Georges Redard and the Linguistic Atlas of Iranian Speakers

Posted on April 12, 2026 by stuartelden

After Émile Benveniste suffered a major stroke in late 1969, his former student and friend Georges Redard planned to publish some of Benveniste’s incomplete projects. Redard was by this time teaching at the University of Bern in Switzerland. One volume did appear after Benveniste’s death, Études sogdiennes in 1979, which collected most of his short writings on this language. Another volume was announced but never completed was Études de dialectologie iranienne, based on field notebooks kept by Benveniste when he conducted research in Iran and Afghanistan between February and August 1947. This research will be discussed on the basis of various archival sources in my study of Benveniste and Georges Dumézil. But while Redard clearly intended to publish the work which Benveniste had been unable to complete, no such study ever appeared.

A composite image of the cover of La Perse (which has text by Redard), a photograph of Redard, and the illustrated cover of one of the working papers.

Redard’s failure to edit the notes of his friend may be related to his own research on a closely related topic – his long-promised but never completed Linguistic Atlas of Iranian, for which the planned first part was on Iranian languages spoken in Afghanistan (for overviews of his work, see pieces by Claude Sandoz and Gérard Fussman). Redard outlined the scope of his interest in Iranian languages in “Panorama linguistique de l’Iran” in 1954, looking at the history of the languages spoken in the area but only briefly surveying the present moment. It was made clear that the research on dialects could only be done by fieldwork, since most of these variants were not written down and if they were, it was done in foreign alphabets which did not always preserve key features of the spoken versions (pp. 145-46). He already indicated some of the challenges of doing such research in this difficult terrain, with problems of access to remote communities (pp. 147-48). 

But the reward is commensurate with the effort. In the solitude of these desolate lands, under a relentlessly radiant sky, languages of a thousand-year-old civilisation survive, and they alone still allow us to study its progress and to examine its mysterious origins (p. 148).

Redard points in particular to Sever Pop, La dialectologie: Aperçu historique et méthodes d’enquête linguistiques, as an inspiration for the approach, but even though this has some treatment of non-European languages he notes that this says nothing about Iranian languages (“L’Atlas des parlers iraniens”, 70). Redard also indicates some existing European linguistic atlases as a comparison to the study they undertook in Afghanistan (“Etat des travaux et publication”, p. 10).

The basic methodology was to use questionnaires, recording vocabulary for many words, with a particular focus on “agricultural, pastoral and artisanal terminology”, and some focus on morphology and syntax (Redard, “L’Atlas des parlers iraniens”, p. 71). The questionnaire itself is hard to find, but there is a copy in the Sprachwissenschaft library of the University of Bern. Some tape recordings were made, on a Stellavox SM5 reel-to-reel recorder – portable by the standards of the time – but much was written down by hand. Fieldwork was ethnographic as well as linguistic, and they were accompanied by a professional photographer, Dominique Darbois, and an illustrator, Li Gelpke-Rommel, for parts of the work (“L’Atlas des parlers iraniens”, p. 72). Dominique Darbois and Jeannine Auboyer collaborated on L’Afghanistan et son art, The Art of Afghanistan, in 1968.

Redard reported on progress at the 24th, 25th and 26th International Congress of Orientalists in Munich in 1957, Moscow in 1960, and New Delhi in 1964; and at an International Conference on linguistic atlases held in Rome in 1967. Reports from Munich, Moscow and Rome were published; while the New Delhi proceedings just listed his title. Attempts to get UNESCO funding for the project were unsuccessful, but they received support from some national research foundations as well as the Iranian Shah and Minister for Education. Redard worked with some other Swiss academics, Iranian scholars and research assistants. Georg Morgenstierne headed the Comité international de dialectologie iranienne, which meant Redard was advised by many of Europe’s leading Iranists, including Walter Bruno Henning, Benveniste, and Ilya Gershevitch (I write about two other moments in Henning’s career here and here).

It is clear from Redard’s reports that the scale of the project did not allow speedy conclusions. He notes that in areas to be studied population density was low but “linguistic differentiation very great” (“L’Atlas des parlers iraniens”, pp. 70-71). One researcher could spend a week in 35 locations a year, which meant it would take five years to survey the Persian territory. The project required work in other countries with Iranian speaking populations, and Redard therefore appealed for support from governments and scholars in “Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, China (Sarikoli) and above all the USSR and Afghanistan” (“Atlas linguistique de l’Iran 1957-1960”, p. 295). There were other difficulties including working in a Muslim country with limited access to female informants, and inaccurate maps for areas where research had to take place. Some of the work had to be conducted in border areas with non-Iranian languages, and nomadic and semi-nomadic people presented a challenge for a geographical map of language distribution. The solution was to examine these groups in their winter areas. 

Redard reported that a German press was prepared to run a series entitled Archiv für iranische Dialektologie or Beiträge zur iranischen Dialektologie, and planned to report on interim progress before the Atlas itself, though he indicated that publications were likely to appear at “irregular intervals” (“Atlas linguistique de l’Iran 1957-1960”, p. 295). He presented on more general issues raised by work in linguistic geography at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1962 (“Le renouvellement des méthodes en linguistique géographique”). Redard also published two articles, both in Festschriften, of a series he called “Notes de dialectologie iranienne”, which are informed by the Atlas project – “Le palmier à Kuhr” and “Camelina”. (Benveniste also contributed to both of those collections.)

No volume of the planned Atlas was ever published. Perhaps Redard’s most thorough statement comes in his chapter “Other Iranian Languages”, commissioned by Thomas Sebeok for his Current Trends in Linguistics series. However this chapter ends with the note that the text “is regrettably incomplete. The concluding section was sent from Iran but never received by the editors; it will appear elsewhere” (p. 121 n. 18). This note summarises a long story, beginning with an initial commission in February 1967, with a deadline of 31 December 1967. It leads thorough missed deadlines in the winter of 1967-68 and stretching through the spring and summer of 1968 when he was unwell and spent time in hospital. Eventually he submitted a partial manuscript in late 1968, shortly before leaving for Afghanistan. 

