Apart from the new preface, Eribon’s biography appears unchanged from the 2011 edition, though that is substantially longer than the version available in English. I write about Senghor’s time as a German prisoner of war here. This edition of Sartre’s Carnets has material not in the English translationWar Diaries – notably a notebook unknown at the time of the first edition. Bakhtin’s book is the original English translation; though there is Rabelais and his World: A New Translation by Sergeiy Sandler, which I haven’t seen yet. The Foucault books have been timed for his centenary, which I wrote about here.
What underpins the legitimacy of the prison system in the twenty-first century? Despite numerous challenges and setbacks, there is still a widespread belief that prisons can be improved in a socially progressive way. Even today, ‘model prisons’ are being built that seek to fix the shortcomings and failures of their predecessors, as if past failures were due to a lack of imagination, determination, or resources.
The aim of creating model prisons is not new: it dates back to the early nineteenth century. Ranging from England to Switzerland and Spain, from Russia to China and India, Carceral Utopia documents a rich, global history of ambitious efforts to create model prisons – places of confinement initially lauded for their progressive ideals but later revealed as fiascos.
At the end of this journey through time and space, it will not suffice merely to highlight the gap between plans and realities, or even to dispel the illusion that model prisons could not live up to their claims. We need to ask why, despite so many failures, these institutions are still being built today. Might their many obvious shortcomings conceal a covert success?
For the first time, this volume brings together the writings, lectures, and correspondence of two of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century French thought: Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) and Gaston Fessard (1897–1978). Kojève is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers in France. His Hegel seminars of the 1930s shaped an entire generation of intellectuals, including Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Aron. Among his closest interlocutors was Gaston Fessard, a leading Jesuit theologian and himself a member of the seminar. Authority, History, and Political Theology charts Kojève and Fessard’s friendship through their reviews of each other’s work, lectures, letters, and unpublished essays. These texts, many translated into English for the very first time, show how each thinker grappled with urgent political-theological issues, such as the rise of totalitarianism, secularism, and Marxism. Including a historical introduction, the volume situates their exchange at the intersection of Hegelian philosophy, Catholic theology, and global politics. It shows how two readers of Hegel– one an atheist philosopher, the other a Jesuit theologian – challenge how we think about political life, the role of religion in the public sphere, and the meaning of the end of history. Part of Bloomsbury’s Political Theologies series, this book is essential for readers interested in political theology, continental philosophy, and intellectual history.
I’m teaching a level 3 option on European Political Theory again this term, for the first time in several years. ‘European’ is used loosely to designate a tradition, rather than all the theorists being European by citizenship. This allows me to include Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe, who engage with that tradition; and Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt, who held French and German citizenship, but spent most of their careers outside of Europe.
Louis Althusser and Hélène Legation
The thinker I struggle with most in the module is Louis Althusser. Should he be taught, and if so, how? Does his murder of his wife mean he should be excluded from the module?
What I do is to continue to teach Althusser, but with warnings and some discussion of the case and her work. I am not sure is the right approach, but other than excluding him entirely I haven’t got a better one. I try to address the reasons for why this might be the wrong choice.
Althusser’s work remains significant, and avoiding him would complicate some of the other lectures. I teach Jean-Paul Sartre in the first week, and Henri Lefebvre later, and one of the themes linking those classes is how to read Marx, or which parts of Marx’s work are most significant. Sartre put a lot of emphasis on the early Marx, which Lefebvre had helped to bring to a French audience in the early 1930s. Althusser wants to exclude the early Marx, seeing it as Hegelian and unscientific. Lefebvre tries to propose a reading of Marx’s career as a whole. There are other themes in the lectures on Sartre and Lefebvre, of course, but Althusser’s position helps with situating their positions in relation to Marx, and introduces the students to a debate. I also discuss Althusser on interpellation and ideology, themes which are later connected to Foucault and Butler, for example.
