Politics is sublime

International audienceCastella, the factory owner Castella has a big moustache, and he tells vulgar jokes. He does not like reading, he does not like the theatre. He spends his days at a factory, which belongs to him, and his evenings at the theatre, to which he seemingly does not belong. His unrefined ways, lack of education, and lack of artistic culture make him an object of ridicule when he joins the artists for dinner after the spectacle, with the hope of gaining the sympathy of the lead actress, Clara, with whom he has fallen madly in love. But they seem worlds apart. Castella's efforts seem merely to consolidate his position as a joking matter in this artistic milieu. In yet another effort to be close to Clara, Castella attends an exhibition by one of her painter friends and buys a painting. But how could this moustachioed industrialist have a taste for painting not induced by some other motivation? The painter's boyfriend believes that Castella felt obliged to buy it after having unwittingly insulted him and his boyfriendöthe painter öwith a pejorative remark on gays. Clara thinks Castella is buying art to impress her. But Castella goes even further: he commissions the painter to paint a mural on the fac° ade of his factory, which happens to be a paint factory. Although the painter's boyfriend believes that Castella has commissioned his boyfriend because he appreciates his art, Clara thinks they are taking advantage of his feelings towards her. ``I know Castella'', she says, ``he doesn't appreciate it. He doesn't know a thing.'' But when she visits the factory to put an end to this exploitation', as she sees it, Castella surprises her by telling her that he actually likes the paintings, and that is why he is buying them. ``You didn't think for a minute it could be because I liked them? Don't worry'', he assures Clara, ``it's because I like them.'' Clara is speechless; even this uneducated, vulgar factory owner öwho doesn't know, as she said, a thingöhas taste. He is not, as she wrongly believed, trying to satisfy the taste of others'öthe film's title (1) öbut his own. There is something egalitarian here: Castella is capable of making judgments of taste, just like her, her painter friend, and all the others. Abstract. This paper examines the political aesthetic of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancie© re who in their own ways, found resources in an innovative reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment. The paper explores the Kantian legacy in the political understanding of these two thinkers. It then focuses on Rancie© re's notion of dissensus and argues that his politics shares the aesthetic features associated with the Kantian sublime

Two Decades of French Urban Policy: From Social Development of Neighbourhoods to the Republican Penal State

International audienceThis paper provides an overview of French national urban policy for the period 1981–2002, organized around three themes: spatial conceptualizations of intervention areas and changing scales of intervention, discursive articulations of intervention areas, and legitimation of state intervention. By relating the transformations of this policy to the contemporary restructuring of the French state, the paper argues that although there are elements of convergence, the contemporary restructuring of the French state differs remarkably from a US or UK-style neoliberalization, partly because of the republican tradition emphasizing the active role of the state for the well-being of its citizens. This restructuring carries the signs of the strong state tradition in France, and is best understood as an articulation of neoliberalism with established political traditions, an articulation that I try to capture with the notion of a ''republican penal state''

Making space for disability in eco-housing and eco-communities

There is continued failure to build homes for diverse and disabled occupancy. We use three eco-communities in England to explore how their eco-houses and wider community spaces accommodate the complex disability of hypotonic Cerebral Palsy. Using site visits, video footage, spatial mapping, field diary observations, surveys and interviews, this paper argues that little attention has been paid to making eco-communities and eco-houses accessible. There are, we argue, three useful and productive ways to interrogate accessibility in eco-communities, through understandings of legislation, barriers and mobility. These have three significant consequences for eco-communities and disabled access: ecological living as practised by these eco-communities relies upon particular bodily capacities, and thus excludes many disabled people; disabled access was only considered in relation to the house and its thresholds, not to the much broader space of the home; and eco-communities need to be, and would benefit from being, spaces of diverse interaction

‘The Modern Atlas’:compressed air and cities c. 1850–1930

This article provides an overview of pneumatic technologies in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western cities. As urban centres continued to grow and expand in the nineteenth century, networks of compressed air were introduced to provide public utilities and private services in a variety of domains, ranging from postal services to beauty parlours. Previously used in mining and large construction works, pneumatic technologies seemed to rival electricity towards the end of the nineteenth century in the provision of urban utilities. Eventually, however, these technologies did not prove flexible enough to keep up with rapid urban population growth and the expansion of cities themselves, nor were they able to become glorious symbols of urban modernity. Through an overview of compressed air applications as used in urban centres, particularly Paris and London, the article provides an insight into the relationship between technological networks and urban modernities from the perspective of this relatively neglected urban network and technology

Hyphal network whole field imaging allows for accurate estimation of anastomosis rates and branching dynamics of the filamentous fungus Podospora anserina