Redard missed repeated deadlines to submit the additional material, partly due to recurrent illness which again led to his hospitalisation. He eventually submitted an incomplete manuscript in mid-March 1969 and promised more to follow in ten days. There was extensive correspondence, increasingly desperate between the editor Thomas Sebeok in Indiana, the publisher Mouton & Co in the Netherlands and Redard in Switzerland to try to get the material, delaying the book by more than a year. It is unclear that Redard ever sent the missing material. Sebeok wrote to his editorial assistant in April 1969 to say that he was sending the “translation of Redard’s further instalment”. He noted “whether the last one or not we have no way to tell. Assume that it is and forward to Mouton accordingly”. Fatally he added that they would not send the translation “to the author for checking”, contrary to their usual practice, but that he could “make minor corrections in galley”. The assumption that they had the complete text led to the release of the honorarium, of $300, a lot of money in 1969. In May 1969 some additional material was received, but somewhere between Sebeok’s assistant telling Mouton it was being translated and needed to be added, something went wrong. In June, Mouton were told to “go ahead and typeset the Redard article”, perhaps without having received the material. Crucially this letter said Redard had “sent nothing new”. It appears that Sebeok’s assistant meant nothing since the part being translated in May; but Mouton took this to mean nothing since the part they already had. A note from Mouton suggests they had received pp. 42-46 of Redard’s text, which they incorrectly assumed to be the end. 

This could have been resolved at proof stage. But Redard did not return the galley proofs, sent to him in November 1969, despite reminders by mail and cable. Sebeok and his team amended the proofs themselves and sent them back to Mouton in January 1970. When Redard finally saw the proofs in April 1970, he was appalled, and wrote in strong terms about the missing material, which he says had been sent, but the editor and press pushed back hard saying that he needed to have alerted them much earlier. The problem was partly that the pagination for subsequent chapters was fixed, so they considered printing it at the end of the volume as an appendix, even in French if there was no time for translation. Sebeok and his assistant claimed they had never received the final part. It seems Redard did not even keep a manuscript. In the end, the press was forced to add the note that it was incomplete, and suggested that the remaining part could appear elsewhere, perhaps in the press’s journal Linguistics, and that an offprint could be mailed with the book. It seems Redard never took up this offer, either because the lack of a manuscript prevented him from reconstituting the material, or because it was never actually written.

One part of the wider research project was the Linguistic Atlas of Afghanistan. In 1967 in response to a conference question, Redard said that this would be the first part of the wider Iranian atlas to be published (“L’Atlas des parlers iraniens”, p. 76). It was led by Redard with Charles Kieffer, with advice from Morgenstierne until his death in 1978. Kieffer had been a student of Benveniste’s Iranian and Comparative Grammar classes at the École pratique des hautes études between 1965-66 and 1968-69. Redard reported on wider the work in a small pamphlet in 1974, L’Atlas linguistique des parlers iraniens, which also included two pieces by Kieffer and one by Sanaoullah Sana, along with maps and drawings. These were all papers presented to the 29th International Congress of Orientalists, held in Paris in July 1973 (L’Atlas linguistique des parlers iraniens, p. 3). As far as I can tell, no formal proceedings of this event were published. It was held in Paris to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first Congress, and was the last to be held with this name. There, again, Redard acknowledges the support of Benveniste and Morgenstierne, and notes that the previously sceptical Henning was now more supportive of the work being conducted (“Etat des travaux et publication”, p. 7). But it is important to recognise that the research was not just conducted by Europeans, but was a genuine partnership with Afghan scholars. Redard particularly indicates N.A. Shāker, who directed the Linguistic Institute at the University of Kabul, and had spent six months in Switzerland, and S.E. Abd-ul-Ghafūr Farhādi (“Etat des travaux et publication”, 8).

Redard recounts that the Afghanistan work was completed between 1962 and 1971, with data gathered in 252 areas, with 269 completed questionnaires (“Etat des travaux et publication”, p. 9). In 1974 he said that six volumes were planned, with the first to cover “the questionnaires, the transcription system, the reports of the inquiries and a large number of drawings and photographs” (“Etat des travaux et publication”, p. 17). Neither this volume nor any of the subsequent ones were published. Redard published no other work from this project either, though a short piece on dialectology by Redard and Kieffer concerning shoe-making in Bāmyān appeared in 1968 in a tribute to Kaj Barr (“La fabrication des chaussures à Bāmyān. Notes de dialectologie afghane”). 

Gérard Fussman hints at the political challenges to the Iranian Atlas project, but does not explain further. Fussman was author of the 1972 Atlas Linguistique des Parlers Dardes et Kafirs [Linguistic Atlas of Dardic and Kafiri (or Nuristani) Speakers], so had experience in a similar field, spanning Afghanistan, Pakistan and disputed Kashmir. Redard reports on these difficulties in 1967, saying that the part of Pakistan they were most interested in was in revolt against the government. The central government were therefore unwilling to allow linguists access, as they feared they might be more interested in oil than languages (Redard, “L’Atlas des parlers iraniens”, p. 76). Because of this, the research was going to begin with Afghanistan, which was relatively stable at the time. The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 added to these difficulties, and made further fieldwork almost impossible. Redard apparently said that the Afghan material was gathered “at the eleventh hour” before much was irretrievably lost.

In 1974 Kieffer provided an outline of how they were planning to map their findings, but while useful this was only a preliminary report (“L’établissement des cartes phonétiques: premiers resultants”). Kieffer wrote a doctoral thesis on the languages of the Lōgar valley of Maidan Wardak province in 1975. Benveniste directed his research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) from 1964, and in 1966 suggested Kieffer focus research “on this rapidly disappearing Ōrmurī language”. Lazard took over the supervision in 1970, and Kieffer worked closely with Redard too. Kieffer published “Les formules de lamentations funèbres des femmes à Caboul: awåz andåxtan-e zanå. Note de dialectologie et d’ethnographie afghanes” in one of the 1975 tribute volumes to Benveniste. After a great deal of additional work he published his grammar of Ōrmurī in 2003, but adds that his planned work on Persian and Pashto was delayed because of “the impossibility of visiting the field for twenty years”, as well as the delays with the Atlas, on which he was “relying greatly” (Grammaire de l’ōrmuṛī de Baraki-Barak (Lōgar, Afghanistan), pp. 15, 20). Kieffer would go on to publish a study of taboos and prohibitions in the languages of Afghanistan in 2011. Daniel Septfonds has compiled a useful list of his other publications. 

