Geotheory – serie

Harnessing the enigmatic and radical philosophy of Dutch rationalist Baruch Spinoza, this book examines and animates the occluded geography beating at the heart of his work. Essays attending to matters of space, nature, hope, aesthetics and politics recast the Dutch rationalist in geographical terms, spotlighting Spinoza's re-thinking and re-writing of earth and world. Advancing a renaissance in Spinozist scholarship, the book argues that Spinoza offers conceptual techniques to better apprehend and negotiate the affects and passions catalysing twenty-first century societal, environmental and political transformation. The stakes of a geographical Spinoza, for ethics, politics, ecology and thought itself, could not be higher.

To think antifascistically is necessarily to think geographically; to think geographically ought to be to think antifascistically. This aphorism sets the compass for this book's ambitious attempt to fold questions of fascism and antifascism into the remit of Geotheory (the focus of the host book series). Alert to fascism's pernicious haunting of our contemporary moment, it reaches for intellectual resources through which to fashion constellations of antifascist thought hinging on attentiveness to space, place, landscape and nature.Specifically, the book offers the first attempt to systematically explore the 'geographies' integral to the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno, premier exponent of the Frankfurt School of critical theory whose writings on philosophy and sociology, politics and culture, literature and music were often framed precisely against the threat of fascistic regression. By disclosing Adorno's geographies, the shape of a geographical antifascism comes into view as a transformational restatement of critical geography's spirit and purpose.

To think antifascistically is necessarily to think geographically; to think geographically ought to be to think antifascistically. This aphorism sets the compass for this book’s ambitious attempt to fold questions of fascism and antifascism into the remit of Geotheory (the focus of the host book series). Alert to fascism’s pernicious haunting of our contemporary moment, it reaches for intellectual resources through which to fashion constellations of antifascist thought hinging on attentiveness to space, place, landscape and nature. Specifically, the book offers the first attempt to systematically explore the ‘geographies’ integral to the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno, premier exponent of the Frankfurt School of critical theory whose writings – on philosophy and sociology, politics and culture, literature and music – were often framed precisely against the threat of fascistic regression. By disclosing Adorno’s geographies, the shape of a geographical antifascism comes into view as a transformational restatement of critical geography’s spirit and purpose.

Across thirteen chapters, this collection examines how love takes place. Ranging from the classical to the contemporary, the artistic to the political, the human to the ecological, the contributors consider how love makes, unmakes, and remakes selves, communities and worlds. Resisting the urge to purify love, alive to love’s turbulence, they address the strange new attachments and alliances love makes possible and those it blights and prohibits. To love, to be loved, to speak of love, is a threat as much as it is a promise: the promise and threat of being undone by love. Love and catastrophe are not opposed but entwined.At the heart of the collection is a surprising thesis: that love is always an experiment with distances, with intervals, with spacing. An education in love, an education by love, is a geography lesson.

What sorts of philosophical ideas, images and histories lie coiled in the prefix ‘geo’? José Luis Romanillos turns to the archive of Greek philosophy, geography and religion to show how existential concern with the environment is not simply a modern preoccupation but a geographical theme of the longue durée.Romanillos proposes a new kind of geophilosophy, one orientated towards understanding the ideas, beliefs and material practices that shaped ancient understandings of the earth. Engaging with a range of philosophical resources, from Hegel and Deleuze to Bataille and Sloterdijk, he explores the conceptual history of the prefix and develops a materialist reading of the physiological registers of earth in Greek thought.