Marcelo Hoffman and I have written a short piece for the Verso blog about Foucault’s 1971 visit to Montreal. This was Foucault’s first time in Canada, where he gave three lectures on Nietzsche at McGill University and one on Sade at the Université de Montréal. Daniel Defert recalls that Foucault also met with Quebec separatists during this visit.
While Foucault’s visits to California from 1975 until near the end of his life are well known, less well explored are his transatlantic trips before 1975. As well as McGill, Foucault visited SUNY Buffalo in spring 1970 and 1972, and Cornell University in autumn 1972. He also visited Brazil in 1965 and four times in the early-mid 1970s.
Marcelo and I have both written about Foucault’s early visits to the Americas. Marcelo’s Foucault in Brazil: Dictatorship, Resistance, and Solidarity (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) examines his five visits there, following the earlier work of Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues in Michel Foucault au Brésil: Présence, effets, résonances, which was first published in Portuguese and then in French translation. Marcelo also wrote about the FBI file on Foucault, which explains some of the challenges he faced on his initial visits to the United States.
In 2025 I spent a few days in the archives in Buffalo. They have quite extensive files which provide a lot of detail about the two times he visited there. Unfortunately, there is no comparable archive for the McGill or Cornell visits. I discuss the Buffalo visits here and in more detail in a piece in Foucault Studies. Leonhard Riep analyses Foucault’s 1972 Buffalo course in detail in an essay in that same issue (both open access). The course has now been published as Histoire de la vérité, edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Orazio Irrera, on the basis of a complete set of tape recordings made at the time (now available online). I have also discussed the limited information about Foucault’s time at Cornell and the visit he made to Attica prison in 1972, while he was staying in Buffalo.
Our piece on the Verso blog looks at the Montreal visit, both the academic lectures he gave and his meetings with the separatists. It is written on the basis of the sources we have been able to find, and also says what we have been unable to discover, through archival absences and state obstruction. We hope it is a useful addition to the story of Foucault in the Americas, before California.
There are too many to try to be comprehensive, but here are a few of the tributes and reposts of older material celebrating the life and career of the remarkable historian Carlo Ginzburg (1939-2026).
It’s not enough to ask what the technology does – we must understand who it’s doing it for and who it’s doing it to
As we enter the age of AI, we are in danger of being reduced to what Cory Doctorow dubs the ‘reverse centaur’. With that term he conjures a human being conscripted as the assistant to a dominant machine. It could be a driver made to deliver nonstop, all day long; a warehouse worker packing shelves without bathroom or food breaks; or a programmer reviewing impossible amounts of AI-produced code.
Don’t fall for the hype! The billionaires managing the rise of AI are putting on a command performance for the bosses and investors, not for the ordinary people who might use the products. When this latest tech bubble bursts, will there be something useful for us in the wreckage?
In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Doctorow examines why we find ourselves in this mess and how we can get out of it. Life after AI should mean the tools work for us, not the other way around.
I posted a short piece to this site every Sunday through 2025, and am now half-way through 2026. I don’t seem to be running out of ideas, usually with a few in progress at any one time, though some have run it close to be ready to go out on the day.
The Tel Quel group who visited ChinaUmberto Eco and Jacques Lacan at the International Gallery of Modern Art, on the Grand Canal in Venice, 1976 (via Lacan Circle Of Australia on X)
They are not on substack or similar, and are free to read.
The full listing is here, with a thematic organisation here. A few shorter pieces have been posted mid-week.
As I’ve said before, it’s hard to know how these are being received, since comments are few and I don’t trust WordPress stats. It’s not just about numbers, but that’s one way to see how they might have been read. With the exception of pieces on Foucault, which always seem relatively popular, I’ve given up trying to predict what the fate of each piece might be.
Following his death in 2024, Fredric Jameson’s vast body of work continues to challenge orthodoxies while retaining close ties to older critical and philosophical traditions, notably dialectical criticism, formal analysis, and utopian discourse. The Future of Totality brings together a selection of Jameson’s former students and other prominent scholars thinking from Jameson, rather than writing onhim, to represent future directions of Jamesonian thought in the tradition of dialectical criticism and cultural study. Through four sections reflecting and building on Jameson’s legacy, focusing on theory, critical reading of new forms, the reshaping of contemporary problematics, and new dimensions inspired by Jameson, The Future of Totality makes its own intervention about the continuity and innovation of Jameson’s contributions. Serving both as a tribute to the scholar and as a space for thinking about the future of his work, these essays explore new and unforeseen dimensions to which Jameson’s work leads.
A provocative examination of the ways our economy has been rigged by financialization, and the importance of games to our dangerous political moment.
