Stuart Elden

The University of Warwick · Department of Politics & International Studies

This article discusses an important moment in the career of Alexandre Koyré, and the history of philosophy in France. It looks at the 1951 election of a successor to Étienne Gilson at the Collège de France, for which Koyré was one of the possible candidates, alongside Henri Gouhier and Martial Gueroult. Koyré came close, but Gueroult was elected to...

Dans la première préface à sa thèse Folie et déraison, Foucault remercie trois hommes qu’il considérait comme ses maîtres et qui ont considérablement influencé son travail. Ainsi, dans sa conférence inaugurale au Collège de France en décembre 1970, ces mêmes noms sont invoqués par Foucault : Georges Canguilhem, Georges Dumézil et Jean Hyppolite. Le...

The biographical links between Michel Foucault and the comparative mythologist and philologist Georges Dumézil have received more attention than their intellectual connections. This article contributes by surveying Foucault’s engagements, from a 1957 radio lecture to his late lectures at the Collège de France. Particular focus is on lectures on str...

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. Shak...

This introduction to the special issue ‘Foucault Before the Collège de France’ surveys Foucault’s work in the first part of his career. While there is a familiar chronology to the books he published in the 1960s – from History of Madness to The Archaeology of Knowledge – the story can be developed in relation to his articles, his translations, his...

On 20 May 1961 Foucault defended his two doctoral theses; on 2 December 1970 he gave his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France. Between these dates, he published four books, travelled widely, and wrote extensively on literature, the visual arts, linguistics, and philosophy. He taught both psychology and philosophy, beginning his explorations o...

This response outlines the intention of thinking critically about terrain as a way to think about the political materiality of territory. It responds to the interlocutors particularly around the themes of place, geology, depth, Eurocentrism, and the relation between human and physical geography.

In this extended review essay we discuss the lectures on sexuality which Foucault delivered in the 1960s, published in a single volume in 2018. The first part of the volume comprises five lectures given at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964 to psychology students. The second part is Foucault’s course ‘The Discourse of Sexuality’, given at t...

It was not until 1961 that Foucault published his first major book, History of Madness. He had already been working as an academic for a decade, teaching in Lille and Paris, writing, organizing cultural programmes and lecturing in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg. Although he published little in this period, Foucault wrote much more, some of which has b...

The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance is a unique collection of articles introducing cutting-edge research and scholarship on politics and performance, which contributes to exciting interdisciplinary work and to shaping a subfield. Organized along five themes—performativity and theatricality; identities; sites and scripts; body, voice, an...

Foucault’s Introduction to a translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s essay ‘Dream and Existence’ was published in late 1954. The translation was credited to Jacqueline Verdeaux, with Foucault acknowledged for the notes. Yet Verdeaux herself indicates the intensely collaborative nature of their working process and the translation. In 1958, Victor von Wei...

This article is based on the 2019 Dialogues in Human Geography plenary lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. It has four parts. The first discusses my work on territory in relation to recent work by geographers and others on the vertical, the volumetric, the voluminous, and the milieu as ways of thinking space in three-dimensions, of a fluid a...

An audio recording is available here - https://progressivegeographies.com/2019/08/29/terrain-politics-history-dialogues-lecture-at-the-rgs-ibg-conference/ - The final text will be published by Dialogues in Human Geography, along with some responses - This lecture will attempt to do two things. First, it will continue work using the concept of te...

“Territory” and “territoriality” are widely used in urban research, but often in a general, nonspecific sense that effectively relies on the idea that a territory is a “bounded space,” or the understanding that territory is the outcome of territoriality. This entry disentangles these uses, looking at economic, political, legal, and strategic senses...

Georges Canguilhem (1904–95) was an influential historian and philosopher of science, as renowned for his teaching as for his writings. He is best known for his book The Normal and the Pathological, originally his doctoral thesis in medicine, but he also wrote a thesis in philosophy on the concept of the reflex, supervised by Gaston Bachelard. He w...

In February 2018 the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality was finally published. Les aveux de la chair [Confessions of the Flesh] was edited by Frédéric Gros, and appeared in the same Gallimard series as Volumes 1, 2 and 3. The book deals with the early Christian Church Fathers of the second to fifth centuries. This essay reviews...

