Michel Foucault, La Croisade des enfants – ed. Arianna Sforzini with Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Flammarion, October 2026
This is big news – the publication of a mid-1970s manuscript, planned for the original thematic version of the History of Sexuality, but abandoned and unfinished as that series changed direction. Foucault lectured on this material in Les Anormaux/Abnormal in 1975.
Au milieu des années 1970, Michel Foucault découvre l’histoire d’une campagne menée par les autorités médicales qui aura duré plus d’un siècle : la lutte acharnée contre la masturbation des enfants. L’onanisme, du milieu du XVIIIᵉ au milieu du XIXᵉ siècle, est dénoncé comme une pratique dangereuse, pouvant engendrer des maladies sévères et entraîner la population vers un déclin fatidique. Comment comprendre le déclenchement de cette incroyable campagne qui rétrospectivement ne peut qu’inspirer la stupeur, le rire ou l’indignation ? L’explication par la répression contre toute forme de sexualité déjouant l’impératif austère de la reproduction de l’espèce paraît à Foucault trop simpliste. Travaillant sur cette littérature anti-onaniste, il y voit la matrice de grandes inventions culturelles : l’articulation d’une causalité sexuelle irréductible, l’affirmation d’une sexualité proprement infantile, l’installation du médecin au cœur des familles comme grand régulateur de l’intimité, l’agencement d’une famille incestueuse et soupçonneuse, la naissance de formes nouvelles de savoirs, pouvoirs, plaisirs. Le texte de Foucault, tout en demeurant inachevé, nous offre cinq chapitres de ce premier épisode de la biopolitique moderne.
From geological maps to photographs and films of snow, ice, clouds, and coral reefs, visual inscriptions mediate the construction and codification of extractive modes of seeing Earth’s subterranean depths and aerial heights. Tracing the territorial ambitions of the archipelagic empires of Japan and the United States in the twentieth century, Archives of the Anthropoceneexplores crucial moments of overlap between the geoscientific history of studying Earth’s deep time and the geopolitical history of territorialization, militarization, and extraction in the Pacific and polar regions. By engaging with contemporary critiques of settler colonialism, liberal humanism, and nonhuman labor from the perspective of environmental media studies, Yuriko Furuhata unsettles the universalist narrative of the Anthropocene, calling us to instead imagine an anticolonial and anti-imperial future for the planet.
This piece is missing from Hervé Coutau-Bégarie’s generally comprehensive L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil, a book-length listing of Dumézil’s books, articles and other publications. (That book is out-of-print, but fairly easily available in libraries or second-hand.)
While Dumézil published a huge amount, by his standards he didn’t publish much in the first years of his career. His two doctoral theses were published in 1924, but before them very little. His first academic articles were in 1925, and his first book reviews in 1929. Coutau-Bégarie indicates three pieces in La Revue universelle about the École normale supérieure, published in 1920, but no other newspaper pieces until 1950.
The key absence from Coutau-Bégarie’s listing is the journalism which Dumézil published under the pseudonym ‘Georges Marcenay’ in the 1930s. Didier Eribon revealed this identity in his Faut-il brûler Dumézil? in 1992. Eribon identified many pieces signed by ‘Marceney’, particularly his regular columns on foreign politics for Le Jour. This was the French newspaper edited by Léon Bailby, though it shared a name with the Quebec independence newspaper and Belgian and Lebanese papers. The French Le Jour was politically on the right, pro-Mussolini but anti-Nazi, and Marcenay’s columns broadly took the same position.Eribon quoted from Marcenay’s columns extensively, and discussed them in some detail. But he expressed a hope others would develop this analysis:
For the rest, we can only hope that a researcher will undertake a systematic study of these chronicles, which often express more than just a simple judgement on current political events: they reveal what might be called Georges Dumézil’s ‘philosophy of history’. However, one must be cautious with this kind of expression: it would be rather risky to deduce that this ‘philosophy of history’ also inspires his academic research. What is certain, on the other hand, is that it shapes his vision of politics (p. 127).
Unfortunately, most commentators since have been content to depend upon Eribon’s work, rather than return to the sources themselves. In the research I’ve been doing on Dumézil I went through all the pieces I could find published by ‘Marcenay’. I found more pieces, both in the journals he was known to have written for, and some other outlets. At least some of his columns were reprinted in other places. I will discuss this elsewhere, though I also recognise that much more could be done.
