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

‘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

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

Peer reviewe

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''

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

Space, Politics and Aesthetics

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Urban Rage : The Revolt of the Excluded

In the past few decades, urban riots have erupted in democracies across the world. While high profile politicians often react by condemning protestors' actions and passing crackdown measures, this book shows how these revolts are in fact rooted in exclusions and genuine grievances which our democracies are failing to address. It argues that global revolts may be sparked by a particular police or government action but nonetheless are expressions of much longer and deep seated rage accumulated through hardship and injustices that have become routine. The book examines urban revolts in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Greece, and Turkey

Disruptive politics

The strand of political theory that emphasises disruption of existing orders has generated a great deal of praise and criticism in geography and urban studies in the past few years. In this article, I address some conflicting interpretations of this strand, and describe what I see as its potential contribution. I emphasise how this strand of disruptive politics opens up new domains of inquiry by highlighting the contingency of established ways of engaging with and making sense of the world, and how it introduces a broadened, rather than limited, understanding of politics. The potential of this strand does not lie in its prescriptive or diagnostic uses, but in this opening up of politics by including practices that elude established institutions and routines

Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy

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