In an age when capitalism feels like an unwinnable game, extreme reactionary ideas and politics are on the rise. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Squid Game, and much of reality TV are cultural reflections of a society of relentless, lonely competition, where each of us must become a player: a savvy risk-taker, a miniature corporation of one. But in a gamed economy we players feel played, and new forms of fascism promise harsh justice and revenge. This book theorizes the connections between the financialization of the capitalist economy, the gamification of our lives, and the rising threat of a uniquely twenty-first century form of fascistic politics.
From vicious online swarmings to the QAnon conspiracy fantasy, from the siege of the US Capitol to the abuse of “free speech,” The Player and the Played analyzes the “playgrom” as a new form of extremist violence. Max Haiven explores how “derivative fascisms” both repeat and reinvent the terrors of the past in a financialized form. How have we learned to love the cheats who have power but loathe the cheats without it? It unpacks the worldbuilding (and world-destroying) urge of Silicon Valley. And it poses the urgent question: What is the antifascist game?
As part of my research on Georges Dumézil and Émile Benveniste, I’ve been tracing their quite different experiences in the Second World War. Both lost their teaching positions under Vichy, although for very different reasons – Dumézil because he had once been a freemason; Benveniste because he was Jewish. Dumézil got his positions back, and taught through the rest of the war in Paris. Benveniste was a soldier, prisoner, escapee, refugee and eventually a librarian in Switzerland, before returning to Paris after the Liberation. There is a wealth of material in the archives which has shed new light on these stories, especially that of Benveniste. They will be discussed in detail in my book on their parallel lives and careers.
Here’s something which adds a little to Benveniste’s story, which remains speculative and not something I’d publish about in a more formal way, so it perhaps finds a home here.
The document is in the papers of German and Jewish Intellectual Émigré Collections, held at the University of Albany, State University of New York. It suggests that Benveniste may have considered a move to the United States, or more likely that friends were exploring this as a possibility for him. The document is in the American Council for Émigrés in the Professions Records, and comes from the papers of Else Staudinger, who helped refugees fleeing Europe. The American Council for Émigrés in the Professions was founded in 1945, by Staudinger and New School director Alvin Johnson, but both of them were important in supporting escaping scholars from Europe much earlier. Johnson was important in the story of the École Libre des Hautes Études, in which many French and Belgian academics in exile taught, alongside other refugees from Europe – I’ve written about some of what Roman Jakobson and Alexandre Koyré taught there in previous pieces in this series.
The document at SUNY Albany is a one-page cv of Benveniste, with the details typed onto a form with existing headings. It lists his posts at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne (i.e. the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which was based at the Sorbonne). It curiously gives his field as Sanskrit, when Iranian and Comparative Grammar were his main fields, and the representative publication as The Persian Religion, perhaps because that was his one book in English at the time. It is undated. It does give the names of some references, and the posts they currently held: Roman Jakobson at the New School; G. Cohen at Yale, and Jean Wahl at Mt. Holyoke. These help with dating the document: Gustave Cohen, formerly of the Sorbonne, was teaching at Yale from 1941; Jakobson arrived in the United States in 1941 and began his École Libre teaching in fall 1942, after doing some work in the New York Public Library; Jean Wahl also began teaching at Mount Holyoke in fall 1942. The institutional affiliations of the referees therefore suggest the document dates from late 1942 or after.
Wahl’s story is fascinating in itself. He was arrested and interned in the Drancy camp north of Paris, as was Benveniste’s brother. Wahl escaped and made it to the United States – a story recently dramatized in W.C. Hackett, Outside the Gates. Benveniste’s brother was sent on a transport to the east, and was murdered in Auschwitz.
Benveniste’s address in this document is given as c/o Prof. Minard, Faculté de Lettres, University of Lyon. This is Armand Minard, a Sanskrit specialist and student of Benveniste’s colleague Louis Renou, and like Benveniste and Renou, of Antoine Meillet.(Georges-Jean Pinault’s work situates Minard well in this French linguistic lineage.) Benveniste had moved to Lyon in the ‘unoccupied zone’ after escaping from a German work camp on 21 November 1941. After the southern parts of France were invaded by the Germans and Italians in late 1942, he decided to leave France. He applied for a Swiss visa in Lyon on 18 December 1942, and left the city the same day. He spent some time in Les Houches near Chamonix in Haute Savoie, then under Italian occupation. He crossed into Switzerland in April 1943, so it again seems likely this document dates from late 1942, or possibly early 1943.
The document is from Staudinger’s files, box 1, folder 122. Staudinger went on to be executive secretary of the American Council for Émigrés in the Professions. Some of the ACEP records are at the New School; some others are at the University of Oregon, mostly a series of annual reports. Unfortunately, neither provides further information on the possibility relating to Benveniste.
