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.
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits. Une anthologie, introduction by Frédéric Gros, Chronology by Henri-Paul Fruchaud, notes and index by Dan di Razza Dilasser – Bibliothèque de la Pléiade October 2026
I’ve mentioned this collection before, but thanks to Foucault News for the extra details.
Dix ans après la mort de Foucault (1984), ses Dits et écritsrassemblaient en quatre volumes les textes épars que le philosophe avait publiés en France et à l’étranger. La présente anthologie donne à lire cinquante-cinq de ces textes, parmi les plus originaux. Dans ces préfaces, articles, entretiens et conférences, qui s’échelonnent de 1961 à 1984, on voit tantôt jaillir l’étincelle d’un livre à venir, tantôt s’ouvrir un chemin vers ces espaces « absolument autres » chers à Foucault. Souvent, on l’écoute questionner sa pratique philosophique et réfléchir à son parcours. Le style, merveilleux gage de cohérence de l’ensemble, se manifeste jusque dans le grain de la voix écrite. Les figures de Raymond Roussel, Bataille, Blanchot, Magritte, Deleuze, Nietzsche, ou encore des Pères de l’Église traversent ces pages, dans lesquelles sont abordés les thèmes foucaldiens par excellence : folie, enfermement, sexualité, pouvoir ou écriture de soi. Les textes ont été établis sur les documents originaux, et les célèbres réponses que Foucault apporta à l’interrogation « Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ? » pourront être lues à la fois dans la version publiée de son vivant et dans un état inédit, fort différent. Foucault avait le goût, devenu légendaire, de la recherche en bibliothèque, mais aussi bien celui de l’intervention dans l’espace public. Le présent volume, qui paraît pour le centenaire de sa naissance, témoigne de ces deux dispositions, a priori éloignées. Chaque texte est accompagné d’une notule qui le contextualise. Un index raisonné et analytique fournit les informations utiles sur les personnes et les œuvres citées.
I’ve mentioned this before, but the Henri Lefebvre who wroteLes unités perdues (2004, 2011), translated by David L. Sweet as The Missing Pieces (2014), is not the Henri Lefebvre who wrote The Production of Space and The Critique of Everyday Life, among many other works.
Les Unités perduesThe Missing Pieces
For one thing, the more famous one was long dead when The Missing Pieces was published. The book’s final remarks are dated to 2004 (p. 85). Its author also did interviews about it at the time of publication – i.e. here.
Henri Lefebvre is a common name – Lefebvre is close to the French equivalent of Smith, and you would not assume that everyone named Henry Smith was the same person.
But I’ve seen a couple of places where people have thought that this Henri Lefebvre is that Henri Lefebvre. The author of The Missing Pieces is a poet and publisher born in 1959, as the book’s “About the Author” indicates. The book is an interesting and stylistically innovative text on abandoned, lost, destroyed, forgotten and unfinished works. Previously a short excerpt was available on the Berfrois website, but that’s – perhaps fittingly – vanished along with the rest of its archive including the pieces I wrote for them.
Here’s the publisher description for the English edition, the first paragraph of which (or the cover above) gives an indication of the book’s style:
• A boarder for two years following a national funeral, Mirabeau is removed from the Pantheon and transferred to the cemetery of Clamart when his pornographic novels are discovered • A photograph taken by Hessling on Christmas night, 1943, of a young woman nailed alive to the village gate of Novimgorod; Hessling asks his friend Wolfgang Borchert to develop the film, look at the photograph, and destroy it • The Beautiful Gardener, a picture by Max Ernst, burned by the Nazis —from The Missing Pieces
The Missing Pieces is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been lost over time and what in some cases never existed. Through a lengthy chain of brief, laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes the history of what is no more and what never was: the artworks, films, screenplays, negatives, poems, symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts, and lives that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, or known about. It is a literary vanitas of sorts, but one that confers an almost mythical quality on the enigmatic creations it recounts–rather than reminding us of the death that inhabits everything humans create.
