periods Foucault already indicates the outlines of a powerful political project. In briefest summary one might say that the first passage—away from the democratic Athenian political terrain of the government of others to the Socratic paradigm of the care of the self—allows him to focus on life as the centre of transformation. Through a second passage, and with the aid of the Cynics, he brings this back to the field of politics as a militant, transformational life: from Pericles the virtuous orator, speaking the truth in public, to Socrates, the wise advocate of self-knowledge; and finally to Diogenes, the militant striving to create a new life that changes the world.
In Matthew Stewart’s very good account of Leibniz and Spinoza, The Courtier and the Heretic (Yale UP, 2005), there is a note in the bibliography that
The standard, reference edition of Leibniz’s collected works is that of the Berlin Akademie. The Akademie is expected to require another century or so to complete its edition, however, so the researcher must rely on a number of other editions of Leibniz’s work.
Now that additional century needs to be seen from the date that edition begun, which was in 1923! Now Leibniz does present a huge number of problems – he wrote on just about every topic imaginable, he wrote in Latin, French and German, and there is an estimate of “150,000 sheets in the archives in Hanover” (Stewart, p. 13). But even so…
Leibniz isn’t especially well-served in English translations either. There are several collections of philosophical writings (Loemker; Wiener; Ariew & Garber; Woolhouse & Francks; Strickland) but lots of overlap between them; the Political Writings which is very limited; and some individual works (Theodicy; the New Essays on Human Understanding), but a huge amount not translated. There is a new Yale UP series of bi-lingual editions, but that’s been going almost twenty years and not produced many volumes.
It got me thinking about the incomplete editions of different thinkers that I’ve worked with in the past. There were several editions of Nietzsche that were never completed (for financial, editorial and/or political reasons) until the Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke and Kritische Studienausgabe dealt with that, but it took many years to complete. There is no complete English translation. The Stanford series seems to have stalled after three volumes, with the last 11 years ago; Cambridge have translations of a number of works, as do Penguin and other publishers, but Hollingdale and Kaufmann translations are still the only ones for some works. Cambridge’s Writings from the Later Notebooks hasn’t yet replaced The Will to Power. Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe is still ongoing, but it isn’t close to being a critical edition. Theodore Kisiel was especially damning of it in the early days. Foucault has been well-served in French with the Dits et écrits collection of the shorter writings, but the English Essential Works was poorly done, with several texts reprinted from earlier collections (without ever quite replacing any of them) and many important texts missing. Complications with Lefebvre’s estate has produced problems with any new French editions of long out-of-print texts – after a flurry in the late 90s and early 2000s. (Some of his works are extremely difficult to find – some ended up on Nazi bonfires after the 1940 invasion, and some were censored by the PCF.) There is a new multi-volume of Eugen Fink’s writings in progress, but the volumes are extremely expensive. Much of his earlier work is out of print, and little is in English. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation is projected to be fifteen volumes in total, and will include all of the writings published in Kant’s lifetime, along with some of the unpublished lectures, correspondence and notes, but isn’t yet complete – the Natural Science volume, which will include the first English translation of the Physical Geography (albeit in the problematic Rink edition), is long delayed. The Kant Akademie Ausgabe isn’t finished either – though the stories Werner Stark has told about what was required for the editions of the Anthropologie and Geographie lectures give a good indication of the enormous work involved.
In part these thoughts are produced by a frustration out of how to reference works. If you reference simply to the volume and page number of the edition you use, then someone following up your references has to find the same edition to check it. If there is a standard way to reference – as there is, for example, with Plato and Aristotle – then any (decent) edition will do. Some works, especially classical texts, can be easily referenced by book, chapter, section, etc. Marginal pagination, to some agreed earlier edition, in translations or new editions can certainly help, but it can be frustrating. To take one example, Kant’s works (with the exception of the Critique of Pure Reason with the A/B pagination) are now frequently referenced to the Gesammelte Schriften in the Akademie Ausgabe by volume and page, and indeed the new Cambridge Kant translations have these in the margins. But because the Cambridge edition is thematically ordered in a different way to the AA (which is partly chronological), unless you know which volume of the Cambridge to go to you are seriously inconvenienced. As it stands, the Cambridge translations don’t even have volume numbers. So a concordance is needed, but could have easily been provided in the texts.
The examples could be multiplied. I haven’t even mentioned medieval writers…
This needed to be done – photos of other things the same distance from the ‘Ground Zero’ site. The commentary below is almost unnecessary, but sadly needed to be said. Thanks to Nathan for alerting me to this.
Update 10pm – see also some of the comments here, which also has a map with the sites on it.
An interesting looking conference – “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods”, March 11-2 2011, George Washington University.
Jane Bennett is the keynote. Details here.
A bit more detail on talks in the autumn here. The programme of the Nijmegen Humboldt lectures is here; and the Radical Philosophy Association draft conference programme is here.
Scu at Critical Animal asks about shelving books. It reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s piece on unpacking his library, which is in Illuminations. I’ve now got so many books that if I don’t organise them I can never find anything.
I have books in two places – my home office and my work office. (The relatively few books I’ve got in the rented flat in London at the moment don’t count.)
At home – three walls are shelved. One wall is Kant/Hegel/Marx/Nietzsche/Husserl/Heidegger/Fink. Heidegger takes up the vast majority of that – the Gesamtausgabe plus nearly all the translations plus loads of secondary literature.
Another wall is Lefebvre and Foucault. Again lots of both – there are only three of Lefebvre’s books that I don’t own, which took a lot of hunting down; plus all of Foucault in French and English. And all of Axelos. The rest of that wall is cds and dictionaries.
The final wall is novels, plus a few books on cricket, music and art.
At work, a big section on 20th and 21st century theory, filed alphabetically. This includes historians and geographers when I have more than one of their books.
Another section on geography, which includes loads of textbooks, companions etc.
Politics (mainly British domestic), including textbooks. A lot of this is a legacy of previous teaching. And lots of history books. (This section is a mess and needs a better system)
History of political theory and philosophy. This is the fastest growing, given recent research interests. It includes all the Latin and Greek works of historians, poets, etc that I have.
War on terror, contemporary international relations, etc. – a large number of books that I bought while working on Terror and Territory.
Journals.
Recently acquired books, library books, and other things I need to use.
And finally, a shelf for the books I’ve written, edited, contributed to, and journals I have a piece in.
Over the years the journal has run a number of interviews with prominent theorists and philosophers. Some of these include Anthony Giddens, Raymond Williams, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Said, Alain Badiou, Michael Goodchild (1999 and 2009), and John Urry. There have also been dialogues between Donna Harroway and David Harvey, and Naomi Klein and Neil Smith.
(The links are generally open only to subscribers, but the Klein and Smith is open access, along with a few other highlight papers, including ones by Sloterdijk and Butler, here.)
The journal I edit, Society and Space, is in its 28th volume. It’s published a very large number of papers in that time. I previously gave some figures about this. I’m now beginning to create a long list of papers to go into a compilation volume – there will be about 20 in the final volume. Going through all the back issues is very interesting – although I knew these pretty well there are still a number of surprises. It’s fascinating to trace the ebb and flow of intellectual debates within geography and related fields through the pieces that appeared in the journal – topics of concern and types of approach come and go over time. Someone writing an intellectual history of gentrification debates, actor-network theory, critical geopolitics, the reception of Foucault in geography, performativity, the scale debate, or non-representational theory, to take just a few examples, would find lots of interest.
