Arise, ye (in)debtariats of the world!

Revolution and the Critique of Human Geography. Prospects for the Right to the City After 50 Years’ is the paper that Don Mitchell read for the plenary lecture at the 7th Nordic Geographic Meet, held in Stockholm in June 2017. The paper was the Geografiska Annaler B Lecture, at the invi- tation Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography and the conference organizers. Proceeding from the premise that ‘revolution is a geographical act’, Mitchell relies on two key revolutionary thinkers cum protagonists to convey the profoundly spatial nature of revolution. The first, Henri Lefebvre is a well-known thinker in geographical circles not least through his oft- cited 1967 text The Right to The City, with the likes of David Harvey, Edward Soja, Neil Smith, Andy Merrifield, Bob Shields, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, and of course Don Mitchell himself, as interlocutors. The second protagonist, Guy Debord is a significant thinker in his own right, Lefebvre’s former student and political antagonist, well known in Marxian, media, film and cultural theory, but not so well known in geographical circles. Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (1995) is a pioneer work on commodified life, culture and power in the contemporary (Merrifield 2004). It is only apposite then that Mitchell grants Debord more space (15 entries on The Society of the Spectacle compared to the 4 or 5 entries on the Right to the City) in his deliberations on revo- lution. Even with the numbered format (reminiscent of Debord’s numbered Theses), one can discern an introduction, corpus and a coda. In what follows, I present my take on Don Mitchell’s lecture/ paper by focusing on two themes. The first revolves around issues of time and history, the second is parallel readings of Debord-Mitchell on questions of space, revolution and the critique of human geography. I wind up by offering an alternative take on revolution and the critique of human geography.

Quo Vadis Europe?

The present article offers a trenchant criticism of the imaginative geographies of 'Europe' using a Pred inspired methodology. The essay strikes at the mythos of Europa as the vanguard of humanity, and enumerates many of the 'dirty tricks' that project the singular as confirmation of the universal. It aligns with the critique of the present in the manner of Allan Pred's critical takes on Europe and deconstruction of the mythos of Europe. With Nietzsche's takes on 'philosophical laughter' as a cue, the essay offers playful parodies on the narcissistic discourses of Europe's historical mission or purpose, its essence/identity, and its place in history. My critique is thus an instance of postcolonial laughter. Critique of historicism and 'European reason' are recurrent themes in Pred's work. Historicism places European humanity as history's prime (favourite) subject, culminating in the infamous yet pompous 'end of history' thesis popularized by Fukuyama, of which Pred was highly critical of. In my reading, Pred's playful takes on Fukuyama's folly, are inspired by postcolonial laughter. Postcolonial laughter is deployed here as an affirmative response to the European negation of the other's being. I use by turn satire and irony, by turn parody and the grotesque to strike at the heart of the mythos of Europe and its 'dirty tricks'. Postcolonial laughter unsettles the hubris and narcissism underlying discourses of Europe's mission/moralism as the vanguard of humanity. Postcolonial laughter is attuned to Pred's 'restless geographies'

Europas origo och telos : En tragikomisk betraktelse

Var börjar och slutar Europa? Varför är den frågan intressant, relevant och viktig att ställa, idag? Frågan i sig innebär ju att man antar att Europa har en början och ett slut. Den innebär dessutom att dess början och slut kan bestämmas. Överhuvudtaget, varför är tron på alfa och omega, behovet av att fastlägga början och slutet nödvändigt, för att tala med Nietzsche (2002: 11)? Vad föranleder spörsmålet och vad står på spel i viljan eller begäret att fastställa ursprung (origo) och mål (telos)

What Would Zarathustra Say?

In this paper we address the contemporary interest for the monstrous and non-human beings in popular culture, fiction as well as in academia, make some speculations about its popularity and ask ourselves what Zarathustra would say? Jameson remark that it is easier to imagine the end of the world rather than the end of capitalism (1998) – itself a précis of the monstrous condition we find ourselves in – serves as a door opener for our deliberations. Agamben’s claim that the human and the non-human are positioned on a threshold rather than on either side of the walls of polis, allows us to imagine monstrous geographies’ topological spaces that fuse the human/non-human, bios/zoē and biopolitics/thanatopolitics. The monstrous, in other words, is the doppelganger of the human. Out of this we make two tentative inferences regarding the current popularity of the monstrous. First, an increasing awareness in the collective cultural imaginary that the corporeal, psychological and cognitive capacities of the human will soon be inadequate to live up to the demands of ‘turbo’ capitalism, a capitalism on steroids so monstrous that we do not see its monstrosity any longer. Secondly, predatory capitalism follows the logic of active nihilism, one that relies primarily on topological rather than Euclidian spatial logics. As such it is ‘blind’ to ontological distinctions (gender, race, human, non-human). Thirdly, this does not imply that passive nihilism is no longer relevant for the logics of predatory capital. Indeed, monstrous figures may embody passive nihilism more fully than the non-monstrous. For if capitalism is the true monster, then monstrosity – in its active and passive guises – is now banal. Is not the monstrous, then, really the non-monstrous? We conceive the tree interpretations as interrelated and central to the post-political condition. Post-politics can thus be conceived as the era of banal monstrosity, a nihilistic condition in which the whole world is being violently subdued by predatory capitalism. Does this presage the dawn of the higher men, a post-nihilist era? What would Zarathustra say?   Key Words: Monster, nihilism, post-political, capitalism, anthropological machine, biopolitics

The paradigmatic tourist

In the Western thought tradition, the tourist has not been a subject worthy of intellectual musings and philosophical deliberations. Indeed, the tourist has been portrayed in primarily derisive ways. Nietzsche's remark, "Tourists-they climb mountains like animals, stupid and perspiring, no one has told them that there are beautiful views on the way," epitomizes the dominant attitude. Why does the figure of the tourist elicit such negative reactions? Do the sentiments perhaps imply something else, or is the tourist a doppelgänger, not anomalous or marginal but normative-a paradigmatic figure? If so, then what can be said of the poetics and politics of the tourist conceptualized as a paradigmatic subject?