Althusser was married to Hélène Rytmann, sometimes known as Hélène Legotien after a name she used in the resistance. Confusingly, Rytmann is sometimes spelled as Rytman; Legotien as Légotien. Sometimes her surname is hyphenated with Althusser’s. Legotien was the name she chose to publish with. On 16 November 1980 she was killed in their apartment in the École normale supérieure in Paris. Althusser alerted the school authorities to what he had done. He was institutionalised, initially at the Sainte-Anne hospital, rather than arrested. He never stood trial. French criminal law at the time meant that if the accused was in a state of mental disturbance at the time, no crime was held to have been committed. It was therefore ruled that there should be no trial. It is not that the defence was on the grounds of diminished responsibility or similar, but that because of his mental state a crime did not take place. As the 1810 code says: “There can be no crime, or delict, where the accused was in a state of madness at the time of the action; or when he has been constrained by a force which he had not the power to resist”. This article of the Napoleonic code was not changed until the early 1990s, after Althusser’s death.
In the previous lecture I mention what’s coming the next week, indicating that if anyone wants to miss the class their absence will be understood. I discussed the issues around this case in a bit more detail this year, why he never stood trial for murder, and using recent research to say something more about Legotien.
We have Althusser’s account, written a few years after the event, of what happened. There was an autopsy and a psychiatric evaluation of Althusser. Hélène Legotien was strangled – he claims he was massaging her neck and it was by accident. His mental health was a constant struggle, and he was in and out of institutions for much of his life. He was treated by drugs and underwent psychoanalysis. His time in a German prisoner of war camp is sometimes seen as a factor in this illness. It has also been reported she was thinking of leaving him. There are various secondary accounts including the beginning of Yann Moulier Boutang’s uncompleted biography. Althusser’s own account in his autobiography is obviously one to take with some scepticism, as with much else in that book. John Sturrock writes about the autobiography and biography in the London Review of Books, with a title doubtless chosen by a subeditor, but no less awful for that. Richard Seymour writes about the case, and what Althusser’s autobiography says, and does not say, here.
Seymour also gives some background on Legotien – a Jewish woman, a communist, a resistant, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and more. But he ends his piece with the suggestion that it is regrettable that “in the discussion of the murder, Rytman hardly ever appears as a woman with qualities”. Asaf Haider has written about how the horrific events are sometimes used to dismiss Althusser’s thought, often to justify reasons that were raised decades before the murder. William S. Lewis has written a lot more about the murder, about Althusser’s legacy and ways of reading him, and about the overwhelmingly male scholarship on Althusser. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times devotes Chapter 4 to “The Murder Scene”.
In the teaching this year I was also able to draw on two recent books about the case. One has been translated into English – Killer Althusser: The Banality of Man by Francis Dupuis-Déri. Dupuis-Déri reads the murder as a case of femicide, and claims that Althusser has murdered her in a second sense too, in terms of silencing her and letting his voice dominate. Dupuis-Déri rightly insists that we only have Althusser’s account of what happened. These texts were published posthumously, which is true of all the writings of the last ten years of his life, when he was institutionalised and publicly silent. His letters to her have been published as Lettres à Hélène, though not translated, but not her letters to him, which do still exist. Althusser’s letters to Franca Madonia have also been published. In contrast, Maria Antoinetta Macciocchi’s Lettres de l’intérieur du parti does not include Althusser’s letters on his request, but they are in the original Italian edition and the English translation Letters from Inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser. (I wrote about Macciocchi in an earlier piece in this series.)
I was more sympathetic to the idea of Dupuis-Déri’s book than I appreciated the book itself. The purpose of questioning the posthumous reception of Althusser’s work and the silencing of Hélène Legotien is important, and I wanted to find out more. But this slight book, based on an article and its postscript, does not do much more than to make that point, relying on existing accounts, particularly Althusser’s own, and trying to hold them to account.
