I mentioned in my last post that I was switching focus to a different book project - one focused on subjectivity and provisionally titled 'encountering the subject'. It's basically a more sustained attempt to develop a post-phenomenology of subjectivity, taking forward what I've written about in shorter form in various places (including with James Ash).

Having been to France for a few days for a project meeting with Damien Masson, Sara Fregonese and Simon Runkel (which was really stimulating, though I didn't take photos for some reason [hence none here]), I've been getting back into that over the past two or three weeks and have made some slow progress... It's probably daft to be working on two books at once, but I'm enjoying being able to switch between two things I'm working on because I want to rather than as a result of other pressures (REF etc). There is something mutually supporting between the projects even if they are a bit different in focus and approach...

The biggest difference I've been facing here thus far compared with the NRT book is that a lot of what I'm working on exists in some form and requires editing / finalising / adapting to fit within the narrative of the book. So, while with the NRT book I was starting with an entirely blank page and trying to explain a series of points / concepts / themes clearly, here I've mostly been trying to whittle, refine, reorientate etc. existing material and it's taking much more time.

So, much of the past few weeks has been spent working with a long and sprawling draft of material I've worked at off and on for a few years that engages with the writings of Roberto Esposito. I came across Esposito through his book Communitas which was mentioned somewhere when I was reading lots and lots of Jean-Luc Nancy. This was back in 2009 or 2010 and I think it was just translated (so - may have been a 'you might be interested in' success for Amazon...). That book sat on my shelves for a while and moved between offices as job changes happened.

A few years ago now, though, I sat down and read through Esposito that and, realising I wished I'd not waited, I went on and read the rest of his key works related to that / available in English at that time. That covered his Immunitas, Bios, and The Third Person. These all revolve around his project of developing an 'affirmative biopolitics'. I also read his 'Terms of the Political' and have recently read 'Persons and Things'. The initial writing I did from that was very much in a 'what does Esposito say' vein which was trying to help clarify his arguments largely for myself. It seems very few geographers have really engaged or written in detail on that. That draft led to a couple of conference presentations back in 2013 and 2014 but was put aside for reasons I can't really remember. Oh, that's right - impending parenthood.

When I returned to it last year, I realised that I didn't want to write a book that just outlined the position of a range of thinkers and instead try to do something that bounced their ideas of a specific 'real-world' encounter which might speak to that theory but also question it. I wanted something less 'textbooky'. So, I spent a bit of time trying to do that, ballooning things up to nearly 17,000 words. Returning to this now, I've been trying to both cut down some of the length explanations / exposition and building more of a narrative argument into the text. I'm not done with that, but I've got a first draft that I'm happier with. It still needs to be cut and the arguments pulled out more, but it's getting there and I'm happy to move on with the rest of the chapters before coming back for a final push / edit when all the pieces are there. This will actually be chapter 3 of the book (after the intro, a chapter 1 and a chapter 2) so I'll need the chapters before it finished before it can be finalised, anyway.

Very recently, then, I've been trying to work at some other existing material that'll form parts of the book - my paper in Emotion, Space and Society that works with Jean-Luc Nancy and such a case / encounter and my recent Geography Compass paper. The former with be the basis for the book's chapter 2 is more in the style I want the book to take but I'm using the freedom of a book manuscript to expand and clarify some of the points in there, as well as introduce a little standardisation between this material and the other chapters (i.e. having some common context about the people I'm engaged with near the start of each chapter). I've also recently received a couple of recent / 'new' Nancy books - Ego Sum and The Disavowed Community, so I want to read those and include references if / where appropriate. For the latter material, I'm using the Compass piece as a starting point for the book's introduction chapter. The key challenge there is removing a bit of the reviewing tone and pushing it again more towards the arguments I want to make / situating what's to come. It's really useful having that review material there as I can situate the book within it, but it needs more 'me' through that and a clearer articulation of the book project within it. I won't finalise it until all the other chapters are written and I'm clear fully on where they all end up, but tinkering with it now has been helpful both in realising I've got stuff I can use but also what I need to be clearer on to myself as much as in writing.

The remaining two main chapters for the book (what will be Chapter 1 and Chapter 4) will engage critically with Levinas's discussion of the face and Jean-Luc Marion's discussion of 'givenness', respectively. I'm going to be working on the Levinas material next while I'm in Australia. He's probably the most established / familiar face (excuse the pun) in geography when it comes to critical engagements with subjectivity (though more so for ethics), but I'm hoping to take that in original directions based on the critical disposition I take with his work. I read a fair bit of Levinas towards the end of my PhD but not since. From what I remember there, it does a lot in terms of the sort of critical engagement with certain understandings of subjectivity I'm trying to develop in the book but also that there's quite a bit of stuff I'm not comfortable with. But that's also the case (but to a lesser degree) with Nancy, which is why I became interested in Esposito. The narrative of the book is less about a synthesis of the positions of these thinkers or picking one ahead of others and more about how we can move forward through each, taking something up, adding something in, responding to issues along the way, etc.. There will be, I think, a short conclusion chapter in the book that tries to draw some of that out and make clear where things have got to (and still need to go) but I'm leaving that for now. 

I'm guessing my next post will either be from or after Australia. That may well resemble holiday snaps that anything academic...

