Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
136
result(s) for
"Elden, Stuart"
Sort by:
Land, terrain, territory
This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it has been understood in different historical and geographical contexts. It does so first by critically interrogating work on territoriality, suggesting that neither the biological nor the social uses of this term are particularly profitable ways to approach the historically more specific category of ‘territory’. Instead, ideas of ‘land’ and ‘terrain’ are examined, suggesting that these political-economic and political-strategic relations are essential to understanding ‘territory’, yet ultimately insufficient. Territory needs to be understood in terms of its relation to space, itself a calculative category that is dependent on the existence of a range of techniques. Ultimately this requires rethinking unproblematic definitions of territory as a ‘bounded space’ or the state as a ‘bordered power container’, because both presuppose the two things that should be most interrogated, space and boundaries. Rather than boundaries being the distinction between place and space, or land or terrain and territory, boundaries are a second-order problem founded upon a particular sense of calculation and concomitant grasp of space. Territory then can be understood as a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain, and measure and control — the technical and the legal — must be thought alongside the economic and strategic.
Journal Article
Space, Knowledge and Power
Michel Foucault's work is rich with implications and insights concerning spatiality, and has inspired many geographers and social scientists to develop these ideas in their own research. This book, the first to engage Foucault's geographies in detail from a wide range of perspectives, is framed around his discussions with the French geography journal Hérodote in the mid 1970s. The opening third of the book comprises some of Foucault's previously untranslated work on questions of space, a range of responses from French and English language commentators, and a newly translated essay by Claude Raffestin, a leading Swiss geographer. The rest of the book presents specially commissioned essays which examine the remarkable reception of Foucault's work in English and French language geography; situate Foucault's project historically; and provide a series of developments of his work in the contemporary contexts of power, biopolitics, governmentality and war. Contributors include a number of key figures in social/spatial theory such as David Harvey, Chris Philo, Sara Mills, Nigel Thrift, John Agnew, Thomas Flynn and Matthew Hannah. Written in an open and engaging tone, the contributors discuss just what they find valuable - and frustrating - about Foucault's geographies. This is a book which will both surprise and challenge.
eBook
Missing the point: globalization, deterritorialization and the space of the world
This article provides a critique of a dominant strand of the literature on globalization - that which suggests it can be understood as deterritorialization. It argues that suggestions that we have moved away from territorial understandings of politics fail to conceptually elaborate the notion of territory itself. Drawing parallels between mathematics and politics in the seventeenth century, the paper claims that the notion of territory is dependent on a particular way of grasping space as calculable. This way of understanding space makes bounded territories possible, but also underlies new global configurations. In other words globalization is a reconfiguration of existing understandings rather than the radical break some suggest. The article concludes by making some comments on this reconfiguration, and suggesting that further historical and conceptual work on territory is necessary before it can be thought to be superseded.
Journal Article
Understanding Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre has been celebrated as one of the most influential social theorists of the twentieth century. Understanding Henri Lefebvre places Lefebvre in his historical and intellectual context and analyzes the extraordinary range of his work, across politics, philosophy, history, literature and culture. Particular emphasis is given to Lefebvre’s trilogy of inspirational thinkers Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche; his links to contemporaries such as Heidegger, Axelos and the Situationalists; and his critiques of existentialism and structuralism. Analysis of his writings on cities are balanced with those on rural communities, the production of space connected to ideas of time and history, and everyday life linked to the festival and cultural revolution. Understanding Henri Lefebvre offers the most wide-ranging and reliable account of this central theorist available.
eBook
Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity
The biographical links between Michel Foucault and the comparative mythologist and philologist Georges Dumézil have received more attention than their intellectual connections. This article contributes by surveying Foucault’s engagements, from a 1957 radio lecture to his late lectures at the Collège de France. Particular focus is on lectures on structuralism and history in 1970, some references between 1970 and 1981, and the use of Dumézil’s work in each of Foucault’s two final courses at the Collège de France. In each, Foucault takes up Dumézil’s analyses of mythology in developing his own projects concerning history and antiquity.
Journal Article
Henri Lefebvre : key writings
Henri Lefebvre is now recognized as one of the most influential social theorists of the Twentieth Century. In English, his writings on cities, everyday life, and the production of space have become hugely influential across Cultural Studies, Sociology, Geography and Architecture. Henri Lefebve: Key Writings presents for the first time the full range of Lefebvre's thought. The selection reinforces the centrality of Lefebvre to current debates in social and spatial theory but also sets Lefebvre's work in the context of his broader philosophical and political concerns.The extracts are divided into sections, each separately introduced by the editors: Philosophy and Marxism; The Critique of Everyday Life; The Country and the City; History, Time and Space; Politics. Nearly all the extracts presented here are new translations and most have never appeared in English before. Henri Lefebvre (1901 - 1991) held a range of academic posts both in France and America and wrote over seventy books including The Production of Space and Critique of Everyday Life.
eBook