Kieffer said of the Atlas that the “materials are assembled, only the commentary remains unfinished. Unfortunately this ALA still sleeps in the archives of the University of Berne” (Tabous, interdits et obligations de langage en Afghanistan, [6]). 

The Atlas remained in that state and Kieffer’s death in 2015 seems to have broken the last link in the chain back through Redard to Benveniste’s work in 1947. However, in 2018 the Norwegian Institute of Philology launched a project to make use of these extensive archives. This aims to revive the Atlas in its original form, aiming to give a historical sense of the data collected by Redard and his colleagues (see here). A brief report and some photographs are on the Institute’s Facebook page. There is also an ongoing project by Erik Anonby, Mortaza Taheri-Ardali and Amos Hayes to produce a new Atlas of the languages of Iran. 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Florence Shahabi for some useful information about the Norwegian project and sharing one of the hard-to-find reports.

References

Erik Anonby, Mortaza Taheri-Ardali and Amos Hayes, “The Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI): A Research Overview”, Iranian Studies 52 (1-2), 2019, 199-230.

Émile Benveniste, “Coutumes funéraires de l’Arachosie ancienne”, in W. B. Henning and E. Yarshater eds., A Locust’s Leg: Studies in honour of S.H. Taquizadeh, London: Percy Lund, Humphries & Co, 1962, 39-43.

Émile Benveniste, “La racine yat- en indo-iranien”, in Indo-Iranica: Mélanges présentés à Georg Morgenstierne à l’occasion de son soixante-dixième anniversaire, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1964, 21-27.

Émile Benveniste, Études sogdiennes, ed. Georges Redard, Wiesbaden: Dr Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1979.

Dominique Darbois and Jeannine Auboyer, L’Afghanistan et son art, Paris: Éditions du cercle d’art, 1968; The Art of Afghanistan, trans. Peter Kneebone, Feltham: Paul Hamlyn, 1968.

Gérard Fussman, Atlas Linguistique des Parlers Dardes et Kafirs, Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient/A. Maisonneuve, two volumes, 1972. 

Gerard Fussman, “Redard, Georges”, Encyclopedia Iranica, 2000, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/redard-georges/

Ch.-M. Kieffer and G. Redard, “La fabrication des chaussures à Bāmyān. Notes de dialectologie afghane”, Acta Orientalia 31, 1968, 47-53.

Charles M. Kieffer, Les parlers de la vallée du Lôgar-Wardak (Afghanistan): Étude de dialectologie iranienne, Ph.D. dissertation, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, 1975.

Charles Kieffer, “Les formules de lamentations funèbres des femmes à Caboul: awåz andåxtan-e zanå. Note de dialectologie et d’ethnographie afghanes”, in Mélanges linguistiques offerts à Émile Benveniste, Paris, 1975, 313-23.

Charles M. Kieffer, Grammaire de l’ōrmuṛī de Baraki-Barak (Lōgar, Afghanistan), Wiesbaden: Dr Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2003.

Charles M. Kieffer, Tabous, interdits et obligations de langage en Afghanistan: Éléments du vocabulaire de la vie privée en terre d’Islam, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2011. 

Ch. M. Kieffer, “L’établissement des cartes phonétiques: premiers resultants”, in L’Atlas linguistique des parlers iraniens, in Georges Redard, L’Atlas linguistique des parlers iraniens: L’Atlas de l’Afghanistan, Universität Bern, Instituts für Sprachwissenschaft, Arbeitspapier 13, Bern, 1974, 21-34.

Sever Pop, La dialectologie: Aperçu historique et méthodes d’enquête linguistiques, Louvain: Chez l’auteur, 2 volumes, 1950. 

Georges Redard, “Panorama linguistique de l’Iran”, Asiatischen Studien VIII, 1954, 137-48.

Georges Redard, “Projet d’un atlas linguistique de l’Iran”, in Herbert Franke ed., Akten des Vierundzwanzigsten Internationalen Orientalisten-Kongresses München 28. August bis 4. September 1957, Wiesbaden: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1959, 440-44.

Georges Redard, Atlas Linguistique de l’Iran: questionnaire normal, Berne: Chez l’auteur, 1960. 

Georges Redard, “Le palmier à Kuhr: Notes de dialectologie iranienne I” in W. B. Henning and E. Yarshater eds., A Locust’s Leg: Studies in honour of S.H. Taquizadeh, London: Percy Lund, Humphries & Co, 1962, 213-19.

Georges Redard, “Atlas linguistique de l’Iran 1957-1960”, Proceedings of the International Congress of Orientalists XXV, Moscow: Kraus, five volumes, 1963, Vol II, 294-96.

Georges Redard, “Le renouvellement des méthodes en linguistique géographique”, in Horace G. Lunt ed., Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, Cambridge, Mass. August 27-31, 1962, The Hague: De Gruyter, 1964, 252-57.

Georges Redard, “Camelina: Notes de dialectologie iranienne II”, in Indo-Iranica: Mélanges présentés à Georg Morgenstierne à l’occasion de son soixante-dixième anniversaire, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1964, 155-62.

Georges Redard, “Le renouvellement des méthodes en linguistique géographique”, in Horace G. Lunt ed., Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, Cambridge, Mass. August 27-31, 1962, The Hague: De Gruyter, 1964, 252-57.

Georges Redard, “Atlas linguistique des parles iranniens” [sic]: Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Congress of Orientalists, New Delhi: Organising Committee XXVI International Congress of Orientalists, four volumes, 1966-70, Vol II, 254.

Georges Redard, “L’Atlas des parlers iraniens”, in Atti del convegno internationale sul Tema: Gli atlanti linguistici Problemi e risultati (Roma 20-24 ottobre 1967), Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1969, 69-75, with discussion 76-78. 

Georges Redard, “Other Iranian Languages” in Thomas A. Sebeok ed., Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 6, La Haye-Paris: Mouton & Co, 1970, 97-135. 

