Geography, Death, and Finitude

10.1068/a4474 ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (11) ◽  
pp. 2533-2553 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Romanillos
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Geographical Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
A Site

Despite growing interest in the geographies of death, loss, and remembrance, comparatively little geographical research has been devoted either to the historical and cultural practices of death, or to an adequate conceptualisation of finitude. Responding to these absences, in this paper I argue for the importance of the notion of finitude within the history and philosophy of geographical thought. Situating finitude initially in the context of the work of Torsten Hägerstrand and Richard Hartshorne, the notion is argued to be both productive of a geographical ethics, and as epistemologically constitutive of phenomenological apprehensions of ‘earth’ and ‘world’. In order to better grasp the sense and genealogy of finitude, I turn to the work of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Georges Bataille. These authors are drawn upon precisely because their writings present powerful conceptual frameworks which demonstrate the intimate relations between spatiality, death, and finitude. At the same time, their writings are critically interrogated in the light of perhaps the most important aspect of the conceptual history of finitude: the way in which it has been articulated as a site of anthropocentric distinction. I argue for a critical deconstruction of this anthropocentric basis to finitude; a deconstruction which raises a series of profound questions over the ethics, normativities, and understandings of responsibility shaping contemporary ethical geographies of the human and nonhuman. In so doing, I demonstrate the geographical importance of the notion of finitude for a variety of arenas of debate which include: phenomenological understandings of spatiality; the biopolitical boundaries drawn between human and animal; and contemporary theorisations of corporeality, materiality, and hospitality.

Tongues as a Site of Subversion

Pneuma ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaputra Tupamahu
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Speaking In Tongues ◽  
International Language ◽  
Politics Of Language ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
A Site ◽  
Cultural Theorist

In this article I discuss the close relationship between colonialism and the expansion of language. Language is always politically contested. A language can become an international language today because it has a long history of colonization and subjugation of other groups of people. I analyze the sociopolitical dimension of tongues by engaging, among others, linguist Roman Jakobson, philosopher Michel Foucault, and cultural theorist Judith Butler. By placing tongues in the context of the politics of language, I aim to show that the practice of speaking in tongues can be viewed as a strategic subversion and disruption of the regime of normalized language.

scholarly journals Into the Interior of Cultural Affiliations: Joan Anim Addo’s Imoinda and the Creolization of Modernity

2015 ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Mina Karavanta
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Caribbean Diaspora ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
A Site ◽  
British Culture

If creolization was represented as the property of the postcolonial world, the sign of hyphenated cultures emerging from the slave plantation economy and the slave trade, it has become a concept that names the transformation of the dominant cultures from within the other “minor” cultures and histories with which they have been living. Creolization emerges as the urgency to develop new concepts and disseminate “contrapuntal” and “affiliated” histories (Said) in order not only to narrate the Caribbean diaspora but also the social, political, and historical development of a wider British culture. In this light, this essay examines Imoinda: Or She Who Will Lose Her Name as a text that mediates between cultures represented as oppositional and operates as a site where their discrepant histories are translated, written anew, and rethought. The text as a site of translation and affiliation of different aesthetics, genres and traditions represents a new poetics of the human whose history is now narrated by the formerly dispossessed and expropriated other. The history of imperialism and slavery narrated of imperialism and slavery is an old narration but its telling is new for it generates new ways of understanding this history in the present where constituencies and communities of different cultural practices, often speaking different languages while sharing the language(s) of the dominant culture, are called forth to live together and live well.

Georges Bataille

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadine Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Alexandre Kojeve ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
The Gift ◽  
General Economy

Throughout his oeuvre, Giorgio Agamben makes numerous references to Georges Bataille. Already in the 1977 Stanzas, Bataille’s general economy is afforded one of the scholia of the chapter ‘The Appropriation of Unreality’ and scolded for its alleged simplification of Marcel Mauss’s account of the gift. A brief discussion of the letters that Bataille and Alexandre Kojève exchanged in 1937 is contained in Agamben’s 1982 Language and Death and picked up again in 2002’s The Open: Man and Animal. The only text that exclusively deals with Bataille, however, is Agamben’s 1987 essay ‘Bataille e il paradosso della sovranità’. By the time Agamben begins the Homo Sacer project (1995), and in particular in Means Without End (1996), Bataille has been banished into unambiguously dismissive footnotes or ‘thresholds’ in which Agamben distances himself from Bataille’s definitions of the sacred, sacrifice and sovereignty. Thus, unlike Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin or Michel Foucault, Bataille not only cannot be considered one of Agamben’s main informants, but receives all but marginal attention from him – and this despite the fact that Bataille is generally held to be one of the crucial thinkers of the sacred and of sovereignty.

The Stadium Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
French History ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
Spectator Sport ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site

The stadium century traces the history of stadia and mass spectatorship in modern France from the vélodromes of the late nineteenth century to the construction of the Stade de France before the 1998 soccer World Cup, and argues that stadia played a privileged role in shaping mass society in twentieth-century France. Drawing off a wide range of archival and published sources, Robert W. Lewis links the histories of French urbanism, mass politics and sport through the history of the stadium in an innovative and original work that will appeal to historians, students of French history and the history of sport, and general readers alike. As The stadium century demonstrates, the stadium was at the centre of long-running debates about public health, national prestige and urban development in twentieth-century France. The stadium also functioned as a key space for mobilizing and transforming the urban crowd, in the twin contexts of mass politics and mass spectator sport. In the process, the stadium became a site for confronting tensions over political allegiance, class, gender, and place-based identity, and for forging particular kinds of cultural practices related to mass consumption and leisure. As stadia and the narratives surrounding them changed dramatically in the years after 1945, the transformed French stadium not only reflected and constituted part of the process of postwar modernisation, but also was increasingly implicated in global transformations to the spaces and practices of sport that connected France even more closely to the rest of the world.

