Christian Abrahamsson, Lund University
Incidentally, the reminder from Mary Thomas to submit this piece came at a moment when I was busy rearranging and unpacking my library. For the first time in nearly five years I have, almost, all my books in the same place. It is a library that I have collected, more or less, over the past decade. A decade characterised by incessant movements between different places – Uppsala, Berkeley, Norrköping, Oxford, Vancouver, Stockholm, Wageningen, Amsterdam and Lund – and across different literatures. Going over my library I cannot help but think about the conversations forming the background noise tying its volumes together. Like the conversation with Allan Pred at Berkeley which made me run down to University Press Books on Bancroft Way to buy, among many other books, Michael Taussig’s My Cocaine Museum. Still one of the most inspiring books I have read. Breath-taking not only in its creativity but also in its ability to draw together the concreteness of lives lived with the poetics of words told. A feat also accomplished by Pred’s own The Past is not dead: facts, fictions, and enduring racial stereotypes. Or, the phone call from Gunnar Olsson one Tuesday evening in Uppsala telling me that in my pigeonhole at the department he had put the manuscript of his forthcoming book Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason. It is still the only (academic) book I haven’t been able to put down. Olsson’s book changed the way I think. It is also one of the few books that have accompanied me on all my subsequent journeys – literally and figuratively. The key insights I drew from it concern the aleatory vibrations of the paradoxical limit between expression and impression, meaning and matter, form and process and the copula is and the conjunctive and. Represented in my library are also the conversations with, among others, Sebastian Abrahamsson and Anders Munk in Oxford. More often than not taking place at the Kings Arms or the Turf. These conversations were crucial mostly for the way they deepened my appreciation of authors such as Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol and Isabelle Stengers. In this regard the two books I would like to nominate are Mol’s The Body Multiple and Stengers’ Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage creation de concepts – two extraordinary books that, in their own distinct ways, address the same paradoxical limits as Abysmal, albeit in a distinctly different register. The more recent layers of my library bear a distinct echo of the conversations I had with Trevor Barnes, Jamie Doucette, Pablo Mendez, Ted Rutland and Andrew Shmuelyat UBC. Touching too many topics to mention here they often percolated between pragmatism, political economy, anthropology and the history of ideas and science. Of particular importance for me were Francesca Bordogna’s brilliant study of William James William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge, Neil Smith’s path breaking book about Isaiah Bowman American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization and Adriana Petryna’s Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. There are, of course, many other books I could have nominated – Peter Gordon’s Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, Caroline Walker Bynum’s Metamorphosis and Identity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity, Natalie Zemon Davis’ Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds, Reviel Netz’s The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History or Sara Westin’s Planerat, alltför planerat: En perspektivistisk studie i stadsplaneringens paradoxer. All great books. Any list of this kind will be an expression of the idiosyncrasies we are all, inevitably, caught up in. For me books are attached to situations, voyages, places, people and conversations.
