Political theory professor Stuart Elden explores the history of land ownership and control from the ancient to the modern world in The Birth of Territory.Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territor...

Shakespeare was an astute observer of contemporary life, culture, and politics. The emerging practice of territory as a political concept and technology did not elude his attention. In Shakespearean Territories, Stuart Elden reveals just how much Shakespeare's unique historical position and political understanding can teach us about territory. Shakespeare dramatized a world of technological advances in measuring, navigation, cartography, and surveying, and his plays open up import...

In a late interview, Foucault, suggested that Heidegger was for him the "essential philosopher." Taking this claim seriously, Mapping the Present assesses the relationship between these two thinkers, particularly on the issue of space and history. It suggests that space and history need to be rethought, and combined as a spatial history, rather than as a history of space. In other words, space should become not merely an object of analysis, but a tool of analysis.The first half of the book...

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 r...

Today's global politics demands a new look at the concept of territory. From so-called deterritorialized terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda to U.S.-led overthrows of existing regimes in the Middle East, the relationship between territory and sovereignty is under siege. Unfolding an updated understanding of the concept of territory, Stuart Elden shows how the contemporary "war on terror" is part of a widespread challenge to the connection between the state and its territory.Al...

Expanding the insights of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families into policing, public order, (in)justice, and daily lifeWhat might it mean for ordinary people to intervene in the circulation of power between police and the streets, sovereigns and their subjects? How did the police come to understand themselves as responsible for the circulation of people as much as things—and to separate law and justice from the maintenance of a newly eme...

Madame de Pompadour's famous quip, "Après nous, le deluge," serves as fitting inspiration for this lively discussion of postwar French intellectual and cultural life. Over the past thirty years, North American and European scholarship has been significantly transformed by the absorption of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories from French thinkers. But Julian Bourg's seamlessly edited volume proves that, historically speaking, French intellecutal and cultural life since World War Tw...

Rhythmanalysis displays all the characteristics which made Lefebvre one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. In the analysis of rhythms -- both biological and social -- Lefebvre shows the interrelation of space and time in the understanding of everyday life.With dazzling skills, Lefebvre moves between discussions of music, the commodity, measurement, the media and the city. In doing so he shows how a non-linear conception of time and history balanced his famous ...

Henri Lefebvre is widely recognized as one of the most influential social theorists of the Twentieth Century. His writings on cities, everyday life, and the production of space have become hugely influential across Cultural Studies, Sociology, Geography and Architecture. Key Writings presents the full range of Lefebvre's thought in a single volume. The selection of essays spanning 1933 to 1990, reinforce the relevance of Lefebvre's work to current debates in social theory, politic...

A classic text that develops one prong of Dumézil’s tripartite hypothesis of Indo-European tribes: the sacred sovereign.Georges Dumézil’s fascination with the myths and histories of India, Rome, Scandinavia, and the Celts yielded an idea that became his most influential scholarly legacy: the tripartite hypothesis, which divides Indo-European societal functions into three classes: the sacred sovereign, the warrior, and the producer. Mitra-Varuna, originally...

One of the most influential Marxist theorists of the twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre pioneered the study of the modern state in an age of accelerating global economic integration and fragmentation. Shortly after the 1974 publication of his landmark book The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre embarked on one of the most ambitious projects of his career: a consideration of the history and geographies of the modern state through a monumental study that linked several disciplines, ...

In Metaphilosophy, Henri Lefebvre works through the implications of Marx's revolutionary thought to consider philosophy's engagement with the world. Lefebvre takes Marx's notion of the "world becoming philosophical and philosophy becoming worldly" as a leitmotif, examining the relation between Hegelian-Marxist supersession and Nietzschean overcoming. Metaphilosophy is conceived of as a transformation of philosophy, developing it into a programme of radical worldwide change. The bo...