A quick book recommendation here at the tail-end of the year:
Mapping the present: Heidegger, Foucault and the project of a spatial
history
Stuart Elden, Continuum Books, 2001 £16.99
This is a wonderful book and I can't recommend it too highly--probably the
best this year. Elden is not a geographer but his book provides some rich
material for a critical geography through a spatialised history of ontology
and subjectification (ie., a Foucaultian genealogy). He provides a very
knowledgeable and scholarly (yet accessible) account of space and place in
Heidegger, as non-Cartesian situated spatial knowledge.
For Foucault readers he also provides the best account yet of spatiality in
Foucault, far beyond the musings on heterotopias we've tended to have so far
(eg., Soja). A major thesis is that Foucault quietly adopted/adapted
Heidegger's spatial politics and read his Nietzsche through Heidegger
(rather than, as it were, the other way round). There are two great
re-readings of Madness & Civilisation and Discipline & punish to cap it off,
comparable to some of Philo's recent work.
Elden's next book is on Lefebvre with Eleonore Kofman.
Jeremy Crampton
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