Category Archives: Philosophy

Regulating nothing?

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For anyone interested in such things (and you should be), here is the full 193 page U.S. Supreme Court ruling, including dissents, in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius – upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare, mostly. When is a tax not a tax, when is a penalty a tax, can you regulate people because they are not acting?

Already an interesting subtext to the story is developing, about the twitter-sphere, and CNN, calling the result too early, evidently having only listened to John Roberts for a couple of minutes. High drama, it seems.

Waldron on political theory

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This has been blogged and tweeted already by various people, and is very good: Jeremy Waldron’s inaugural lecture as Chichele Chair of Political Theory at Oxford, on ‘political political theory’.

Geography and ethics: the latest installment, again

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Some shameless self-promotion – otherwise known as the respectable reason for academics to blog, apparently. The second of my three annual(ish) reports on ‘geography and ethics’ for Progress in Human Geography has now been published in print – a full year after going live online. So it has page numbers now.

This one is rather grandly titled Placing life in the space of reasons, and tries to say why I think geographers might learn something from reading things life the McDowell/Dreyfus debate. The first was on the theme of Justice unbound, and tried to glean a set of connections between various strands of work which might be said to give a priority to injustice in theorising normatively about justice. In my head, these two pieces are meant to be read alongside the third, which is about recent social theory which addresses ‘normative’ things, and suggests an agenda around ‘geographies of worth’ [although this bit might be a bit brief and allusive]. I’m sure no-one reads these pieces like this – I don’t. But that is sort of how they were conceived in the writing.  This last one isn’t up online yet, although rest assured that I will post when it is!

Newish blog: Ecotechnics

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I’m a bit behind here, but James Ash has a newish blog, called Ecotechnics, on ‘the relationship between technology, theory and space’ – regular posts on phenomenology, Stiegler, habits, practices, Malabou, Nancy, brains, that sort of thing, those sort of people. Well worth a follow.

Roemer, Scanlon, and others remembering G. A. Cohen

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Via Crooked Timber, here are some interesting comments and personal reflections on the legacy of G.A. Cohen from a memorial service held in 2010 – Roemer’s remarks are a neat little summary of the approach, and hang-ups, of ‘analytical Marxism’; Scanlon’s end with a really succinct, and quite telling comparison of two perspectives from which to think about justice and injustice, as a way of trying to account for Cohen’s seemingly odd, for a Marxist, insistence on thinking that questions of justice were not primarily about institutions (following Rawls), but about interactions between individuals (following, and critiquing, Nozick).

Geographies of radical democracy

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For anyone interested in this sort of thing, I have a new paper, co-written with Gary Bridge, just published on-line in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, which addresses how best to theorise about the relationship between democracy and geography. It develops the idea of agonistic pragmatism, and the notion of transactional space, and explores how the idea of ‘all affected interests’ may, or may not, provide the grounds for rethinking this relationship. It’s an attempt to expand a little the range of reference points, in geography and related fields, for discussions of ‘radical democracy’. You can access a pre-publication draft of the paper here, and the abstract is below:

“There is significant interest in democracy in contemporary human geography. Theoretically, this interest has been most strongly influenced by poststructuralist theories of radical democracy and associated ontologies of relational spatiality. These emphasize a priori understandings of the spaces of democratic politics, ones that focus on marginal spaces and the destabilization of established patterns. This article develops an alternative account of the spaces of democratic politics that seeks to move beyond the stylized contrast of poststructuralist agonism and liberal consensualism. This alternative draws into focus the spatial dimensions of philosophical pragmatism and the relevance of this tradition for thinking about the geographies of democracy. In particular, the geographical relevance of pragmatism lies in the distinctive inflection of the all-affected principle and of the rationalities of problem solving. Drawing on John Dewey’s work, a conceptualization of transactional space is developed to reconfigure understandings of the agonistics of participation as well as the experimental institutionalization of democratic will. The difference that a pragmatist approach makes to understandings of the geographies of democracy is explored in relation to transnational and urban politics.”

Agency and experience: nonsite.org Issue 5

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The new issue of nonsite.org contains essays by Ruth Leys, Michael Fried and Robert Pippin, amongst other things, and focusses on “the relation between our agency–our actions, or emotions, our character–and our experience–of the world, of ourselves, of each other.” It also ‘reprints’ Todd Cronan’s review of affect theory.

Affect theory: Cronan review in Radical Philosophy

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Todd Cronan has a punchy review of The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth, in Radical Philosophy. Amongst the points he makes are the relentless claims about newness, and the predilection for binary oppositions in expositions of the importance of ‘affect’. He reminded me, too, of the odd understanding of ‘post-structuralism’ against which this work defines itself, not least in geography, where post-structuralism is understood to have simply been a radicalization of a structuralist model of signification which remained on that same plane; and the rather odd relationship to the empirical that humanities work, in particular, on affect tends to have – in which cases which exemplify the interpretative value of affect theory are always things worlded as ‘events’, without problematization, by the good old mass media.

Critchley interview

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Here is an interview with Simon Critchley, on his new book Faith of the Faithless, which in part continues a ‘debate’ with Zizek about violence and non-violence. You could win the book, if you know which football team he supports.