There are also a few pieces in newspapers signed by Dumézil in his own name. Two were published in L’Intransigeant in March and April 1924, another right-wing paper, directed by Bailby before he founded Le Jour. Another article, and the earliest I have found after the ones for La Revue universelle, is this piece on “La véritable histoire de Tout-Ankh-Amon”, the true story of Tutankhamun, published in La Revue française. Its 9 March 1924 date means it predates his defence of his doctoral theses, which took place on 5 April.
La Revue française was the name given to several French papers, not to be confused with La Nouvelle Revue française, published by Gallimard. This particular one was a right-wing newspaper founded in 1905, edited by Antoine Rédier, originally with the name La Revue française politique et littéraire. Later, Maurice Blanchot would write for it – I’ve written about his political journalism and reviews of Dumézil before in this series.
The Tutankhamun piece is perhaps more interesting for the fact Dumézil wrote it than for its specific content. It appeared a few days after his 26th birthday (4 March 1924). Dumézil says a little about the sponsorship of Carter’s excavations by his friend Lord Carnarvon, the media circus about the discoveries, and the clash with the Egyptian authorities. He spends most time on giving some of the background to Tutankhamun’s reign and early death. The photographs in the article are credited to the Queen of Belgium, who was one of the first visitors to the excavation site in early 1923. One thing which is interesting about the piece is that Dumézil is writing about a figure outside of the Indo-European tradition, and not in one other area in which he worked, the Caucasus.
In 1925 Dumézil moved to Turkey, where he taught until 1931, and from there to Uppsala, where he taught for two years as well as running French cultural events in the town. (This was the post he would recommend Foucault for two decades later, briefly mentioned in his tribute to Foucault which is reproduced here.) I’ve found no articles in French newspapers during Dumézil’s time outside France. It was on his return to Paris in 1933 that he began writing for newspapers again, now under the pseudonym of ‘Georges Marcenay’. It has been claimed that the purpose was to supplement his income as a temporary lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. The journalism ends in 1935, when he gained a permanent post there. As indicated above, the politics of that journalism has been discussed by Eribon and others, and is something I’ll treat elsewhere. But this piece on Tutankhamun is an interesting early piece.
References
Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil: Catalogue raisonée, Paris: Economica, 1998.
Georges Dumézil, “La Véritable histoire de Tout-Ankh-Amon”, La Revue française 19 (10), 9 March 1924, 262-63.
Georges Dumézil, “Les Fourmis sous l’averse”, L’Intransigeant, 13 March 1924, 1.
Georges Dumézil, “Nous manquons de mots historiques”, L’Intransigeant, 25 April 1924, 1.
Didier Eribon, Faut-il brûler Dumézil?Mythologie, science et politique,Paris: Fayard, 1992.
This is the 90th 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. The pieces 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.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
Nondualism in International Relations: A Methodological Reconstruction Beyond Binaries examines howInternational Relations (IR) has long been structured by binary thinking—inside/outside, self/other, West/non-West, hierarchy/anarchy, and theory/practice. While recent approaches, including Global IR, have sought to pluralise the field, they often retain a methodological commitment to separability, treating analytical units as pre-given or historically constituted discrete entities.
The book uses Global IR as an entry point, arguing that overcoming binary thinking requires not the addition of new perspectives but a reorientation at the level of methodology. Advancing nondualism as a basis for the methodological reconstruction of IR, the volume brings together contributions that develop distinct nondualist methodological models across core domains of enquiry, including space, time, meaning, logic, order, ethics, gender, and identity. Each chapter follows a shared analytical sequence: identifying dualist limitations, developing a nondualist methodological model, and demonstrating its practical implications. These approaches are illustrated through engagements with issues such as territoriality, temporal ordering, cross-cultural interpretation, environmental governance, international order, conflict and reconciliation, gendered political processes, migration, and uneven global development. By shifting the focus from epistemic pluralism to methodological reconstruction, the book advances a Lakatosian nondualist IR research programme with implications beyond the discipline, extending to wider debates across the social sciences and humanities. It offers a systematic approach to analysing complex political formations without reducing them to fixed categories or either–or logics.
Nondualism in International Relations will be of interest to scholars and students of International Relations and Global IR, as well as those working in political theory, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and human geography.
In Citizen Marx, Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism. Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism. One of Marx’s principal political values, Leipold contends, was a republican conception of freedom, according to which one is unfree when subjected to arbitrary power.
