Migration,the Urban Periphery,and the Politics of Migrant Lives

This paper explores the politics of migration through a focus on labor migration regimes and the urban lives of migrants in the Seoul Metropolitan Region of South Korea. In particular, it draws attention to the ways in which migrant lives highlight the limits of the contemporary emphasis on control in migration management regimes. The paper contends that while migration management certainly reworks the socio‐legal status of migrants, the desire for control is often displaced in the everyday presence and practices of migrants as urban residents. In order to develop this argument I focus on the notion of the urban periphery as a spatio‐temporal configuration that manifests marginalization but is also potentially generative, innovative and destabilizing. The paper proceeds by exploring three dimensions of the periphery: (1) the mobile commons that emerges in everyday life; (2) the process of becoming undocumented and the subversion of control; and (3) the tactics of recognition that challenge the peripheral location of migrants. In each case the focus on the urban periphery draws attention to the importance of visibility and invisibility in migration, to the uneven spatio‐temporal configuration of migrant lives in the city, and to the ways in which migrant desires constitute a politics that exceeds what is normatively expected of them.     

Doxographical or Philosophical History of Philosophy: On Michael Frede's Precepts for Writing the History of Philosophy

Summary

In a series of articles from the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Frede analysed the history of histories of philosophy written over the last three hundred years. According to Frede, modern scholars have degenerated into what he calls a ‘doxographical’ mode of writing the history of philosophy. Instead, he argued, these scholars should write what he called ‘philosophical’ history of philosophy, first established in the last decades of the seventeenth century but since abandoned. In the present article it is argued that Frede's reconstruction of the history of histories of philosophy is historically problematic.