Georges Redard, L’Atlas linguistique des parlers iraniens: L’Atlas de l’Afghanistan, Universität Bern, Instituts für Sprachwissenschaft, Arbeitspapier 13, Bern, 1974.

Claude Sandoz, “Georges Redard (1922-2005)”, Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 58, 2005, 21-25

Daniel Septfonds, “Kieffer, Charles Martin”, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2017, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kieffer-charles-martin/

Archives and websites

École pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences historiques et philologiques. Annuaire, https://www.persee.fr/collection/ephe

Thomas Sebeok papers, C264, Indiana University, https://digitalcollections.iu.edu/collections/s4655m085?locale=de

Norwegian Institute of Philology, “Linguistic Atlas of Afghanistan (ALA)”, https://www.philology.no/ala

Harold Bailey papers, Ancient India and Iran Trust, Georges Redard-Harold Bailey correspondence

This is the 67th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.

The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Harriet Hawkins, “Lithic Lives: Earth Stories from Cambodia’s Land of the Gemstones”, 9th Cosgrove Lecture, Royal Holloway, 11 May 2026

Posted on April 11, 2026 by stuartelden

Harriet Hawkins, “Lithic Lives: Earth Stories from Cambodia’s Land of the Gemstones“, 9th Cosgrove Lecture, Royal Holloway, 11 May 2026

A fragment of ruby, a hand-written list of sapphire sales from February 1918, a much-loved pop song crooned during Cambodia’s second ‘Golden-Age’, a necklace of tumbled garnet chips, a golden otter, a mosquito infected with drug-resistant malaria, a head-dress from Ancient Rome, an up-turned muddy plastic bottle on a bamboo stick. Any and all of these offer generative beginnings for telling Earth Stories from Cambodia’s Land of the Gemstones.

The Land of the Gemstones, located in Cambodia’s North-Western forested uplands, has for millennia been a source of gemstones, a site of geopolitical controversy and a richly fabled land. Yet in the wake of the Khmer Rouge whose genocidal regime was funded by extraction of stones and timber from the area, many of these stories remain untold. For the past three years we (a group of Cambodian and British researchers and artists) have been collaborating with miners, cutters, dealers, stones and spirits to track gemstone geobiographies and explore the lithic intimacies of lives lived seeking, shaping and protecting gemstones.

The Earth Stories we share here draw together ethnography, image, song and stone in a geopoetic response to the challenges of living and researching lithic lives in the Land of the Gemstones. Some of these challenges are unique to this place and its practices, others are shared with those mining around the world and all sit within the impulse to complicate the Earth stories that colonialisms have told.

Harriet Hawkins is Professor of GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on the intersections of geography, art, creativity, aesthetics, and the imagination. She explores how creative practices can contribute to critical contemporary issues – such as the current and future use of underground spaces, and engagements with climate change. Her recent research project, THINK DEEP, was funded the European Research Council. She is the author of For Creative Geographies(Routledge 2013), Creativity (Routledge 2016) and Geography, Art, Research: Artistic Research in the GeoHumanities (Routledge 2020).

Free, but booking required.

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A Scholarly Edition of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers – first three volumes, Oxford University Press, April 2026

Posted on April 10, 2026 by stuartelden

A Scholarly Edition of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers – first three volumes published by Oxford University Press on 30 April 2026, edited by Lloyd Strickland.

They are very expensive, over £400 for the first three volumes: Leibniz: Philosophical Papers, 1677–1686 – Universal Language, Characteristic, Logic, Encyclopaedia, and General Science; Metaphysics, Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Jurisprudence and Religion and Theology.

The three volumes of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers (1677–1686) published by Oxford University Press represent the first stage in a larger project to recover Leibniz’s philosophical writings directly from manuscript sources and present them in a scholarly English edition.

Leibniz continued writing philosophy for another thirty years after 1686, and much of this later work has never been brought together in a modern English edition. The project now turns to these later writings.

More information at the Leibniz Papers website. Thanks to Daily Nous for the alert.

Posted in Gottfried Leibniz | 1 Comment

Tiphaine Samoyault, Translation and Violence, trans. Alexander Hertich, Princeton University Press, September 2026

Posted on April 9, 2026 by stuartelden

Tiphaine Samoyault, Translation and Violence, trans. Alexander Hertich, Princeton University Press, September 2026

The rapid development of AI-powered translation tools is making translation more accessible than ever before, raising in a dramatic new way the old utopian promise of translation—to allow transparent dialogue across linguistic barriers. But algorithmic translation brings great risks, including increasing inequalities in linguistic representation, reinforcing the dominance of a few languages, accelerating the disappearance of vulnerable languages, and even ostensibly eliminating the need to learn foreign languages. In Translation and Violence, Tiphaine Samoyault offers a provocative rethinking of the ethics and politics of translation in the age of AI. She shows how translation can be linguistically and politically violent—but also how it can be a means of resistance, justice, and reparation.

The book examines links between translation and violence during European colonialism and South African apartheid, under totalitarian regimes, and in Nazi camps. It engages with numerous philosophers and translation theorists, among them Derrida, Berman, Meschonnic, Glissant, and Spivak. And it offers detailed analyses of important literary texts that illustrate the violences of translating, including works by Proust, Primo Levi, Celan, and Perec.

Despite the violence that translation can do, Translation and Violence argues for a theory and practice of translation that can contribute to dialogue between cultures, literatures, and languages, and to the political possibility of creating a common world.

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Two dedications from Georges Dumézil – to Alfred Ernoux and Luc Estang

Posted on April 8, 2026 by stuartelden

With only rare exceptions, I’ve not tended to buy second-hand books with a view to the edition or dedications. Generally, I’ve been getting hold of copies because of the content, and the relatively few times I’ve looked for a first edition has been when that is different from later reprints. This was the case, for example, with some of Foucault’s early books.

One of the exceptions was getting a book from the sale of Georges Bataille’s library – a copy of Musset, dedicated by Henri Lefebvre. That copy is briefly mentioned and photographed here.

