In contradistinction to the treatment of race as a problem of epistomologyöhow is phenotype represented in racial discourseöthe author seeks to defend a materialist ontology of race. The creative materiality of race is asserted following the`material turn' in feminism, anthropology, complexity theory, and Deleuze. Race is shown to be an embodied and material event, à machine assemblage' with a different spatiality than the self/other scheme of Hegel. Taking issue with the calls for the transcendence of race amongst cultural studies scholars such as Paul Gilroy, the author ends the paper by suggesting that the political battle against racial subordination includes a serious engagement with its biological dimensions. Race should not be eliminated, but its energies harnessed through a cosmopolitan ethics which is sensitive to its heterogeneous and dynamic nature.

Foucault and geographyIn a 1976 interview with Michel Foucault in the geographical journal He¨rodote, one of the editors told him:``You accord a de facto privilege to the factor of time, at the cost of nebulous or nomadic spatial demarcations whose uncertainty is in contrast with your care in marking off sections of time, periods and ages. ... This uncertainty of spatialisation [also] contrasts with your profuse use of spatial metaphorsöposition, displacement, site, field; sometimes geographical metaphors evenöterritory, domain, soil, horizon, archipelago, geopolitics, region, landscape'' (Foucault, 1980, pages 67, 68). Foucault responded to the accusation by stressing that these spatial metaphors actually allowed him to think through what he became known for: the intersection of power and knowledge. Foucault's geography, as Chris Philo (1992) shows, was onlỳ nomadic' and`uncertain' so that the inherently distributed nature of subjectivity and the spatiality of discursive practice could become apparent to the critical analyst:`A nyone envisaging the analysis of discourses solely in terms of temporal continuity would inevitably be led to approach and analyse it like the internal transformation of an individual consciousness'' (Foucault, 1980, page 69). Geographers are fond of the final sentence of the interview:``Geography must indeed necessarily lie at the heart of my concerns'' (page 77). Though it is true that Foucault could be vague in his topographical referencing, it can be argued that his thought was more`geographical' than, say, Jacques Lacan's or Jacques Derrida's. As Edward Said suggests, Foucault's position in poststructuralist philosophy can be termed`geopolitical':`W hereas Derrida's theory of textuality brings criticism to bear upon a signifier freed from any obligation to a transcendental signified, Foucault's theories move criticism from a consideration of the signifier to a description of the signifier's place, a place rarely innocent, dimensionless, or without the affirmative authority of discursive discipline'' (1978, page 701, original emphasis).

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Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection—a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for art's work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the cosmos, prompting experimentation with materiality, sensation, and life. In the book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008, Duke University Press, Durham, NC), that is the subject of this panel discussion, Grosz sets out an ontology of art, looking at its forms of emergence as territorialising force, sexual selection, and nonhuman power. In Grosz's terms, art is an art of existence. This is not a narrow understanding of art as a practice that is about taste, cultural accomplishment, or a reflection of society, but an art that is—at its most provocative—an extraction from the universe and an elaboration on it. This ‘geoaesthetics’ which is both biospheric and biopolitical, presents a formable challenge to geographers interested in art, sexuality, time, and the territorialisation of the earth. How might we understand this distinctly different kind of biopolitics? And what might Grosz's concept of ‘geopower’ offer in terms of a renegotiation of a more active ‘geo’ in geopolitics? Grosz argues that art is not tied to the reproduction of the known, but to the possibility of the new, overcoming the containment of the present to elaborate on futures yet to come. In this rethinking of sexual selection Grosz suggests an intensely political role for art as a bioaesthetics that is charged with the creation of new worlds and forms of life. Grosz makes a radical argument for a feminist philosophy of the biosphere and for our thinking the world otherwise.

IntroductionOne of the key developments in 20th-century continental philosophy has been the turn away from Rene¨Descartes' strong rationalist statement`I think therefore I am'. Though Descartes started from skeptical premises öI doubt everything, even or especially the existence of my bodyöhe arrived at the solid assurance that scientific and logical progress was possible by the very fact that it was thinkable by the individual. The requirement for this belief was the radical separating of consciousness from corporeality, culture from nature, human from animal, and individual from society. Although this dualism inaugurated European philosophical modernity, it has been called untenable by most philosophers, from Baruch Spinoza to Friedrich Nietzsche, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, analytic philosophy, poststructuralism, and neuroscience. If we accept that geography maps and explains distributions, landscapes, and senses of place, these all undeniably involve human bodies. Studying space is thus necessarily coming to terms with the legacy of Cartesian dualism. The arguments I will focus on here attempt to bring bodies and minds in some sort of fundamental communication. The arguments against Descartes are many and various, however, and the cogito will continue to spur debate for centuries more.Geography has for some decades now built on phenomenology, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis to understand human bodies in non-Cartesian terms, as always-already positioned within social formations (