Lefebvre’s list includes Marcel Duchamp’s (accidentally destroyed) film of Man Ray shaving off the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s pubic hair; the page written by Balzac on his deathbed (lost); Spinoza’s Treatise on the Rainbow (thrown into a fire); the final seven meters of Kerouac’s original typescript for On the Road (eaten by a dog); the chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erased before an audience); and the one moment in André Malraux’s life in which he exclaimed “I believe, for a minute, I was thinking nothing.” The Missing Pieces offers a treasure trove of cultural and artistic detail and will entertain even those readers not enamored of the void.
The Publisher’s Weekly tries to warn people off making the confusion, while praising the work: “Each sentence or phrase in this haunting project from French poet and publisher Lefebvre (not to be confused with the Marxist philosopher) describes something lost, erased, destroyed, or otherwise unfinished within the life of an artist”. A review by Daniel Barbiero does the same thing. But one review on Amazon complains of their disappointment that it was not by the more famous person – and rather unfairly only gives it three stars as a result.
This is my fault for not reading the “About the author,” but I was disappointed that this is not the Henri Lefebvre of “Right to the City” or “The Production of Space.” If your name is Henri Lefebvre and you didn’t write those two books, you should probably mention that somewhere in the description, something like “The contemporary poet Henri Lefebvre.”
But here’s the amusing bit. In The Missing Pieces, Henri Lefebvre (2) makes a passing reference to Henri Lefebvre (1). It’s not about his fabled missing study of rural sociology, which his biographer Rémi Hess recounts was stolen from a car parked near the Panthéon (pp. 169-70), and which Adam David Morton and I discuss briefly in our introduction to On the Rural (pp. xii-xiv). Rather, it’s about the acrimonious falling out between Lefebvre and the Situationists, which was probably to do with women and accusations of plagiarism: “We no longer know why Henri Lefebvre fell out with Guy Debord” (p. 34). It’s almost as if he’s inviting the confusion.
Rémi Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, Paris: A.M. Métailié, 1988.
Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography, eds. Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, trans. Robert Bononno and others, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
This is the 89th 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.
Foreword by Caleb Smith and Paul North (the sample material online appears to be from Marxism and Form instead).
In The Prison-House of Language, Fredric Jameson, one of the most important literary and cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, provides a thorough historical and philosophical introduction to Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Combining a survey of these influential critical movements and a critique of their methodology, Jameson lays bare their presuppositions, questioning whether the methods of Saussurean linguistics can adequately capture the concrete realities of time and history. The result is a unique and thought-provoking confrontation of two major strands of modern thought and a central work in the development of Jameson’s monumental critical project.
In Marxism and Form, Fredric Jameson, one of the most important literary and cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, offers a pioneering look at major European Marxist and Frankfurt School thinkers—Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács, and Sartre. Through penetrating readings, Jameson develops an influential mode of critical engagement that places art and culture at the heart of Marxist theory. The result lays the foundations for the entirety of Jameson’s monumental critical project—and remains a timely and vital work of aesthetic criticism for readers today.
In The Capitalist Era, leading global historian Jeremy Adelman puts the world’s current unwinding in much-needed historical perspective. Combining political, economic, intellectual, and environmental history, the book tells the epic story of the forces that, since the late eighteenth century, have transformed the world into a single but fractured survival unit that is integrated by exchange and flow, yet divided by suspicion and fear. It is a story of hopes for universal peace, panic over planetary destruction, and debates, policies, and media that have shaped how people view one another across distances and borders.
The Capitalist Era chronicles how global integration compelled people from different parts of the world to reckon with what it means to need each other for resources or recognition without knowing one another, and it describes the confrontations and experiments that have shaped the world through periods of integration and disintegration over the past two centuries. As trade, migration, and new technologies have brought people closer together in search of wealth, security, and survival, there have been huge clashes and collisions involving writers and soldiers, biologists and economists, photographers and missionaries.
Strangers—are they partners or rivals, liberators or oppressors? As The Capitalist Era shows, this is perhaps the biggest question hanging over our past, present, and future. To understand our world, it is essential to grasp how strangers have regarded each other as they decided to welcome or exclude, to respect or dominate. Rejecting simplistic determinisms about inevitable peace or inescapable doom, this book illuminates the brittle unity of today’s world.