With Georges Dumézil, tracking down some of his books can be a challenge in any edition or condition, and one of the few times I tried hard to get a first edition was with Mitra-Varuna, in part because of changes between it and the second edition, and the editorial work I was doing. I did eventually get a copy, and I say a bit more about the challenges of finding the first edition here.

With his other books, with two exceptions I have found copies, and by chance, a couple of them have dedications. They were not especially expensive – I’m not sure that the sellers realised it was his handwriting, which is hard to read, and Dumézil hardly has the premium to his name that, for example, a signed book by Foucault would have.

Naissance de Rome cover
Naissance de Rome dedication
Tarpeia cover

The copy of Naissance de Rome has the dedication: “à Monsieur Luc Estang / hommage de Dumézil”.

The copy of Tarpeia says “à Monsieur A. Ernest, hommage respectueux / Georges Dumézil / mai 1947”.

The dedicatees are in themselves interesting. Alfred Ernout was a colleague of Dumézil’s at the Collège de France and a specialist on Latin. He and Antoine Meillet co-authored an etymological dictionary of Latin. But Ernout had known Dumezil for decades, teaching him at a lycée in Troyes.

Luc Estang was the pen-name of the unfortunately named Luc Bastard, a novelist, poet and literary critic. I know little about his links to Dumezil, though it is not surprising they would have known each other.

References

Georges Dumézil, Tarpeia, Paris: Gallimard, 1947 (Les Mythes Romaines series).

Georges Dumézil, Naissance de Rome (Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus II), Paris: Gallimard, 1944.

Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine: Histoire des mots, Paris: Klincksieck, revised fourth edition, 2001 [1932].

This note is in the same style as the ‘Sunday histories‘ posts, though its minor status means I’ve posted it mid-week.

Posted in Georges Bataille, Georges Dumézil, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Julian Brigstocke, Nonauthoritarian Authority: Cities, Materiality, and the Aesthetics of Power – LSE Press, March 2026 (print and open access)

Posted on April 7, 2026 by stuartelden

Julian Brigstocke, Nonauthoritarian Authority: Cities, Materiality, and the Aesthetics of Power – LSE Press, March 2026 (print and open access)

Authority is not a word with many positive connotations. It suggests power-hungry dictators, trigger-happy police, stifling bureaucracies, and monumental urban landscapes. In Nonauthoritarian Authority Julian Brigstocke argues that in these shattered times, anti-authoritarianism is not enough: a radical, speculative reinvention of authority is needed. He introduces the idea of nonauthoritarian authority: a form of power that pluralises marginalised and hidden voices, recognises diverse agencies, and amplifies heterogeneous demands. 

Engaging with key philosophical debates around materiality, experience, feeling, agency, and landscape, Nonauthoritarian Authority stages a series of experiments with thinking, reading, researching, and writing nonauthoritarian authority. Dramatising a speculative search for barely sensed, dispersed authorities, Brigstocke’s experiments in thinking explore the intrinsically spatial nature of authority, through empirical studies of violent urban borders in Rio de Janeiro, colonial material infrastructures in Hong Kong, monumental architecture in Paris, and everyday spaces of encounter in the UK.  

Offering an intricate and playful reflection on the relationship between authority, urban forms, and writing, each exercise in thinking links form and genre to a distinctive way of imagining authority. Each chapter simultaneously critiques a form of authoritarian authority and searches for a new, nonauthoritarian authority within the rubble of the old.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche, A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity –  Cornell University Press, June 2026

Posted on April 6, 2026 by stuartelden

Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche, A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity –  Cornell University Press, June 2026

A Protestant Air focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentieth-century French thought: André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roland Barthes. All three came from a Protestant background and thus shared a common marginality in a nation culturally marked by Catholicism, one that profoundly shaped their personalities, thinking, and literary careers. When André Gide received the Nobel Prize in 1947, he declared that if he had represented anything as a writer, it was the “spirit of protestation.” 

Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche explores the filiation that this spirit weaves between Gide, Sartre, and Barthes. She shows how their Protestant difference, confronted with France’s Catholicity, informed their posture as writers, their conceptualization of literature, and their elaboration of the figure of the French intellectual as a counter-authority, with a distinctive positioning vis-à-vis the individual and the institution. In so doing, A Protestant Air examines the religious underpinnings of twentieth-century letters and politics, their interaction with the secularization of French society, and, more broadly, the historical and philosophical relationship between the Protestant ethos and modernity itself.

Posted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Maurice Blanchot’s Politics and His War-Time Reviews of Georges Dumézil

Posted on April 5, 2026 by stuartelden

The philosopher, literary theorist and novelist Maurice Blanchot’s politics have come under periodic scrutiny. Leslie Hill describes the source of the controversy: 

As early as 1931 and 1932, while starting out with the Journal des débats, Blanchot was writing political articles and book reviews in various magazines and journals belonging to what soon became known at the time as the Jeune Droite. This was a loosely defined, highly volatile, disparate ideological movement that was largely the preserve of disaffected younger members of the French monarchist movement, Action française, who, tired of the circumspection and inertia of that party’s traditionalist leadership, had turned to more extreme measures in the desire to overcome what they saw as France’s decline into mediocrity; indeed, alongside its virulent nationalism, hatred of Marxism, and contempt for parliamentary democracy, what mainly distinguished the Jeune Droite was its diagnosis that France was in the grip of a profound spiritual and ideological crisis that might be remedied only by recourse to radical and violent means that demanded immediate mobilisation (Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, 27).

Blanchot’s journalism was never republished in his lifetime. It was brought to wider attention with a listing of pieces in two bibliographies in the journal Gramma in 1975-76, and the “Bibliographical Check-List” in SubStance in 1976. These indicated how Blanchot wrote in right-wing outlets including the anti-republican Combat, a journal which was arguably closer to fascism than the royalist tendencies of Action française, and in Le Rempert and the nationalist l’Insurgé.

