Month: November 2015

One-day Workshop on Fanon and Philosophy from CREMP

The event was held 20th of November (h/t DMF)

This workshop will explore this issue by returning to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, highlighting its debt to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and emphasising Fanon’s search for an affirmative anti-colonial philosophy and politics.Speakers:    John Narayan (University of Warwick)    Matthieu Renault (University of Paris 8)    Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths, London)    Howard Caygill (CRMEP)    Lucie Mercier (CRMEP)    Peter Hallward (CRMEP)

Source: One-day Workshop on Fanon and Philosophy | Backdoor Broadcasting Company

My review of Jean-Luc Nancy and Adèle Van Reeth’s La jouissance at Symposium’s Open Site

A summary:

Broken into five chapters, La jouissance is a set of interviews with Jean-Luc Nancy around the tricky title word and the meaning of pleasure today and in Western history. At times ribald, at others highly academic, this book should be important to scholars of Nancy and contemporary Continental theory who will not just find extended discussions of the topic of jouissance, but also on Platonism, différance, Lacan, Spinoza, the feminine, community, the history of Christianity, and other important topics in Nancy’s work. For those beginning with Nancy, no discussion is too difficult and it’s carried along, no way around the pun, by a sexy topic. The interviewer is amiable and presses just the right questions—those that the reader will be thinking about, given Nancy’s previous answers. But more importantly, jouissance is revealed—in retrospect it is obvious—as a key term in Nancy’s oeuvre.

Source: Jean-Luc Nancy and Adèle Van Reeth. La jouissance » CSCP / SCPC

Society and Space Volume 33 Issue 6 now online | Society and space

Here are the contents of volume 33, issue 6, which can be accessed by subscription:

Spatial big data and anxieties of control Agnieszka Leszczynski 965-984
The affect of Jugaad: Frugal innovation and postcolonial practice in India’s mobile phone ecologyAmit S Rai 985-1002
Between the metropole and the postcolony: On the dynamics of rights’ machinery from the northwestern tribal belt to the “mainland” Pakistan Muhammad Ali Nasir 1003-1021
Capitalist pigs: Governmentality, subjectivities, and the regulation of pig farming in colonial Hong Kong, 1950-1970 Kin Wing Chang and Byron Miller 1022-1042
Imagining society: Logics of visualization in images of immigrant integration Sanne Boersma and Willem Schinkel 1043-1062
Terminal experimentation: The transformation of experiences, events and escapes at global airportsAnthony Elliott and David Radford 1063-1079
Markets, bodies, and rhythms: A rhythmanalysis of financial markets from open-outcry trading to high-frequency trading Christian Borch, Kristian Bondo Hansen, and Ann-Christina Lange 1080-1097
Animal performativity: Exploring the lives of donkeys in Botswana Martha Geiger and Alice J Hovorka 1098-1117
Opposing the opposition? Binarity and complexity in political resistance Leonie Ansems de Vries and Doerthe Rosenow 1118-1134
Anxiety and phantasy in the field: The position of the unconscious in ethnographic research Jesse Proudfoot 1135-1152

Review of Peter Sloterdijk’s Der Ästhetische Imperativ – Schriften zur Kunst

At Theory Culture and Society (open access). Here is part of what is in that volume:

In order to talk about the future of art after the ‘end of art’, i.e. towards it and from within it, Sloterdijk deems it necessary to firstly talk about the future of the future. It is a question of the ‘world system’ of credit, based on virtualised spaces.,where every ‘reasonable’ person acts ‘as if’ s/he obeyed the “categorical imperative of a Kantian enlightened by a stock market report: act in a way that the maxim of your borrowing could at any time serve as principle of a universal law of the apocalypse” (457). In this highly individualised system, imaginary temporal commonalities have broken into pieces and the only common denominator might be that we are living in a historico-philosophically defined ‘risk society’ (460). However, every synchronisation also creates a-synchronisation – as such, this ‘global’ risk society in turn also already in- and excludes phenomena which are withdrawing from it and in this way create their own different temporalities, i.e. different forms of living.

Marx and Foucault

This has been up at Viewpoint Magazine for a couple of weeks, which is Pierre Macherey on Foucault’s relation to Marx. This is a perennial discussion, but one better answered than before given the publication of The Punitive Society, which I’m teaching right now. (Yes it was just published but the students happily agreed for a course correction from the previously assigned Lectures on the Will to Know.) First off, the translation is excellent and the numerous helpful footnotes by Graham Burchell feel like academic cheating: I don’t have to search for cross references to where Foucault has discussed this or that concept since he invariably provides it. And Bernard Harcourt’s afterward is likely to be quoted in any student papers at the end of the semester–clear while marking the text out in terms of the complex web of relations to other texts by Foucault. Second, it’s remarkable how far Foucault goes in attempting a detente of sorts with Marxists in the audience; when he critiques Marx’s view of labor–or rather, says that it’s a posteriori to the docile bodies necessary for the rising bourgeoisie and for the punitive society (prisons, hospitals, etc.; i.e., Foucault uses punitive as equal to disciplinary power here)–he refers to Marx in terms of “post-Hegelians philosophers.” This is far different from later, more jabbing references.

In any case, it’s great to work through the text with an excellent set of students–a couple of new PhDs here are really digging into it–after giving it a more quick read last year. What’s particularly interesting about the lectures is that one can see better than in his published Surveiller and Punir (1975) where he makes certain choices of reading the archive in terms of the late 18th century rise of punition, as well as some choices that are just puzzling to me, for example, that only with punition or discipline did morality enter into the penal system, counterexamples of which are, I would think, in the entire Western tradition, so perhaps it’s about looking at what he precisely means by morality (though it seems to be the general usage given the claim that if one wants to know morality, forget Kant and study the rise of the police). There’s much more to say; I’ll have a review out soon (at the LARB) going through more details. But quickly if one wants to get Foucault setting out why he thinks exclusion and otherness are too vague for analysis (against so many before and after him), why transgression is a facile political tool, why he uses civil war not class war, and so on through a host of topics, this is a rich and rewarding set of lectures. (And hands-down more interesting if you’re bored once more teaching well-worn passages in Discipline and Punish.)