Esta es una compilación de algunas de las reflexiones que escribí para mi blog Progressive Geographies durante el proceso de investigación para una serie de libros sobre Michel Foucault. Comienza con una breve reflexión respecto a lo que estaba haciendo con estos posts, y luego es seguida por un pequeño texto que escribí para el periódico online Be...

This paper argues that territory is more than a simple concept, and that William Shakespeare is a valuable guide to understanding its complexities. Shakespeare’s plays explore many aspects of geography, politics and territory. They include ideas about the division of kingdoms in King Lear, the struggle over its control in Macbeth and many of the En...

This lecture sketches the contours of a political–legal theory of terrain. It argues that terrain is a useful concept to think the materiality of territory. Terrain is where the geopolitical and the geophysical meet, and it is therefore a helpful concept to make political–legal understandings of territory better account for the complexities of the...

Foucault only refers to Shakespeare in a few places in his work. He is intrigued by the figures of madness that appear in King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. He occasionally notes the overthrow of one monarch by another, such as in Richard II or Richard III, arguing that “a part of Shakespeare's historical drama really is the drama of the coup d’État.”...

This chapter develops a parallel project to Foucault’s predominant interest in biopolitics, in relation to geopolitics. It suggests that the latter can be understood in a related way, and drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Elizabeth Grosz and others, suggests a threefold relation between geopower, geopolitics and geometrics. The point is no...

Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge was published in March 1969; Discipline and Punish in February 1975. Although only six years apart, the difference in tone is stark: the former is a methodological treatise, the latter a call to arms. What accounts for the radical shift in Foucault's approach?Foucault's time in Tunisia had been a polit...

This article is a transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon in San Francisco in October 1983. It has never previously been published and is transcribed on the basis of a tape recording made at the time. Foucault and Simon begin with a discussion of Foucault’s 1977 lecture ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual...

This chapter examines the way in which mathematics and politics intertwined in National Socialist Germany, particularly in relation to the period between 1933 and 1939. As Heidegger’s critical writings on the regime showed, one of the particular issues was the way in which what he calls machination and later technology depended upon a particular no...

On 26 August 1974, Michel Foucault completed work on Discipline and Punish, and on that very same day began writing the first volume of The History of Sexuality. A little under ten years later, on 25 June 1984, shortly after the second and third volumes were published, he was dead. This decade is one of the most fascinating of his career. It begin...

This article analyses Foucault’s 1972–3 lecture course, La société punitive. While the course can certainly be seen as an initial draft of themes for the 1975 book Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish), there are some important differences. The reading here focuses on different modes of punishment; the civil war and the social enemy; the comp...

A review forum of Stuart Elden's (2013) The Birth of Territory book. Featuring an introduction by Stephen Legg, commenataries by Mike Heffernan (University of Nottingham), Briony McDonagh (University of Hull), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (George Washington University), Saskia Sassen (Columbia University), and a response by Stuart Elden (University of Warw...

This introduction to the translation of Henri Lefebvre's 1956 essay “The theory of ground rent and rural Sociology” moves through three stages. First, it suggests that Anglophone appropriations of Lefebvre have tended to focus too much on his urban writings, at the expense of understanding his early work on rural sociology, and failing to recognise...

The April 2014 kidnapping of the schoolgirls at Chibok, north-eastern Nigeria, has meant that Boko Haram is now widely discussed by Western governments and in Western media. Yet within Nigeria the group has been well known for several years. Boko Haram's activities, or actions attributed to the group, have developed in a range of ways, many contrad...

This response to John Agnew agrees that the history of ideas is never enough for the project of understanding the world but argues that it is a crucial part of that work. The commentary begins by contesting the claim that there is a turn towards this perspective in geography and suggests that much more needs to be done. I engage with Agnew’s articl...

This chapter discusses the early Middle Ages. It begins with a reading of Saint Augustine’s two cities, and reads him, along with Jerome and Paulus Orosius, in the context of the barbarian invasions. It moves to an analysis of the work of Boethius and Isidore of Seville and their attempts to preserve the classical heritage. The political context of...

The book’s conclusion discusses state practices and techniques of cartography, surveying and statistics and looks at examples from many particular histories of states and their territories. It therefore outlines ways in which territory came to be understood and practiced as a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and cont...

This article discusses the way that the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) made a number of significant contributions to geography. In outlining his contributions as a geologist, palaeontologist, biologist, historian, political theorist and geopolitician, it challenges the straightforward way he is read in geography....