In 1980 Jeffrey Mehlman wrote a piece about “Blanchot at Combat”. Mehlman claims that from 1936 to 1938, “Blanchot appears not as a littérateur with ‘rightist’ leanings, but essentially as a political thinker in an enterprise central to his generation” (p. 812). A further key discussion was Steven Ungar’s 1995 book Scandal and Aftereffect. Ungar’s point is that Blanchot’s post-war work is usually the focus, a period when he turned to novels and works of literary theory and philosophy. It is this later phase of his writing which was so important for Foucault, Derrida and others. Hard-to-find during Blanchot’s lifetime, his earlier political writings were collected in 2017 as Chroniques politiques des annees trente: 1931-1940, edited by David Uhrig. Unlike most of Blanchot’s other books, including other posthumous collections, there is no English translation. 

Blanchot had published a book review in La Revue Universelle in 1931, and he appeared twice more in this journal, which associated with Action française. His biographer Christophe Bident notes that he also published in other journals related to this movement (Maurice Blanchot, French 60/English 44). Then he was the foreign policy column writer for the Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, probably from 1931, then from 1932 its leader writer and editor-in-chief, until 1940 (Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 68-69/51; Hill, Blanchot, 21). Hill describes it as being in the 1930s “a traditionalist, staunchly conservative evening daily” (Blanchot, 21).

Cover images of Chroniques politiques and Chroniques littéraires by Maurice Blanchot

Bident provides a brief discussion of the possible anti-Semitism of some of these texts, and also notes their strident “antidemocratic, antiparliamentary, and anticapitalist rhetoric” (Maurice Blanchot, 96/75, 110/88). There is also a discussion by Michel Surya in L’Autre Blanchot. A more sceptical assessment comes from Hill: 

But what is most startling of all about the accusation that Blanchot himself professed anti-semitic views in the 1930s is that, to date, no evidence of any real substance has ever been produced to support it. At most, the charge rests on a particular interpretation of no more than four articles published by Blanchot in 1936 and 1937 (Blanchot, 36, see 36-39).

In 1940 Blanchot tried to stop Journal des Débats publishing after the defeat and the collapse of the Third Republic, but was unsuccessful. He stopped writing political texts rather than support its interest “in the triumphs of Marshal Pétain” (Bident, Maurice Blanchot 153/123). As a consequence of the lack of explicitly political texts, as Ungar indicates: “Little is known about Blanchot’s politics during and immediately after Vichy” (Scandal and Aftereffect, 134). 

For a while he was without income, and it seems his writing of a large number of literary essays for the continuing Journal des débats during the occupation was simply in order to support his family. Although these pieces of 1941-44 were not generally political in nature, they were in “a paper that was ever more in favor of the Vichy government and especially Pétain” (Bident, Maurice Blanchot 154-55/124). While literary and theoretical, this does not mean they are devoid of political interest. Mehlman, for example, has indicated Blanchot’s reference to Charles Maurras, the leader of Action française, in a 1942 review of Maxime Leroy’s La politique de Sainte-Beuve. Mehlman discussed this in a presentation to a conference in London in 1993: “Pour Saint-Beuve: Maurice Blanchot, 10 March 1942”. When confronted with this, Blanchot claimed to have “no memory” of the review, and confessed he initially “doubted whether it had even been written” (“A Letter”, 209). When presented with the text he was contrite: 

Let me go immediately to the worst. That in March 1942 one pronounces the name of Maurras (particularly when nothing in the context demands a name such as this) is detestable and inexcusable… The fact remains that the name of Maurras is an indelible stain and an expression of dishonour. I was never close to the man, during whatever period, and always kept my distance from Action Française, even when Gide out of curiosity would call to see him (“A Letter”, 210).

Blanchot’s books appeared with Gallimard in the early 1940s, and include Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab and Faux Pas. For Bident, they were “published in occupied France with a regularity mirroring that of his columns, and without ever having any trouble with the German censors. The question of the political morality of these publications cannot be avoided. But neither can one omit to add that in the same era and in the same place, publications appeared by Bataille, Sartre, Leiris and Camus” (Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 155/124). We could add Georges Dumézil to that list.

Bident counts 171 articles and two front-page texts in this period in Journal des Débats (Maurice Blanchot, 181/145). 54 of these texts were collected in the book Faux Pas in 1943. Bident reports that the invitation to collect them in a book came from Gaston Gallimard himself (Maurice Blanchot, 225/179). The texts in this collection were often rewritten, and the ordering was non-chronological. In 2007, the remaining pieces from Journal des Débats were collected in a single volume in French, bringing together texts from 1941-1944, and each year’s essays were translated as separate English volumes: Into Disaster 1941; Desperate Clarity 1942; A World in Ruins 1943; Death Now 1944. The Journal des débats was closed with the Liberation, in part because its publication under the occupation led to charges of collaboration. These texts and political issues around them are also explored in Bident’s biography. In particular he discusses some of the first discussions of this earlier Blanchot, and how long it took for the full story to emerge (Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 528-29/421-22; see Hill, Blanchot, 21-52).

Bident’s translator John McKeane suggests that some of these texts in response: 

are haunted by the idea of Blanchot’s unpalatable past, but precisely they are haunted by it because there is not sufficient evidence to move to any full-scale condemnation (there is a clear difference of scale to the scandals surrounding Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger, for instance). There are indeed statements in Blanchot’s work that he himself recognized as ‘detestable and inexcusable’. But because they are so few, Surya for instance is often reduced to criticizing Blanchot’s associates… Forty years after the publication of selected 1930s texts in Gramma, and twenty years after the comprehensive accounts of Hill and Bident, we need to realize that this incomplete line of thinking has run into the sand. Perhaps in due course archival information will arise allowing for a full-scale condemnation of Blanchot. But in the meantime, sufficient evidence is lacking, meaning we exist in a half-light where strange shapes are seen in the shadows, and the debate is one of insinuation and guilt by association. Therefore it is surely time to banish these particular specters by switching on the lights of reading and analysis (“Amor: Blanchot since 2003”, 476).

Nonetheless Ungar suggests that the analysis “Serge Klarsfeld, Robert Paxton, Pascal Ory, and Henry Rousso have done for Vichy remains to be done for France in the 1930s” (Scandal and Aftereffect, 153, see 172). One contribution this would be his collaborative book with Dudley Andrew, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture, published a decade later. Richard Wolin has recently written about Blanchot’s 1930s journalism. There is a more extensive treatment in Leslie Hill, Blanchot politique: Sur une réflexion jamais interrompue.