The success of filamentous fungi in colonizing most natural environments can be largely attributed to their ability to form an expanding interconnected network, the mycelium, or thallus, constituted by a collection of hyphal apexes in motion producing hyphae and subject to branching and fusion. In this work, we characterize the hyphal network expansion and the structure of the fungus Podospora anserina under controlled culture conditions. To this end, temporal series of pictures of the network dynamics are produced, starting from germinating ascospores and ending when the network reaches a few centimeters width, with a typical image resolution of several micrometers. The completely automated image reconstruction steps allow an easy post-processing and a quantitative analysis of the dynamics. The main features of the evolution of the hyphal network, such as the total length L of the mycelium, the number of "nodes" (or crossing points) N and the number of apexes A, can then be precisely quantified. Beyond these main features, the determination of the distribution of the intra-thallus surfaces (S; i; ) and the statistical analysis of some local measures of N, A and L give new insights on the dynamics of expanding fungal networks. Based on these results, we now aim at developing robust and versatile discrete/continuous mathematical models to further understand the key mechanisms driving the development of the fungus thallus

Re-conceptualising Territorial Cohesion Through the Prism of Spatial Justice : Critical Perspectives on Academic and Policy Discourses

Peer reviewe

Antiracist Feminism and the Politics of Solidarity in Neoliberal Times

The chapter analyses the establishment and expansion of antiracist feminism in the last decade throughout the Nordic region, with new groups, media sites, and public events organised, especially in the large cities. Keskinen examines antiracist feminist and queer of colour activism in which the main or sole actors belong to groups racialised as non-white or ‘others’ in Nordic societies. A fundamental argument developed in the chapter is the central role and potential of these emerging social movements in the reconfiguring of political agendas and tackling pressing societal issues, due to its capacity to overlap and connect the borders of antiracist, feminist, and (to some extent) class-based politics. The chapter further argues for the usefulness of theorising the neoliberal turn of racial capitalism as the societal condition in which feminist activism takes place.Peer reviewe

Space, Politics and Aesthetics

International audienc

The 'where' of asylum

International audienceDoes law produce spaces where it no longer applies? Does it, in other words, set up spaces of lawlessness? The question seems almost rhetorical given the growing body of work inspired by Agamben's notions of the camp' and state of exception'. Indeed, in the past decade or so, this question has been guiding much research in various disciplines, with human geography probably at the forefront, and unsurprisingly so given that the question is as spatial as it is legal. But this is not the first encounter between law and geography. There are, in fact, two different theoretical strands to human geographers' engagement with the relationship between law and space, one rooted in the critical legal studies movement, and the other, more recent one, in Agamben's work. The former, usually called critical legal geography, is animated by a concern to see law not as timeless and independent of social life, but as shaped by, and in turn shaping, social relations, identities, and power structures öto see law, as Delaney (2003) succinctly put it, ``as a thing of this world''. Law, in this view, is not merely prohibitive, but also productive; it is constitutive of the spaces of social life. Furthermore, it has a geographical specificity; despite its claim to universality, the where of law matters. The latter strand is more concerned with the spatiality of law and sovereign power. What animates this growing body of work is the idea that law may actually be involved in producing spaces of lawlessness, although what is in question is not the absence of law as such but violence committed through law. It is this latter strand that seems to be the more prominent one in contemporary legal ^ spatial research. This shift in focus from spaces of law to spaces of lawlessness is not simply rhetorical (`because Agamben had this idea ...'), but circumstantial. This is perhaps best evidenced by the recurrent references to Guanta¨amo and military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have become the paradigmatic examples of much writing on space, law, and sovereignty. (1) Compared with such high-profile examples, however, the issue of asylum has received relatively little attention, despite the worrying developments in the European Union's (EU) asylum law and policy in the past decade or so. This is not to suggest that asylum has been completely neglected by geographers; nor that the institution of asylum is in good health elsewhere in the world. However, the shape EU asylum law and policy has been taking deserves attention from the perspectives both of spaces of law and spaces of lawlessness as it has spatial manifestations in a variety of forms (detention centres, transit zones, appropriated city streets) and a range of places, including those beyond the territorial boundaries of member states. It not (1) Although the practices of the US government in the aftermath of September 11 brought onto the stage the issue of detention of foreigners, Dow (2004) shows that an appalling and largely obscure system of detention for so-called illegal immigrants' had existed in the US well before that. Therefore, detention-related human rights abuses and legal violations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guanta¨amo were not such a novelty; they were, in a sense, a continuation of similar practices at home towards detained immigrants, practices that violate fundamental rights (presumption of innocence, the right of habeas corpus, the right to humane and decent treatment), remain arbitrary, opaque, and wanting public scrutiny