Space, Politics, and Aesthetics by Mustafa Dikeç

Introduction by
Published
July 12, 2016

A special review forum on Mustafa Dikeç’s Space, Politics and Aesthetics, published by Edinburgh University Press as part of its "Taking on the Political" book series. The review forum includes contributions by David Featherstone, Gillian Rose, Japhy Wilson, Mark Jackson, and Nigel Clark. The reviews are followed by a response from Mustafa Dikeç.

A special review forum on Mustafa Dikeç’s Space, Politics and Aesthetics, published by Edinburgh University Press as part of its "Taking on the Political" book series. The review forum includes contributions by David Featherstone, Gillian Rose, Japhy Wilson, Mark Jackson, and Nigel Clark. The reviews are followed by a response from Mustafa Dikeç.

See Mustafa Dikeç's most recent contributions to Society & Space: Badlands of the Republic? Revolts, the French State, and the Question of Banlieues, The ‘Where’ of Asylum, Space, Politics, and the Political, and Politics is Sublime

essays in this forum

Space, Politics and Aesthetics Review by Nigel Clark

What Dikeç conjures from his conjoined conversation with Rancière, Arendt, and Nancy is a faith that ordinary people, acting in concert, have an on-going and ultimately irrepressible ability to perturb the spatial orderings through which they are positioned and constrained. Not so much a matter of empirical verifiability, this foregrounding of a capacity to remake social space, following Rancière, is more of a wager.

By

Nigel Clark

Space, Politics and Aesthetics Review by Gillian Rose

What Dikec’s account does do, however, and rather wonderfully, is offer a sustained meditation on space, spaciosity, spatiality—that is, on forms of distribution and organization—and why they matter.

By

Gillian Rose

Space, Politics and Aesthetics Review by David Featherstone

The book is composed of a detailed and ambitious engagement with the ways in which space, politics and aesthetics function in the in the work of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. This approach is animated by a concern with the permanent possibility of politics, a concern which is shaped by a distinctive and productive mobilisation of the distinction between “politics” and “the political.”

By

David Featherstone

Space, Politics and Aesthetics Response by Mustafa Dikeç

I am grateful to my colleagues for taking the time to respond to Space, Politics, and Aesthetics. Their supportive comments are encouraging, and criticisms testing. Their more critical comments suggest that there are a few issues that I should have explained more clearly in the book. I will, therefore, take this opportunity to clarify better what I tried to do in the book, focusing on the following themes: focus and scope of the book, its engagement with Kant, its worldly inspirations, and its arguments concerning space and politics.

By

Mustafa Dikeç

Space, Politics and Aesthetics Review by Japhy Wilson

Mustafa Dikec’s new book, "Space, Politics and Aesthetics", makes an important contribution to Edinburgh University Press's excellent Taking on the Political series, and to broader debates on the nature of politics and the political. Focusing on the relation between space, politics, and aesthetics in the work of Arendt, Nancy, and Ranciere, Dikec argues that politics is a form of spatial rupture in the organization of perception.

By

Japhy Wilson

Space, Politics and Aesthetics Review by Mark Jackson

Aesthetics seems increasingly popular amongst critical geographers. Everywhere, that is, where geography seeks to interrogate its generative and political conditions. The reason is simple. Critique must seek, relentlessly so; critique demands unyielding attention to the reflexive conditions for making claims upon each other and the world.

By

Mark Jackson