It is unlikely the form was completed by Benveniste himself, given the entries on Sanskrit and the Sorbonne, so it was probably completed by someone on his behalf, perhaps one of the people named as a possible reference. By 1942 it would have been exceptionally difficult for someone to get out of Occupied Europe, especially a Jewish escaped prisoner of war. One of the last of the boats out of Marseille, which took Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Serge, André Breton and others out of France to Martinique was in Spring 1941. (Eric Jennings is good on these stories.) Jakobson took a different route from Scandinavia – a remarkable story in itself. It certainly makes sense that Benveniste or his friends would have explored options elsewhere.
The prospect of Benveniste entering the United States is an interesting footnote to the story of his evasion of the German forces. By the time the form was completed an Atlantic route would have been closed off. Fortunately, he found another route to safety, and was able to return to Paris after the liberation, taking up his teaching posts at the Collège de France and the EPHE again. After the war, Minard would join Benveniste in teaching comparative grammar at the EPHE.
After a long neglect, Wahl is finally receiving some attention in the anglophone world, and as well as some translations a decade ago – Transcendence and the Concrete and Human Existence and Transcendence – his The Idea of the Instant in Descartes’s Philosophy recently appeared. To connect to another recent post in this series, he was another French reader of T.S. Eliot. Even though he did translate other poetry, including some by Eliot, he was not planning to translate Four Quartets, but to write a refutation. In the end, he seems to have only published a short poem, “On Reading the Four Quartets”.
References
Eric Jennings, “Last Exit from Vichy France: The Martinique Escape Route and the Ambiguities of Emigration”, The Journal of Modern History 74 (2), 2002, 289-324.
Eric T. Jennings, “‘The Best Avenue of Escape’: The French Caribbean Route as Expulsion, Rescue, Trial, and Encounter”, French Politics, Culture & Society 30 (2), 2012, 33-52.
Eric T. Jennings, Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
W.C. Hackett, Outside the Gates, Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2021.
Georges-Jean Pinault, “Armand Minard (1906-1998)”, EPHE Section des sciences historiques et philologiques: Livret-Annuaire 13, 1997-98, 31-33.
This is the 78th 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 throughout 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
Scott B. Ritner argues that the antifascist philosopher and mystic Simone Weil’s critical writings about the social crises of the mid-twentieth century, especially fascism, are particularly instructive for today. Now, as then, liberal democratic capitalist states are under threat from authoritarian leaders and fascist movements. Situating Weil and her work in the tradition of pessimistic critical theory, Ritner reveals how Weil’s work can be understood as participating in an ongoing project critique of capitalist and liberal, neoliberal, and fascist modes of domination. This novel interpretation of Weil’s work argues for reading her combined anarchist, Marxian, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and Platonic approaches to political thought holistically alongside her mystical Christianity and Judaism as a singular antifascist project in which pessimism is given political prominence. Taking up Weil’s critiques of the State, the organization of labor, the use and effects of violence, and the ideology of revolution, Ritner mobilizes Weil’s idiosyncratic antifascist politics towards a conceptual framework he calls “revolutionary pessimism”—defined as root-and-branch political action without expectation. As Ritner persuades, the revolutionary pessimism perceivable in Weil’s writing can reorient antifascism from a defensive political posture to an offensive posture of generative permanent revolt.
When the pursuit of knowledge is eclipsed by money and power, what remains of higher learning?
What is a university for? Is it a sanctuary for disciplined study, or has it become something else entirely? In After the University, Chad Wellmon traces the long and often uneasy relationship between higher learning and the institutions that claim to protect it. Moving from the guilds of medieval Paris and the knowledge factories of Enlightenment-era Göttingen to the research empires of Berlin and Berkeley, Wellmon shows how the modern university has repeatedly reshaped itself to serve shifting social and political demands.
Across centuries, the goods of disciplined study—the joy of reading, the virtues of intellectual rigor, and the possibility of self-formation—have been overshadowed by the pursuit of external rewards such as money, prestige, and power. Part institutional history and part philosophical reflection, After the University examines how today’s institutions defend themselves not in the name of learning but in the language of productivity, innovation, and economic utility. Drawing on his experiences as a scholar, teacher, administrator, and witness to crises such as white supremacist marches and the COVID-19 pandemic, Wellmon illustrates how universities justify themselves through the outputs of graduates, research discoveries, and workforce training while leaving unmentioned the very practices that once defined them.
Despite this transformation, Wellmon argues that the university’s current state of turmoil exposes a new, enticing possibility: recognizing the practices of disciplined study as goods worth valuing in and of themselves rather than simply as means to other ends. With insight and urgency, After the University asks whether our institutions can still nurture intellectual desire—or whether we must find new homes for the life of the mind.
Après Leçons de ténèbres, le nouveau cours de Didier Fassin au Collège de France.
À l’occasion du centenaire de la naissance de Michel Foucault, cet ouvrage analyse l’empreinte laissée par son œuvre, dans le champ intellectuel comme dans l’espace social. Didier Fassin en retrace les lignes de force, en les replaçant dans leur contexte d’émergence et dans leurs usages actuels.
