Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction

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Authors: Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint.

Publication Info: New York: Routledge, 2009.

“The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction is a comprehensive overview of the history and study of science fiction. It outlines major writers, movements, and texts in the genre, established critical approaches and areas for future study. Fifty-six entries by a team of renowned international contributors are divided into four parts which look, in turn, at:

History – an integrated chronological narrative of the genre’s development

Theory – detailed accounts of major theoretical approaches including feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism and utopian studies

Issues and Challenges – anticipates future directions for study in areas as diverse as science studies, music, design, environmentalism, ethics and alterity

Subgenres – a prismatic view of the genre, tracing themes and developments within specific subgenres.

Bringing into dialogue the many perspectives on the genre The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and the future of science fiction and the way it is taught and studied.”

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A Conservationist Manifesto

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Author: Scott Russell Sanders

Publication Info: Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.

“As an antidote to the destructive culture of consumption dominating American life today, Scott Russell Sanders calls for a culture of conservation that allows us to savor and preserve the world, instead of devouring it. How might we shift to a more durable and responsible way of life? What changes in values and behavior will be required? Ranging geographically from southern Indiana to the Boundary Waters Wilderness and culturally from the Bible to billboards, Sanders extends the visions of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Rachel Carson to our own day. A Conservationist Manifesto shows the crucial relevance of a conservation ethic at a time of mounting concern about global climate change, depletion of natural resources, extinction of species, and the economic inequities between rich and poor nations. The important message of this powerful book is that conservation is not simply a personal virtue but a public one.”

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Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

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Author: José Esteban Muñoz

Publication Info: New York: NYU Press, 2009.

“The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.

Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O’Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.

In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a ‘not yet here’ that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.”

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Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics

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Author: Timothy Morton

Publication Info: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

“In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the “nature” they revere. The problem is a symptom of the ecological catastrophe in which we are living. Morton sets out a seeming paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all.

Ecology without Nature investigates our ecological assumptions in a way that is provocative and deeply engaging. Ranging widely in eighteenth-century through contemporary philosophy, culture, and history, he explores the value of art in imagining environmental projects for the future. Morton develops a fresh vocabulary for reading ‘environmentality’ in artistic form as well as content, and traces the contexts of ecological constructs through the history of capitalism. From John Clare to John Cage, from Kierkegaard to Kristeva, from The Lord of the Rings to electronic life forms, Ecology without Nature widens our view of ecological criticism, and deepens our understanding of ecology itself. Instead of trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton sets out a radical new form of ecological criticism: ‘dark ecology.'”

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The Ecological Thought

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Author: Timothy Morton

Publication Info: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

“In this passionate, lucid, and surprising book, Timothy Morton argues that all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, Morton contends, nor does “Nature” exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what Morton calls the ecological thought.

In three concise chapters, Morton investigates the profound philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the fact that all life forms are interconnected. As a work of environmental philosophy and theory, The Ecological Thought explores an emerging awareness of ecological reality in an age of global warming. Using Darwin and contemporary discoveries in life sciences as root texts, Morton describes a mesh of deeply interconnected life forms—intimate, strange, and lacking fixed identity.

A “prequel” to his Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard, 2007), The Ecological Thought is an engaged and accessible work that will challenge the thinking of readers in disciplines ranging from critical theory to Romanticism to cultural geography.”

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Commonwealth

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Author: Michael Hardt

Publication Info: Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009.

“When Empire appeared in 2000, it defined the political and economic challenges of the era of globalization and, thrillingly, found in them possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Now, with Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution for our common wealth.

Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.”

Though this book functions as an extension and a completion of a sustained line of Hardt and Negri’s thought, it also stands alone and is entirely accessible to readers who are not familiar with the previous works. It is certain to appeal to, challenge, and enrich the thinking of anyone interested in questions of politics and globalization.”

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Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

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Author: Robert Pogue Harrison

Publication Info: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008

“Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.

With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.”