The other recent book, which I think is much better, is Johanna Luyssen, Les Fragments d’Hélène. Luyssen makes the strong point that we need to try to retrieve her voice. It does so first by calling her Hélène, neither the name of her father or her husband. It’s less clear why Legotien, which she chose for herself, should not be preferred. It does more with archival material, as well as using the already-published accounts of her life and death.
Lucie Rondeau du Noyer has also done important work in trying to put the emphasis back on Hélène Legotien, rather than the act of her murder or the writings of her murderer. In English, Rondeau du Noyer’s writing includes a conference paper and a post on the Verso blog. The blog piece is also valuable in listing Legotien’s published works – compiling a bibliography is essential labour which makes possible other engagements. As far as I can tell, nothing of Legotien’s work is available in English translation. (Dupuis-Déri also provides a bibliography, using Rondeau du Noyer’s work.) As well as published work by Legotien, Rondeau du Noyer helped to establish the Hélène Legotien archives at IMEC in Normandy. These archives of French publishers and writers include some materials relating to Foucault, much of the Derrida archive (with copies of the material held at UC Irvine), and Althusser’s own papers. Legotien’s archives were only separately organised and inventoried in 2025. Before that, some of her papers were part of Althusser’s archive. Some documents relating to Legotien’s role in relation to the resistance and her expulsion from the French Communist Party have recently been edited in La Pensée No 424.
I don’t have any strong conclusions here. I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone. As this piece indicates, I struggle with whether I am doing the right thing. My approach is therefore to warn the students of what’s coming; teach with a clear indication of the stakes; try to say what I can about Legotien; and admit I might be wrong to discuss Althusser at all. The students who expressed a view to me seemed to think this approach was appropriate, with some noting that they had been taught Althusser before without this even being mentioned.
References
“Hélène Legotein Rytmann (1950-1952)”, La Pensée 424, 2025, 69-121.
Louis Althusser, L’Avenir dure longtemps suivi de Les Faits, eds. Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang, Paris: Éditions Stock/IMEC, 1992, Le Livre du poche, 1994; The Future Lasts a Long Time, trans. Richard Veasey, London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.
Louis Althusser, Lettres à Hélène: 1947-1980, ed. Olivier Corpet, Paris: Grasset, 2011, Le Livre de Poche, 2013.
Louis Althusser, Lettres à Franca (1961-1973), eds. François Matheron and Yann Moulier Boutang, Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1998.
Francis Dupuis-Déri, Killer Althusser: The Banality of Man, trans. Mélissa Bull, Toronto: Between the Lines, 2025.
Johanna Luyssen, Les Fragments d’Hélène, Paris: Juillard, 2025.
Yann Moulier Boutang, Louis Althusser, une biographie I: La Formation du mythe, Paris: Grasset, 1992.
Lucie Rondeau Du Noyer, “Not your average Marxist”, Historical Materialism – Twenty-First Annual Conference, Nov 2024, London, United Kingdom, https://hal.science/hal-05346707
Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Lettere dall’interno del PCI a Louis Althusser, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1969; Lettres de l’intérieur du parti: le Parti communiste, les masses et les forces révolutionnaires pendant la campagne électorale à Naples en mai 1968, Paris: François Maspero, 1970; Letters from Inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser, trans. Stephen M. Hellman, London: NLB, 1973.
Elisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, trans. William McCuaig, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
This is the 96th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and so far through 2026. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal and developed 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.
When an ordinary man is thrust into the dangerous world of smuggling at America’s northern border, he is forced to risk his own freedom to protect refugees from violent immigration policing.
Soon after conservative businessman Bob Boulé opens the Smuggler’s Inn, a quirky bed and breakfast in Blaine, Washington directly on the US-Canada border, refugees, drug traffickers, and ICE agents all trust him with their secrets. The refugees tell Bob heartbreaking stories of persecution and death. The drug traffickers and ICE agents try to recruit Bob to their side in the dangerous game of smuggling at the border. As Bob’s work at the Smuggler’s Inn spirals, he is forced to make a series of risky decisions that draw him deeper and deeper into the murky border underworld, putting his own freedom at risk. His secret life comes crashing down after a violent confrontation with a Border Patrol agent in his driveway, leading him to question his core beliefs about right and wrong as he finds his true purpose in life. In this gripping exposé, Border expert Reece Jones and immigration lawyer Greg Boos reveal the hidden world of America’s northern border and provide readers with urgent insights into immigration and border policing throughout the United States.