Reviews of Dumézil

In the pages of Journal des débats during the occupation Blanchot wrote four pieces on Dumézil, treating his books Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, Horace et les Curiaces, Servius et la fortune and Naissance de Rome. None of these reviews are included in Faux Pas which has no references to Dumézil. But that book has a number of pieces on myth and religion, so the interest is not surprising. Blanchot’s first review of Dumézil came in July 1942 and was of the first volume of the Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus series. It began with a general statement of the book’s potential importance:

If Georges Dumézil’s book Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus were of interest only to the specialist, it would be deprived of part of the readership it deserves and to which it appeals thanks to the brilliance of its form, the scope of its attention to certain specific issues and the skill with which it draws the reader toward questions whose legitimacy can be glimpsed only at the highest levels of learning. The latest in a series of numerous studies in comparative mythology, his essay not only examines problems relating to the prehistoric past of our civilizations, it also presupposes a method that requires us to reflect usefully on what the requirements of knowledge are, and it helps to define a notion as important and as obscure as that of myth (Chroniques littéraires, 187-88; Desperate Clarity, 92). 

In the wake of nineteenth century work on the common language to which many modern languages were related, it notes that earlier attempts to “reconstitute the religion and the mythology of these remote societies” were “premature, and it failed” (Chroniques littéraires, 188; Desperate Clarity, 93).

But for the last twenty years or so new research, developments in ethnography and anthropology and an increasing mistrust of sociological theories have made it possible to reconsider that failure, and Dumézil’s studies are themselves an example of the combination of rigor and daring that has been necessary in order to formulate some initial hypotheses concerning the religious and social frameworks of the Indo-Europeans (Chroniques littéraires, 18; Desperate Clarity, 93).

However, he does indicate some potential problems, suggesting that the tripartite division and the way

Hindu myths and thinkers, like the Druids, should seek to discern within souls the same architectural and hierarchical order that exists in kingdoms, in accordance with a notion of which Plato provides a celebrated account in Book IV of the Republic. Is this homology between the soul and society an Indo-European legacy? Is it not present too in the traditions that the vestiges of non-Aryan civilizations allow us to imagine? It is in this respect that the comparative method appears threatened by the range of its hypotheses and the scale of its success, claiming more than it is able to and more than can possibly be proved (Chroniques littéraires, 191; Desperate Clarity, 96).

He also indicates some of the challenges Dumézil’s comparative approach had for specialists, and particularly his claims about early Rome as myth turned into history (Chroniques littéraires, 192; Desperate Clarity, 97).

He followed this up with discussion of Horace et les Curiaces later that year, in an essay which partnered the book with Jacques Benoist-Méchin analysis of “letters sent by soldiers killed in the 1914–18 war”, and Henri Daniel-Rops’s study of the soldier and theologian Ernest Psichari (Chroniques littéraires, 214; Desperate Clarity, 122).

Georges Dumézil focuses on the principle of heroic force that is generally represented, among the Indo-European peoples, through myths of a war-like character [caractère guerrier]. The aim of this learned comparativist is to find in the story of Horatius’s combat not so much the trace of a historical event, but an adaptation of a myth designed to represent an ancient military initiation rite (Chroniques littéraires, 218; Desperate Clarity, 126).

Turning to the comparison with the Irish Cú Chulainn legend, he continues:

Georges Dumézil provides a minute examination of the differences separating the two legends, and he explains them by showing how Roman mythology, through eliminating the element of the marvellous from the ancient rite, transformed it into a romance [roman] and retained only its outlines, which is to say the same framework of fact, but justified by reasons that were both psychological and judicial (Chroniques littéraires, 219; Desperate Clarity, 127). 

Blanchot returned to these themes in an article on the next book in Dumézil’s Les Mythes Romains series, Servius et la fortune, reviewed in June 1943. Blanchot describes this as a book in which he “applies the same explanatory principles [principes d’explication]” as his earlier work “to a study of the king who no longer incarnates simply sovereignty, but rather a certain type of access to sovereign power, and who is considered to be the inventor of a social practice whose origins no doubt go back to the Indo-European era” (Chroniques littéraires, 385; A World in Ruins, 118). His last review of Dumézil was of the book Naissance de Rome, the second book in the Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus series. Here he again returns to the theme of the relation of what purports to be Roman history as disguised myth, and Dumézil’s challenge to established accounts of the early stages of the city, particularly André Piganiol (Chroniques littéraires, 625; Death Now, 124-25). Dumézil builds on Theodor Mommsen’s claim that some aspects of Roman pseudo-history come from later history, with a past constructed to serve the interests of the present (Chroniques littéraires, 625-26; Death Now, 125). But Dumézil also contends that if at least aspects of what is taken to be history is actually myth, it can reveal traces of the earlier Indo-European societies, for which other traditions also give evidence (Chroniques littéraires, 623; Death Now, 122).

The End of the War

Blanchot was almost executed by a German firing squad in June 1944, but escaped when the squad came under attack. Fifty years later he fictionalised the event in The Instant of My Death. The Journal des débats was closed after the liberation, in part because its publication under the occupation led to charges of collaboration.

After the war Blanchot joined the first Paris issue of the journal L’Arche, originally launched during the war in Algiers. He wrote sixteen texts for L’Arche, mostly longer critical essays, thirteen of which were collected in The Work of Fire (see Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 237-38/190). Blanchot was unusual in that he worked with both L’Arche and Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes. “He was even one of the rare writers able to straddle both journals” (Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 241/194). He was also closely involved in the launch of Critique, and Georges Bataille declared that “Without Blanchot, no more than without Éric Weil [sans B, pas plus que sans EW], I could not have founded the journal” (Dominique Arban, “Cinq minutes avec Georges Bataille”, 5). 

But Blanchot did not stay with Critique long and left it and Les Temps Modernes in the early 1950s, joining the relaunched nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française. He published 128 articles with this journal, which as Bident notes are “mostly collected in Blanchot’s four main volumes of criticism. The Space of Literature, The Book to Come, and later The Infinite Conversation and Friendship in 1969 and 1971” (Maurice Blanchot, 335/272).