scholarly journals THE CONCEPT OF “EXPERIENCE” AND THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, 1924–1963

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
STUART MIDDLETON
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
New Left ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
A Site

Despite intense scholarly interest in the “Anglo-Marxism” that rose to prominence in Britain from the mid-1950s, its intellectual lineaments and lineages have yet to be fully accounted for. This is particularly the case with the concept of “experience,” which was a central category in the work of two of the most influential figures of the early “New Left” in Britain: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. This essay traces a conceptual history of “experience” from its emergence in Cambridge literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the quasi-Marxist literary culture of the 1930s, to the confluence of these two currents in the work of Williams and Thompson. Reassessing the nature of each thinker's engagement with Leavisite literary and cultural criticism, and of Thompson's attempted reformulation of Marxism, it argues that recovering their widely differing usages of “experience” illuminates their distinctive conceptions of “culture” as a site of political action.

FORUM: THE IDEA OF THE SELF

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-322
Author(s):  
JUDITH SURKIS
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
The Self ◽  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
History Of ◽  
Normative Implications

The Idea of the Self is a book which really made me think. Within the history of selfhood that it sets forth (and within which it is inscribed), this is precisely what a book about the self should do. For, as Seigel explains, reflectivity—our ability as selves to think critically about our own positions—is a constitutive, and pre-eminent, aspect or dimension of our selfhood. His work raises important questions about the normative implications of the ways in which we think about selfhood and how we attempt to write its history. As someone whose work has both addressed and been influenced by thinkers (such as Emile Durkheim, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida) that Seigel argues have an unsatisfying and overly abstract account of selfhood, these are provocative questions indeed. The Idea of the Self has, as a result, forced me to interrogate the normative assumptions that underlie my own research and writing.

Temporal Layering in the Long Conceptual History of Sexual Medicine: Reading Koselleck with Foucault

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Alison M. Downham Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Sexual Medicine ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts

AbstractThis paper reflects on the challenges of writing long conceptual histories of sexual medicine, drawing on the approaches of Michel Foucault and of Reinhart Koselleck. Foucault’s statements about nineteenth-century rupture considered alongside his later-life emphasis on long conceptual continuities implied something similar to Koselleck’s own accommodation of different kinds of historical inheritances expressed as multiple ‘temporal layers.’ The layering model in the history of concepts may be useful for complicating the historical periodizations commonly invoked by historians of sexuality, overcoming historiographic temptations to reduce complex cultural and intellectual phenomena to a unified Zeitgeist. The paper also shows that a haunting reference to ‘concepts’ among scholars of the long history of sexual medicine indicates the emergence of a de facto methodology of conceptual history, albeit one in need of further refinement. It is proposed that reading Koselleck alongside Foucault provides a useful starting-point for precisely this kind of theoretical development.

At genplacere den moderne stat - Guvernementalitet og de politiske idéers historie

2018 ◽  
pp. 59-88
Author(s):  
Martin Saar
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of

Michel Foucault never wrote very comprehensively about his method in regards to his approach to the history of political ideas and the emergence of the modern state, something he most explicitly tried to do in the two lectures which he himself termed ’a history of governmentality’, Security, Territory, Population (1977-78) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79). This article treats these reflections as a ’methodological promise’ and seeks to reconstruct a Foucauldianapproach to the history of political ideas from the role Foucault himself believed the ’history of governmentality’ should play. Foucault’s approach proves to be a distinct way of studying the history of political ideas as an alternative to, and in some ways superior to, both the more traditional ways of doing the history of political ideas as well as newer attempts such as intellectual history and conceptual history. In the special way it looks at the history of political thought, Foucault’s approach can go much further than the other alternatives.

Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850: Narratives and Representations

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Knowledge Interests

The book pays tribute to Paul Slack’s work as a historian, and engages with the rapidly growing body of work on the ‘history of emotions’. The themes of suffering and happiness run through Paul Slack’s publications, the first being more prominent in his early work on plague and poverty, the second in his more recent work on conceptual frameworks for social thought and action. He himself has not written directly with the history of emotions, the editors of this volume have thought that assembling essays on these themes provides an opportunity and indeed an obligation to do that. The chapters explore in turn shifting discourses of happiness and suffering over time; the deployment of these discourses for particular purposes at specific moments; and their relationship to subjective experience. In their introduction, the editors note the very diverse approaches that can be taken to the topic; they suggest that it is best treated not as a discrete field of enquiry but as terrain in which many paths may fruitfully cross. It has much to offer as a site of encounter between historians with diverse knowledge, interests, and skills.

Mobile Marketing

2020 ◽  
pp. 324-338
Author(s):  
Nicholas Carah
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Mobile Marketing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Infrastructure ◽  
Critical Account ◽  
A Site ◽  
Consumer Creativity

The mobile device is a critical touchpoint between the logistical and promotional infrastructure of marketing and the everyday lives of consumers. Mobile devices like the smartphone are taken up by marketers as part of their efforts to harness consumer creativity and to make consumers visible. Mobile marketing emerges from a longer history of marketers creating more open-ended relationships with cultural practices. This chapter examines the role of the mobile in the forms of marketing that have emerged around major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Snapchat. The mobile enables marketers to manage more open-ended, participatory, and data-driven brands. The smartphone is a site of continuous experimentation with geolocative, algorithmic, contextual, and augmented reality forms of advertising. The smartphone both invites consumers to participate in co-creating brands and opens them up to sophisticated forms of data-driven tracking and targeting. Consumers undertake the productive labor of translating their lived experience into data. A critical account of mobile marketing needs to account for how marketers shape the development of digital media platforms as cultural infrastructure.

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