Textures of the Anthropocene: New four-volume set from MIT Press

Posted on March 7, 2015 by

stuartelden:

This looks very interesting.

Originally posted on the anthropo.scene:

Details of a new set of works on the Anthropocene are here.

This is a description from the MIT Press site:9780262527415_1

We have entered the Anthropocene era—a geological age of our own making, in which what we have understood to be nature is made by man. We need a new way to understand the dynamics of a new epoch. These volumes offer writings that approach the Anthropocene through the perspectives of grain, vapor, and ray—the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. The first three volumes—each devoted to one of the three textures—offer a series of paired texts, with contemporary writers responding to historic writings. A fourth volume offers a guide to the project as a whole.

Grain: Granular materials add up to concrete forms; insignificant specks accumulate into complex entities. The texts in this volume narrate some of the fundamental qualities of the granular. In one pairing of texts…

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Gastón Gordillo – Terrain as Insurgent Weapon (abstract)

Posted on March 7, 2015 by

Gastón Gordillo shares an update on his ongoing work on terrain, for a forthcoming conference at UBC. Very sorry to miss this one – I’ll still be in Melbourne, talking about a related topic. Gastón and I have organised two sessions on terrain at the AAG meeting in Chicago in April, where we will be presenting our work along with a range of others (see line-up for session 1 and 2).

Below is the abstract of my essay “Terrain as Insurgent Weapon: An Affective Geometry of Combat in the Valley of Death,” which I’ll present at the workshop Space, Materiality, and Violence, at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, March 20-21. This is my most thorough attempt yet to theorize terrain, based on how the mountainous terrain of the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, affected warfare in the region. In the next few days, I’ll be posting excerpts on this blog. I’m really looking forward to this workshop, which will bring together among the best thinkers in the field, such as Eyal Weizman (our keynote speaker), Derek Gregory, Craig Jones, Caren Kaplan, Jake Kosek, Léopold Lambert, Catherine Lutz, and Shaylih Muehlmann.

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Brad Evans reviews Michael Dillon’s Biopolitics of Security at Antipode

Posted on March 6, 2015 by

Biopolitics of SecurityBrad Evans reviews Michael Dillon’s Biopolitics of Security: A Political Analytic of Finitude at Antipode.

I’m looking forward to seeing this book when back in the UK.

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iBorder, Borderscapes, Bordering: A Conversation – Chiara Brambilla and Holger Pötzsch

Posted on March 5, 2015 by

stuartelden:

A discussion extending the work of a recent article in Society and Space – open access for a month alongside this open site piece.

Originally posted on Society and space:

Holger Pötzsch’s article “The emergence of iBorder: bordering bodies, networks, and machines” appears in issue 1 of the 2015 volume of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and is now open access for one month. Extending the insights of that piece, he and Chiara Brambilla discuss a range of theoretical and methodological issues in border research in the following conversation:

Holger Pötzsch: In the article on iBorder published in Society and Space, I argue that contemporary borders and regimes of bordering are dislocated, dispersed, and increasingly attach themselves to individual bodies. I move from a description of the socio-technological apparatus of management and control centered upon biometrics, dataveillance, and automation through which these processes are facilitated to questions of the practices through which the varying potentials for individualized in- and exclusion are actualized. I term this transition a movement of attention from iBorder to the contingent practices of iBordering. Would you say…

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Foucault and the History of Our Present (2015)

Posted on March 5, 2015 by

stuartelden:

A new (expensive) collection of essays on Foucault, with introduction free to download.

Originally posted on Foucault News:

fuggle1Foucault and the History of Our Present, edited by Sophie Fuggle, Yari Lanci, and Martina Tazzioli

ISBN 9781137385918
Publication Date February 2015
Formats Hardcover Ebook (EPUB) Ebook (PDF)
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan

PDF of flyer

PDF of front matter and intro

According to philosopher Michel Foucault, the ‘history of the present’ should constitute the starting point for any enquiry into the past and a critical ontology of ourselves. This book comprises a series of essays all centring on the question of the present or, rather, multiple presents which compose contemporary experience. The collection brings together philosophical readings of Foucault which try to rework his thought in light of our present, together with practical analyses of our own moment which draw on his methodological approaches to questions of power, knowledge and subjectivity. Covering a range of topics including freedom, politics, ethics, security, war, migration, incarceration, the sociology and political economy of…

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Freiburg will not replace Günter Figal in the ‘Heidegger’ Chair

Posted on March 5, 2015 by

Story from the Daily Nous – ‘Heidegger’ chair not to be filled when Figal retires, but another analytic post, at a lower level, instead. Three updates at Daily Nous with more information.

The University of Freiburg, the academic home of Günter Figal—who recently stepped down from the leadership of the Martin Heidegger Society in the wake of the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks—has decided to convert the faculty chair long dedicated to the Heideggerian tradition to one dedicated to philosophy of language. It has also downgraded the line from a full professorship to the equivalent of an assistant professorship. Figal now holds the position, but will be retiring soon, as he has reached the mandatory retirement age in Germany. At the moment, as far as I know, there is no official explanation for the decision, but there has been speculation that the university is attempting to distance itself from Heidegger and his anti-semitism. Those who read German can read more about these developments here and here…

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Foucault conference in Zurich, 19-21 March 2015

Posted on March 5, 2015 by

Programme for an interesting conference on Foucault in Zurich later this month – some papers in German and some in English.

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