From the Taliban-controlled countryside of Afghanistan to the infamous La Joya prison in Panama, the stories featured in Smuggler converge in the misty forests of the Pacific Northwest in the borderlands between Seattle and Vancouver. There are car chases, drug deals between the Hells Angels and the Sinaloa cartel, and over a thousand people who slip quietly across the border to safety in Canada in the dead of night. After the violent confrontation with the Border Patrol agent, Bob’s complaint goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose landmark decision in Egbert v. Boule paves the way for the apparent impunity of ICE agents on American streets in the second presidency of Donald Trump.
Featuring personal interviews, in-depth research, and a propulsive narrative, Smuggler is the untold true story of how a quaint bed and breakfast on the northern border became the epicenter of debates about refugee protections and violent immigration policing inside the United States.
A study of thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon that reveals the medieval thinking that erased non-Christian texts, actors, and cultures from the history of science
In his works, thirteenth-century English scholastic philosopher and Franciscan Roger Bacon depicted an enticing future that included, among other technological marvels, vehicles of unimaginable speed without animal power, diving bells for exploring the ocean floor, and mirrors and lenses that could incinerate whole armies. These speculative technologies exemplify the promise of scientia experimentalis, Bacon’s term for his theory of scientific knowledge production, and which relied on both theory and experiential knowledge to get accurate knowledge of the natural world. In the centuries after his death, others constructed Bacon’s inventiveness and anticipation through partial readings, creative mistranslations, and purposeful distortions of his work, especially relating to scientia experimentalis.
In Necessary Inventions, E. R. Truitt uses Roger Bacon and his afterlives to establish and critique the role of periodization in the historiography of science, specifically the divide between “medieval” and “modern.” Truitt shows how, in his lifetime, Bacon was part of an intellectual current of men at Oxford and in Paris, and he consulted texts written in Arabic, newly available in Latin, from which he borrowed, synthesized, and Christianized knowledge about optics, experimentation, and other topics. By the nineteenth century, however, Bacon was understood within the history of scientific development as a brilliant visionary who foretold (or, according to some, invented) later technologies and whose theory of scientia experimentalis anticipated the scientific method by five hundred years. This framing implies that Bacon’s own time—the Middle Ages— was one of intellectual immaturity, and that Bacon’s ideas were precocious because the period in which he lived was an era of intellectual stagnation, hostile to rational thought. Truitt exposes the history of this characterization of the medieval period, showing how it organizes both the historiography of science and the narrative of scientific progress.
Uncovering the logic of replacement theology that undergirds the characterization of Bacon as a prophetic figure of scientific modernity, Necessary Inventions reveals the medieval thinking that enabled modern science to tell a story of scientific development that erased non-Christian texts, actors, and cultures from the history of science.
An illuminating exploration of the relationship between the restitution of looted art, global status, and the international construction of national cultural heritage.
Why is art restitution a matter of politics? How does the artwork displayed in national museums reflect the international status of the state that owns it? Why do some states agree to return looted art and others resist?
National art collections have long been a way for states to compete with each other for status, prestige, and cultural worth in international society. In many former imperial nations, however, these collections include art looted during imperial expansions and colonial occupations. While this was once a sign of high international standing, the markers of such status, particularly in the context of art, have since significantly changed. A new international legal and normative architecture governing art provenance developed after World War II and became institutionalized in the 1990s and 2000s. Since then, there have been national and global social movements demanding the return of looted art. This shift has established not only that looting is wrong but, more importantly, that restitution is morally right. As a result of this reframing of what it means to own art, an artifact’s historical provenance has become a core element of its value and the search for provenance and demands for restitution a direct threat to state status. The same objects that granted states high international status now threaten to provoke status decline.
