Geography Archives: France

The “Iranian people” have not spoken. What’s happening in Iran today is a developing conflict between two forces that each represent millions of people.  There are good people on both sides and the issues are complicated.  So before U.S. progressives decide to weigh in, supporting one side and condemning the other, let’s take a little […]

Rasoul Akram Hospital’s doctors and nurses protest the deaths of seven people last night, reportedly shot by basij. Iran – State TV: Seven People Killed Near Rally SiteVideo by France 24 Doctors and Nurses Protest in Tehran, 16 June 2009Video by Saeid Saeid, born in Kermanshah, is an electrical engineer in Enschede, the Netherlands.

This is the fourth in a series of articles on “Ideas for the Struggle” by Marta Harnecker. 1.  For a long time, left-wing parties were authoritarian.  The usual practice was bureaucratic centralism, very much influenced by the experiences of Soviet socialism.  All criteria, tasks, initiatives, and courses of political action were decided by the party […]

This is the third in a series of articles on “Ideas for the Struggle” by Marta Harnecker. 1.  We have said before that politics is the art of constructing a social and political force capable of changing the balance of forces in order to make possible tomorrow what appears impossible today.  But, to be able […]

Juan Cole.  Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.  Illustrations, maps.  xi + 279 pp.  $16.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-230-60603-6. Juan Cole’s Napoleon’s Egypt tells the story of revolutionary France’s attempt to conquer Egypt and the cultural interchanges that resulted.  Although various aims drove the effort, the main motive was a prerevolutionary […]

Philosophy only exists insofar as there are paradoxical relations, relations which fail to connect, or should not connect. When every connection is naturally legitimate, philosophy is impossible or in vain.

Philosophy is the violence done by thought to impossible relations.

Today, which is to say “after Deleuze,” there is a clear requisitioning of philosophy by cinema — or of cinema by philosophy. It is therefore certain that cinema offers us paradoxical relations, entirely improbable connections.

Talks between Barack Obama and the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships over the past fortnight have unleashed a flood of media interest in the settlements Israel has been constructing on Palestinian territory for more than four decades. The US president’s message is unambiguous: the continuing growth of the settlements makes impossible the establishment of a Palestinian […]

This is the second in a series of articles on “Ideas for the Struggle” by Marta Harnecker. 1.  Popular movements and, more generally, various social actors who are engaged in the struggle against neoliberal globalization today at the international level as well as in their own countries reject, with good reason, actions that aim to […]

First of all, we would like to ask you where the story that you tell in your movie comes from.

The idea was born from the complexity of the theme proposed: dignity. I think it’s very difficult to deal with such sweeping concepts as justice and dignity in the allotted two or three minutes, so I looked for an idea that actually asked the question ‘What is dignity’ rather than answering it.

  This is the first in a series of articles on “Ideas for the Struggle” by Marta Harnecker. 1.  The recent popular uprisings at the turn of the 21st century that have rocked numerous countries such as Argentina and Bolivia — and, more generally, the history of the multiple social explosions that have occurred in […]

Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009). This book is a disgrace. It is difficult to understand why a reputable publisher like Yale University Press would wish to have its name on a book that is so dishonest, ill-informed, and pursues an obvious political agenda.  Perhaps the clue […]

Nancy Fraser‘s analysis of the obstacles to social and political justice represents an advance at a theoretical level for those who face the dilemmas of social practice.  In this sense, her work reinforces the importance of the role of the intellectual, not only when it comes to dealing with moments of crisis, but also with […]

Essayist, thinker and professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, Butler is best known for her studies of gender and sexuality, in which she examines the question of what it means to remake, to resignify, the restrictive normative concepts of sexual life and gender. Is it possible to establish any […]

  This action was led by the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), especially Omar Slaouti, who heads the NPA list in Île-de-France, as well as by Senator Alima Boumediene-Thiery (Greens), conducted in a clear, educational fashion, with the participation of many local politicians.  The NPA walks the walk, demonstrating that the call for the boycott of […]

On Monday, 4 May 2009, 4,000 prison guards went on strike in France, protesting prison overcrowding (63,351 prisoners held in facilities designed for only 52,000), which has led to rising suicides of prisoners (96 in 2007, 115 in 2008, and 42 so far this year), inadequate budgets (resulting in the low starting salary of 1,200 […]

POINTE-A-PITRE, 1 May 2009 (AFP) — The leader of the New Anti-Capitalist Party Olivier Besancenot marched on Friday in Guadeloupe, joining the procession organized by 13 trade unions of the LKP, which started the recent general strike in the island.  Besancenot characterized his presence as “hats off” to the movement. Several thousands of people (30,000 […]

  “The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined or spiritual things could exist.  Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt. [. […]

  L’image de la femme au Maghreb (Images of Women in the Maghreb), a collection of articles edited by Barzakh in Algeria and by Actes Sud and the Mediterranean Center for the Humanities (MMSH) in France, is a work of research by four writers on the representation of women in their countries.  The project was […]

  A great American theorist and intellectual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of queer theory and the author of Epistemology of the Closet, Between Men, and Tendencies among other books and articles, died on the night of Sunday, 12 April 2009.  To pay homage to her, I posed questions to two of her […]

  Conor Foley, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, Verso, 2008. All is not well within the world of humanitarian aid organisations.  In his new book, The Thin Blue Line, Conor Foley, an experienced aid worker, discusses many of the problems associated with the burgeoning relationship between contemporary aid organisations and recent […]