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Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community

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Author: Roberto Esposito

Translator: Timothy C. Campbell

Publication Info: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010

“No theme has been more central to international philosophical debates than that of community: from American communitarianism to Habermas’s ethic of communication to the French deconstruction of community in the work of Derrida and Nancy. Nevertheless, in none of these cases has the concept been examined from the perspective of community’s original etymological meaning: cum munus. In Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Roberto Esposito does just that through an original counter-history of political philosophy that takes up not only readings of community by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger and Bataille, but also by Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Canetti, Arendt, and Sartre. The result of his extraordinary conceptual and lexical analysis is a radical overturning of contemporary interpretations of community. Community isn’t a property, nor is it a territory to be separated and defended against those who do not belong to it. Rather, it is a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves.”

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From Terror to Utopia

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Reviewer: Paul Hayman (Durham University)

Published on H-Human-Rights (November, 2009) Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root

“Have we, in the last two decades, seen the rise and fall of the “Age of Rights”? The future of human rights in a post-9/11 world is uncertain. This seismic event has altered the international landscape and has forced the rethinking of state agendas in both foreign and domestic policy. A focus on terror is, it seems, diluting the gains made in the previous decade. The global arena in which human rights compete for political standing is framed by a host of complex concerns. In Achieving Human Rights, Richard A. Falk attempts to make sense of the complex world that seems to spin around us. The Iraq War, genocide, the rule of law, and information technology, for example, are features of what the international system has become. What about human rights? How can we extract and reclaim them from this morass? Falk’s new book seeks to cut through the accumulation of misconception and misdirection surrounding human rights, and he does this with a vibrancy and clarity befitting his position in the field.”  [This is the first paragraph.  Remainder can be found here.]

Book reviewed:  Achieving Human Rights.

Publication Info: New York Routledge, 2009.

From Publisher’s Website:

“Richard Falk once again captures our attention with a nuanced analysis of what we need to do – at the personal level as well as state actions – to refocus our pursuit of human rights in a post-9/11 world. From democratic global governance, to the costs of the Iraq War, the preeminent role of the United States in the world order to the role of individual citizens of a globalized world, Falk stresses the moral urgency of achieving human rights. In elegant simplicity, this book places the priority of such an ethos in the personal decisions we make in our human interactions, not just the activities of government institutions and non-governmental organizations. Falk masterly weaves together such topics as the Iraq War, U.S. human rights practices and abuses, humanitarian intervention, the rule of law, responses to terrorism, genocide in Bosnia, the Pinochet trial, the Holocaust, and information technology to create a moral tapestry of world order with human rights at the center.”

Utopia and the Everyday. Between Art and Education.

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Exhibition : 27.11.2009 – 14.02.2010

Tuesday – Sunday 11am-6pm

The Centre d’Art Contemporain

This project aims at presenting art practices that straddle both art and education, which have always been strongly tied. UTOPIA AND THE EVERYDAY proposes to invite artists and collectives whose practices include strategies borrowed from teaching methods, using the cultural institution as a space for critical thought and discussion about education, and provide a prospective environment to tackle social and political issues.

The exhibition UTOPIA AND THE EVERYDAY invites us to consider the field of contemporary art as a free space to experiment with new learning methods, to see the relationship between the teacher and the taught in a different light, or to tackle issues that learning institutions do not usually address.

UTOPIA AND THE EVERYDAY revolves around three collaborations between international artists and local players: the students at Deutsche Schule Genf (the German School of Geneva), the Haute Ecole Pédagogique de Lausanne in relationship with CIRA (Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme), and a collaboration involving people and associations from Le Lignon (Geneva). Together they will produce new works, designed for the Centre’s display spaces. The exhibition is based on democratic and creative processes that involve each participant according to a horizontality principle.

The invited artists and collectives, NILS NORMAN (UK), in collaboration with TILO STEIREIF (CH), OSCAR TUAZON and DAMON RICH (founder of CENTER FOR URBAN PEDAGOGY, USA), and trafo.K in collaboration with architect GABU HEINDL (Austria) all carry out artistic practices that are based on exchanging experience and expertise.

A documentary section also presents other pioneering projects in this field from the 1950s until today, allowing to expand the social, cultural, political, and environmental issues related to the project. UTOPIA AND THE EVERYDAY will be the subject of a catalogue, a gazette, and a series of public events. A new version of this project will also be presented at the Kunstmuseum Thun in 2010.

Centre d’Art de Genève

10, rue des Vieux-Grenadiers

Genève

Phone: + 41 22 329 18 42

Contact: Marie-Avril Berthet

info@centre.ch www.centre.ch