As of yesterday, I've (pretty much) drafted the first 3 chapters of the NRT book. I say pretty much as there's one gap I can't do anything about now that will lead to the production of a figure, but the text is pretty much drafted. 

It has been an interesting start and I've managed to stick largely to the rules I set myself (see 1st post). I've started at the start and I'm writing in a linear way, both chapter-by-chapter and within each chapter. I'm not editing as I go or worrying about it being quite right yet. I've written more than my target words each week / day, though that's also meant I've gone WAY over the chapter limits I set myself. But I've not worried about it / will edit later (for a sense of what WAY means - I should have 21,000 words at this point and I've more than 34,000...). Looking back at the proposal though, I don't think I'm going overboard and it's a case that the plan was far to ambitious in terms of what would be covered in the words allocated. But again, I'll edit that when I've a full draft. 

I've worked almost exclusively on the book for the past 9 weeks. At times, a little too exclusively. About half way through that I realised that I needed to find a slightly healthier way to work. That became quite a literal issue when a muscle in my back spasmed... Part of the problem is that before starting working on this I was Programme Co-Ordinator and Senior Tutor for all of our geography programmes at Plymouth. That translated into constant interruption. So, often, while I'd try to sit down for a long time to work on something, I was perpetually interrupted and so ended up down corridors speaking to people, talking to our professional support staff, etc etc. Being on sabbatical and working from home has meant almost no distraction (other than toddlers and cats demanding cuddles / strokes, respectively). That translated into me sitting down at my desk at 8.30-9 and staying there writing / thinking / reading / writing for hours and hours on end. It's reach time to get my daughter from nursery and I'd realised I hadn't left the house since dropping her in the morning. And I was absolutely exhausted because of the work I was doing. A lot of the admin I did before wasn't exactly mentally taxing so gave me a break from thinking to hard. I've totally lost that type of semi-down time.

So, a few weeks ago I worked out a schedule for my days. There are some subtle differences for each day based on things like when my daughter is or isn't at nursery, but each generally consists of the following:
1) a trip one of a couple of favourite cafes where I tend to get on with writing. Normally I can get my day's words done then alone...
2) some kind of exercise / going outside for a walk. I'm lucky to live next to a large park so I've worked our a few 15-20min loops to walk.
3) set periods at home for writing (usually no longer than 3 hrs)
4) set periods at home for reading (usually around 2 hours long)
5) some time to do something that doesn't involve a lot of thought (emails, research related admin, writing up some notes from reading, some 'data' transcription I've got to do etc.)  

This has seemed much healthier and I think now that I'm a couple of weeks into the official sabbatical period I'm losing the slightly panicked feeling that 'must make it count, must produce, might not this sort of opportunity again' etc.).

But all that said, I'm setting the NRT book aside for the next 8 weeks or so. I tend to work like this normally, just on a different scale, when it comes to articles etc. I'll work on one fairly intensely then leave it aside at an appropriate point (a draft, getting 'stuck' etc.), while I pick up another. The first tends to drop to the back of my mind and I can come back to it with a fresher feeling and some different perspectives. Until recently it wasn't a conscious decision and more a product of waiting for review comments etc. to come back. But I think I work better this way that trying to have multiple strands going at the same time.

So, as the NRT book stuff goes into a drawer, there are a couple of other things going on...

First up, I've got a quick trip to Cergy-Pointoise for the rest of this week for a project meeting with Damien Masson and others. This is the first meeting for a project we're starting a project on 'Living in the City with Terror' that extends the work I did with Damien on Atmospheres and Security. It's going to be interesting to see how that develops...

Second, when I get back, next week I'm going to move back to a longer running book project, provisionally titled 'Encountering the Subject'. This is really different to the NRT one in a number of senses. While I started the NRT one relatively from scratch, this book aims to draw together and develop some strands of my work that have gone on for some time now. The book will basically be about subjectivity (or rather, intersubjectivity) after a range of post-phenomenological ideas. My paper in Emotion, Space and Society will form the basis for one chapter and mirror the approach I'm hoping to take throughout - of staging a conversation between conceptual material and some kind of encounter that sets the scene for it / asks questions back. Also, my very recent paper in Geography Compass will provide a range of review-based material for the introduction.

Before starting the NRT book I'd been working for some time with Roberto Esposito's writing on community-immunity, including a presentation years ago at the IBG and another in Bristol a little  more recently. That's work has  built up to a very bloated draft (somewhere in the region of 17,000 words) that I want to spend the next few weeks whittling down / getting into better shape as a proper draft (more like 12,000). After that, will be further work on the introduction (building on the Compass paper) and what will be the first chapter that comes before the Nancy and Esposito material. I haven't gone looking for a contract yet but I wanted to get at least two or three chapters in so I could article the point / argument more clearly in that and provide sample material.

I'm aiming to post more about that project separately / once I've got back into it and update and things go along. 

Oh, and I'm off to Perth in Australia for much of November where I'll have a desk at the University of Western Australia and, mostly, be staying with my brother who lives there. So some of the subjectivity work will be done on the move which should be interesting in terms of fairly banal logistical questions / managing access to resources etc. I'm not sure how many books I can take that aren't about Peppa pig so I'm going to have to think quite strategically about what work I plan for that trip...