In The Art of Status, Jelena Subotić examines this relationship between the restitution of looted art and international status, with a focus on the Parthenon (‘Elgin’) Marbles, the Benin Bronzes, and a collection of paintings looted during the Holocaust that are now housed at the Serbian National Museum. Subotić tells the story of these artworks, how they were looted, how they ended up on display in national museums, and how the art restitution disputes have unfolded. While these cases are different in terms of their historical context of looting and ownership claims, the movements for their restitution, and resistance to it, illustrate the larger questions of how national cultural heritage is internationally constructed and how it serves states’ desire for international status and prestige.
An in-depth and nuanced account of art restitution disputes, The Art of Status illuminates the shifting political significance of art on the international stage, from ownership to restitution.
Today’s world is driven by reactions. We are constantly prompted to like or comment on digital content—and bombarded with requests to rate everything from customer service to doctors. Reactions have become both an object of fascination—as seen in “reaction videos”—and a highly valued metric. What happens when the worth of every action is determined by how people react to it? Can we still act with purpose—or are we trapped in a loop of stimulus and response? In this groundbreaking book, William Davies argues that we are living not in an “attention economy” but rather in what he calls a “reaction economy”—a world where the kind of witnessing implied by “attention” has been displaced by the harvesting of reactions, and humans have become less distinguishable from nonhumans. Exploring the fascinating idea and history of reactions, The Reaction Economy asks what happens to our lives, culture and politics when everyone is constantly reacting to everyone else.
The Reaction Economy traces the concept of reaction through the natural sciences, psychology, avant-garde experiments and the cybernetic notion of “feedback mechanisms.” It shows that the relationship between two kinds of reaction—automatic and rapid responses and slower reactions rooted in sustained feelings of injustice or vengeance—cuts to the heart of our world today, including the explosion of reactionary politics.
Identifying and illuminating a central aspect of contemporary life, The Reaction Economy also explores how we might escape this system by rediscovering a capacity for action, spontaneity and imagination, beyond the compulsion to react.
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.
The untold story of Ray Trautman, the Greatest Generation’s librarian, who made reading central to the Allied fight in World War II and transformed the role of books in American life.
Though unknown to most readers, no one made a greater contribution to reading habits in America than Ray Trautman. Growing up in the rural Midwest, Trautman looked to reading as a way of exploring the world—as both escape and enlightenment—and yet, as with many Americans, discovered that with no community library and limited funds finding books was a challenge. This sparked in him a lifelong passion to build libraries and ensure free access to books for all. After working his way through college, Trautman became an independent bookseller, and then joined the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression, building libraries and teaching people how to read. In late 1940, after earning a degree in library studies from Columbia, he landed the job of a lifetime: Chief Librarian of the Army. Many military leaders believed books were an unnecessary distraction for troops, but Trautman relentlessly championed books, believing, like others, that they were key to the fight against totalitarianism and ultimately built the largest and most far-reaching library system in the world. He devised the “Armed Services Editions,” wallet-sized paperbacks and printed miniature magazines for soldiers. He also created the most popular comic book in the Army, Overseas Comics. Along the way, Trautman fought book bans and book-resistant generals (including Douglas MacArthur), was nearly killed in the Battle of the Bulge while on a special assignment for Dwight Eisenhower and joined forces with librarians and publishers to spread access to reading. Trautman was credited with distributing nearly a half billion books, magazines, and comic books to troops.
When the war ended in 1945, Trautman brought the fight for books home: advocating for rural libraries, building libraries in prisons, campaigning for more books for the visually impaired, and working to develop materials for adults with low reading proficiency so they could improve their literacy skills.
A Librarian’s War introduces readers to a man who dedicated his life to instilling a passion for reading and unhindered access to books. Molly Guptill Manning’s book puts Trautman where he deserves to be: at the center of the story.