In the 1950s Blanchot also returned to writing political texts, and his position seems to have shifted quite dramatically, including support for Algerian independence and opposition to de Gaulle (Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 391-93/315-16). These political texts have been collected posthumously as Écrits Politiques 1953-1993, translated as Political Writings, 1953-1993. His many more literary articles in Bataille’s Critique journal are collected in La Condition Critique: Articles 1945-1998, for which there does not seem to be an English translation. As far as I can tell, after the war he never again engaged with Dumézil’s work.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Alin Constantine for first alerting me to Blanchot’s reviews of Dumézil.

Bibliographies of Blanchot

“Bibliographie I”, Gramma 3/4 [Lire Blanchot I], 1975, 223-45.

“Bibliographie II”, Gramma 5 [Lire Blanchot II], 1976, 123-32.

“Maurice Blanchot: A Bibliographical Check-List”, SubStance 5 (14), 1976, 142-59.

Blanchot’s Reviews of Dumézil

“Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus” (1942), reprinted in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats, 187-193; “Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus”, Desperate Clarity, 92-98.

“Considérations sur le héros” (1942), on Horace et les curiaces, reprinted in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats, 214-20; “Considerations on the Hero”, Desperate Clarity, 122-29.

“De la louange à la souveraineté” (1943), on Servius et la fortune, reprinted in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats, 385-91; “From Praise to Sovereignty”, A World in Ruins, 118-25.

“Naissance de Rome” (1944), reprinted in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats, 623-27; “The Birth of Rome”, Death Now, 122-26.

Other References

Dominique Arban, “Cinq minutes avec Georges Bataille”, Le Figaro Littéraire, 17 July 1948, 5.

Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005.

Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Ce qui demeure: Lettres de soldats tombés au champ d’honneur 1914-1918, Albin Michel, 1942.

Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot Partenaire Invisible: Essai biographique, Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998; Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, trans. John McKeane, New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

Maurice Blanchot, “La politique de Sainte-Beuve” (1942), Chroniques littéraires, 141-47; “The Politics of Sainte-Beuve”, Desperate Clarity, 38-44.

Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas, Paris: Gallimard, 1971 [1943]; Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandall, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Maurice Blanchot, “L’Instant de ma mort”, French-English version in Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, 2-11.

Maurice Blanchot, “A Letter”, French-English version, trans. Leslie Hill, in Carolyn Bailey Gill ed. Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, London: Routledge, 1996, 209-11.

Maurice Blanchot, Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats: avril 1941-août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident, Paris: Gallimard, 2007; Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014; Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014; A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland, New York: Fordham University Press, 2016; Death Now: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1944, trans. Michael Holland, New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.

Maurice Blanchot, Écrits Politiques 1953-1993, ed. Éric Hoppenot, Paris: Gallimard, 2008; Political Writings, 1953-1993, trans. Zakir Paul, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010

Maurice Blanchot, La Condition Critique: Articles 1945-1998, ed. Christophe Bident, Paris: Gallimard, 2010.

Maurice Blanchot, Chroniques politiques des annees trente: 1931-1940, ed. David Uhrig, Paris: Gallimard, 2017.

Henri Daniel-Rops, Psichari, Paris: Librarie Plon, 1942.

Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, London: Routledge, 1997.

Leslie Hill, Blanchot politique: Sur une réflexion jamais interrompue, Genève: Furor, 2020.

Éric Hoppenot, “Maurice Blanchot: Compagnon de route de Critique?” in Sylvie Patron (ed.), Autour de Critique 1946-1992, Le Coudray: Otrante, 2021, 101-26.

Maxime Leroy, La politique de Sainte-Beuve, Paris: Gallimard, 1941.

John McKeane, “Amor: Blanchot since 2003”, in Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, trans. John McKeane, New York: Fordham University Press, 2018, 465-78.

Jeffrey Mehlman, “Blanchot at Combat: Of Literature and Terror”, MLN 95 (4), 1980, 808-29. 

Jeffrey Mehlman, “Pour Saint-Beuve: Maurice Blanchot, 10 March 1942”, in Carolyn Bailey Gill ed. Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, London: Routledge, 1996, 212-31.

Michel Surya, L’Autre Blanchot: L’écriture de jour, l’écriture de nuit, Paris: Gallimard, 2015.

Steven Ungar, Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Richard Wolin, “Blanchot Collabo: From the Jeune Droite to Jeune France”, French Politics, Culture & Society 43 (1), 2025, 93–124.

This is the 66th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.

The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.

Posted in Albert Camus, Georges Bataille, Georges Dumézil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Maurice Blanchot, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Sakora Christmas, Territorial Natures: Imperial Japan and the Mongolian Question – University of Chicago Press, October 2026

Posted on April 4, 2026 by stuartelden

Sakora Christmas, Territorial Natures: Imperial Japan and the Mongolian Question – University of Chicago Press, October 2026

A critical account of the Japanese occupation in Inner Mongolia.
 
Early in the twentieth century, the steppe borderlands between China and Mongolia erupted in violence. As imperial Japan expanded into this area, this crisis between nomadic and settler communities posed fundamental problems in governance. In response, Japanese and Mongol leaders together proposed a radical solution: Demarcating an autonomous region in Manchukuo for minority peoples, a new kind of political space that would later define the territorial structure of Communist China. 
 
In Territorial Natures, Sakura Christmas explores how the fraught partition of this autonomous region warped the ethnic and environmental boundaries of Manchukuo. She challenges its origin story as a socialist invention by the Chinese state, instead seeing it as also a fascist extension from the Japanese occupation. By reading Chinese and Mongolian sources against Japanese archives, Christmas reveals how this contested history seeded the volatile landscape of autonomous regions in the People’s Republic of China today.

Posted in Territory, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Story of Capital: Book Launch with David Harvey in Conversation with Adam Tooze

Posted on April 3, 2026 by stuartelden

The Story of Capital: Book Launch with David Harvey in Conversation with Adam Tooze – discussing The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works (Verso, 2026), via Reading Capital with David Harvey

Posted in Adam Tooze, David Harvey, Uncategorized | 3 Comments