Placing Marx’s republican communism in its historical context—but not consigning him to that context—Leipold traces Marx’s shifting relationship to republicanism across three broad periods. First, Marx began his political life as a republican committed to a democratic republic in which citizens held active popular sovereignty. Second, he transitioned to communism, criticizing republicanism but incorporating the republican opposition to arbitrary power into his social critiques. He argued that although a democratic republic was not sufficient for emancipation, it was necessary for it. Third, spurred by the events of the Paris Commune of 1871, he came to view popular control in representation and public administration as essential to the realization of communism. Leipold shows how Marx positioned his republican communism to displace both antipolitical socialism and anticommunist republicanism. One of Marx’s great contributions, Leipold suggests, was to place politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of socialism.
In Mosquito Work, Ann H. Kelly and Javier Lezaun reimagine global health by returning to its most persistent problem: the mosquito. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic and historical research across Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the former Soviet Union, the authors follow entomologists, technicians, community volunteers, and the mosquitoes themselves to illuminate the collaborations, experimental improvisations, and political entanglements that shape contemporary disease control. In each setting, Kelly and Lezaun explore how expertise is crafted, how interventions take shape, and how scientific attention to mosquito life becomes a vehicle for imagining different futures of global health. The painstaking effort to come to grips with the dynamic behaviors, elusive ecology, and irrepressible recalcitrance of mosquitoes offers crucial insight into what global health can know and do. Mosquito Work reveals a world where intervention depends less on silver bullets than on forms of care, persistence, and collaboration that unfold close to the problem at hand.
This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the intertwined cultural, historical, and geopolitical landscape of Ladakh and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) – two regions separated by the Line of Control (LoC) yet bound by deep-rooted connections. Moving beyond conventional security and strategic discourse, this volume focusses on humanitarian concerns and the lived experiences of local populations who continue to bear the impact of political instability, militarisation, and border tensions. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the book critically examines key issues including border dynamics, divided families, socio-economic marginalisation, climate vulnerability, and environmental security. It sheds light on emerging protests in Ladakh post-abrogation, political aspirations in GB, and the militarisation of everyday life along contested borders. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, legal analysis, and normative frameworks, the chapters amplify voices from within these communities, offering rare insights into the aspirations, anxieties, and resilience of borderland populations. Rich in case studies and real-life narratives, the book bridges academic scholarship with grassroots perspectives, making it both rigorous and accessible. This book is useful to the departments of Border Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Political Science, International Relations, Anthropology, Sociology, and Security Studies. It would be an indispensable resource for policymakers, journalists, and readers interested in South Asia and border conflicts.
A wide-ranging and up-to-date survey of the leading ideas and debates in political philosophy
Political Philosophy: The Fundamentals introduces core topics within the field by engaging students in seminal works in both contemporary philosophy and the history of political thought. Requiring no previous background in the subject, this clear and comprehensible textbook equips readers with the necessary context for understanding different philosophical perspectives.
Through eight succinct chapters, Thom Brooks highlights important contributions made from political philosophers from the past and present to connect the history of political thought with ongoing debates. Readers gain insights into various conceptions about the nature of freedom, different ways of understanding equality, longstanding debates over punishment, questions concerning the value of human rights, issues of global justice and severe poverty, approaches to handling climate change and much more.
Helping readers develop informed opinions on central issues, Political Philosophy: The Fundamentals:
Discusses divergent views about the different forms and limits of freedom that philosophers have defended over time
Provides a historical perspective of contemporary understandings of human rights and their origins in natural law and natural rights
Illustrates the multiple ways that freedom has been understood, including commonalities and differences
Examines various ways of implementing equality and assessing their merits
Covers influential work by John Rawls that envisions a well-ordered society governed by principles of justice
Featuring carefully selected further readings in each chapter, Political Philosophy: The Fundamentals is essential reading for undergraduate students and general readers interested in the historical development and present-day debates over political ideas and institutions.
In recent years, people across the world have protested the violence of policing and its intrusion into everyday lives, and the close timing of these global movements is no coincidence. As Imperial Entanglements of Policingshows, a central reason for the remarkable similarities of policing around the globe is empire. Across the entire sweep of modern policing, there have been strong, mutual connections among police forces via tactics, training, technology, and ideology. Contributors investigate these imperial entanglements in diverse sites around the world, from cities like New York, Santiago, and Johannesburg to countries like the Philippines, Algeria, United Kingdom, and Iraq. Together, they examine a range of policing practices and tactics, such as the impact of American, German, and United Nations policing consultants being employed across the world and the influence of technology and ideology on these encounters. They highlight the ways imperial power was and continues to be perpetrated through police power, how it has evolved in service of imperial goals, and its connection with sites of imperial control.