Without Masters is an anthropological history of the radical ethical and political principle of autogestión as it traveled around the world in the twentieth century and came to be popularized in Mexico City in the early 2000s. A political term that first arose in 1962 Algeria traveled across continents until it landed in Mexico City’s anarcho-punk scene in the 1980s, where it eventually came to be associated more with zines, music, art, and Zapatismo than with its origins in anarchism or syndicalism. Without Masters brings the true history of autogestión and the quiet radicalism of Mexico City’s autogestive collectives to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Along the way, Stone brings together diverse materials, from punk zines and political fliers to Beat novels and Zapatista parables, that tell an alternate history of radical politics throughout the world in the second half of the twentieth century which serves as a reminder of Mexico’s formative role in the creation of modern social theory.
This book examines how convicts played a key role in the development of capitalism in Australia and how their active resistance shaped both workplace relations and institutions. It highlights the contribution of convicts to worker mobilization and political descent, forcing a rethink of Australia’s foundational story. It is a book that will appeal to an international audience, as well as the many hundreds of thousands of Australians who can trace descent from convicts. It will enable the latter to make sense of the experience of their ancestors, equipping them with the necessary tools to understand convict and court records. It will also provide a valuable undergraduate and postgraduate teaching tool and reference for those studying unfree labour and worker history, social history, colonization and global migration in a digital age.
Medieval saints were thought to be able to provide miraculous cures for a wide variety of illnesses, and about one-tenth of their miracles involved the restoration of sanity to those who had lost their minds. Deprived of Sense and Intellect explores 460 of these stories written across Latin Christendom between 1240 and 1500. The study uses the lens of critical disability studies to bridge the gap between discussions of demonic possession and naturally arising somatic conditions, treating all these narratives about disability and miraculous healing not as documentation of changes to the function of an individual person, but instead as evidence of substantial and intrusive interpersonal tensions in medieval communities. While medieval communities assigned these tensions to a malfunction of consciousness in a single person, medieval miracle texts also reveal how the function and malfunction of consciousness was named and classified. In studying these texts, Leigh Ann Craig explores the terminology and rhetoric used to diagnose a loss of mind as either from natural causes or as an effect of demonic predation, tracing the use of Latin vocabulary in medical compendia, law, and theology. Deprived of Sense and Intellect finds that since diagnoses were difficult and frequently subject to doubt, they varied based on regional cultures of disability in northern and southern Europe, the influences on the development of community consensus in Latin Europe in the Middle Ages, and assumptions based on gender, material evidence, and self-diagnosis.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, governments around the world have expelled, en masse, more than 30 million people. Yet despite its prevalence, mass expulsion remains an understudied phenomenon as scholarly attention has been directed toward the gravest atrocities—genocide and mass killing—or toward forced migration more broadly. Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal examines why and how governments expel, providing a systematic, cross-regional account of mass expulsion over the longue durée. Using the original Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset, the book explains when and where expulsion occurs, who is targeted, and what regimes are most likely to expel. The book identifies two overarching categories of mass expulsion—security and economic—and develops a typology of four corresponding types: counter-irredentist, counter-subversive, reprisal, and nativist. It advances a theory of mass expulsion that traces the decision-making process, showing how key structural, proximate, precipitating, and intervening factors combine to shape the conditions under which governments expel or are restrained. Evidence is drawn from archival research conducted at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the League of Nations archives in Geneva, Switzerland.
This research contributes to the fields of international peace and security, political violence, and forced migration. Conceptually, it fills a gap in the literature by systematically examining mass expulsion as a distinct eliminationist policy aimed at the intentional removal of ethnic groups. Theoretically, it extends existing explanations beyond war and security threats, highlighting an entire class of expulsions targeting perceived economic threats. The book deepens our understanding of critical atrocity restraints, demonstrating the importance of alliances, the “homeland” state of the target group, and international organizations. These restraints generate core policy recommendations that seek to spur greater attention to deterring mass expulsion as a priority for atrocity prevention.