Shakespeare’s King Lear begins with a division of Britain between the King’s daughters. Lear says he wishes to divest himself of “interest of territory, cares of state.” What follows is a remarkable play about the politics of space, not simply in terms of Lear’s story but also in terms of the subplot concerning the legitimate and illegitimate sons...

We all-too-often think of the spaces of geography as areas, not volumes. Territories are bordered, divided and demarcated, but not understood in terms of height and depth. ‘Secure the area’ is a common expression for the military and police, but what happens if another dimension is taken into account and we think what it means to ‘secure the volume...

This article approaches the question of territory, and its relation to politics and governance, from a historical perspective. The approach here is to interrogate the claims made by Foucault concerning territory in his work on governmentality. Foucault sees territory as crucial to the Middle Ages through to Machiavelli, but as displaced as the obje...

This response to John Allen (2011) focuses on the understandings of geometry, topology, topography and territory used in the article. I challenge his largely ahistorical renderings of these terms, suggesting that these terms cannot be seen as static, and therefore put into convenient oppositions. Territory, for instance, is not simply a bounded spa...

The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) annual Medals and Awards recognise achievements in geographical research, fieldwork, exploration, photography, teaching, and in enthusing public audiences. The speeches and citations are a record of the ceremony of 2011. With comments by Dr Sylvia Earle, Professors David Liv...

This response to Marco Antonsich focuses on a few key issues. Contrary to the suggestion that I focus more on a term than an idea, or that my way of working is mere etymology or philology, I stress the importance of thinking the relation between words, concepts and practices. To look at any one alone is misleading and historically impoverished. I f...

The ontologies of space and territory, our experience of them and the techniques we use to govern them, the very conception of the socio-spatial formations that we inhabit, are all historically specific: they depend on a genealogy of practices, knowledges, discourses, regulations, performances and representations articulated in a way that is extrem...

This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it has been understood in different historical and geographical contexts. It does so first by critically interrogating w...

This article discusses the third Greek sense of the term demos. As well as meaning either the people as a whole, or a group within them, the term also meant the deme, a location. The relation between politics, democracy and location is examined through examining models for the division of land within the Greek polis. The main focus is on Kleisthene...

In this article, we offer an account of how the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre can be read as a theorist of territory. While Lefebvre’s writings on state space have generated some interest in recent years, the territorial dimensions of his thinking on this issue have not been explored. Meanwhile, the question of territory...

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 Eld...

This article provides a reading of the Old English poem Beowulf, with a focus on its symbolic and political geographies. The key question is the role of place or site in the poem in general terms, and the more specific issue of land. The article first analyses three significant sites in the narrative — the locations of the battles between Beowulf a...

This paper considers the ways in which Iraq’s territorial integrity has been invoked by the international community, how it was violated by the US-led coalition between 2003 and 2007, and how these acts have called into question the future viability of the Iraqi state. The paper contends that Iraq provides an instructive illustration of how the int...

This introductory essay provides a background to the writings of Peter Sloterdijk. It begins with a discussion of writings translated into English in the late 1980s—the Critique of Cynical Reason and Thinker on Stage—but then shows how Sloterdijk’s work has developed and changed over the last two decades. Particular attention is paid to his writing...

This article offers a critical reassessment of Immanuel Kant's lectures on Physische Geographie and his contribution to geographical thought more generally. There are a number of reasons why this reassessment is needed: the lectures are finally about to be published in English translation; careful philological work in German has exposed how corrupt...

This ‘afterword’ to the papers on dialectics situates the debate in the ground between Marxism and poststructuralism. Rather than a wholesale rejection of the dialectic, these authors attempt to think how poststructuralism might force an encounter with it, retaining yet transforming it. Drawing on Deleuze’s characterization of abstract thought as d...

While geographical aspects of the « war on terror » have received extensive discussion, the specifically territorial aspects have been less well explored. This article engages with the relation between territory and terror through three main angles. First, the relation between terrorist training camps and the absence of sovereign power over territo...

The Conservative party under David Cameron's leadership has embarked on a series of foreign policy initiatives which appear to revise the political right's traditional reluctance to interfere in third-party conflicts with no obvious British interest. This article looks at whether this shift is substantial through an examination of Cameron's and Wil...