A new collection of essays on two of the most important communist philosophers of our time: Alain Badiou and Toni Negri.
From the “red years” that followed the social explosion of May ’68 into the first decades of the 21st century, Alain Badiou and Toni Negri have produced two imposing and consequential bodies of philosophical writing, while never abandoning their commitment to a militant politics of equality. The essays collected in this book tackle multiple dimensions of their work—from ontology to biopolitics, from art to violence, from the theory of capitalism to the challenge of counter-revolution. But all of them are also efforts to explore and answer a single question: What does it mean to be a communist in philosophy?
A history of the technology of supply-chain management from punch cards to neural nets, and how the ambiguity built into that technology helps companies and exploits workers
Seeing Like a Supply Chain is a compelling investigation into the hidden networks that drive our global economy. Miriam Posner presents a blow-by-blow account of the technology of supply-chain management from punch cards to neural nets, revealing how the system’s built-in ambiguity shields companies from accountability while exploiting workers.
Drawing on more than a decade of research, Posner shows how computation converged with the growth of global trade to allow for a lightning-quick, astoundingly efficient supply chain that lets corporations source products without any notion of where their goods are actually being produced. At a time when multinational firms fear the reputational damage of human rights violations in the making of their products, the supply chain’s shroud of vagueness is a feature, not a bug. Posner shows how this is technically accomplished—and how the strategic disavowal of information extends through every step of that chain.
Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani (eds.), The Biopolitical Animal – Edinburgh University Press, November 2024; paperback May 2026
Explores the intersection of biopolitics and the animal question, pushing the debate in new directions
Remedies the inherent species blindness of biopolitical theories that have so far mostly excluded nonhuman subjects
Contributes to the ‘political turn’ in animal studies that problematises and expands the scope of inquiry beyond the traditional comfort zone of ethics and ecology
Clarifies and concretises into new, powerful interventions the important work that has preceded it at the intersection of biopolitics and animal studies
Addresses the necessary intersection of biopolitics and animality from a number of different perspectives, from ancient philosophy to literary and postcolonial theory, from political theology to philosophical ethology and critical theory
The two issues around which this collection revolves are that it is impossible to address biopolitics without taking the animal question into account, and that the animal question inherently concerns the politics of life beyond species barriers. Although biopolitical theories are necessarily structured around animal metaphors, they predominantly refer to human corporeality. On the other hand, the animal question is typically treated as an ethical issue, that is, a question of how human beings, the dominant species, ought to learn how to live peaceably with and respect other forms of life. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the fields of biopolitics and animal studies problematises, reconceptualises, and redefines these categories in order to realise the full potential of the biopolitical framework of analysis in the context of animal studies and praxis.
Metapersons begins from a simple yet striking observation: across the world, people live in the company of divinities, ancestors, spirits, sacred mountains, or enlivened statues. They pray with intensity, sense the presence of ghosts, and experience forms of coexistence with beings beyond the human. Drawing on fieldwork in Portugal, China, Mozambique, and Brazil, João Pina-Cabral shows how humans continually move beyond their embodied condition through lived relations with such entities.
Revisiting classic anthropological debates—from Durkheim and Mauss on prayer and the sacred to later critiques of religion—this book argues that a “new anthropological synthesis” has emerged in recent decades: one that understands transcendence as a fundamental feature of life itself. In this light, familiar categories such as “superstition” require reconsideration in new terms. Pina-Cabral develops a scalar model of life’s plurality, seeing personhood as the dynamic source of transcendence.
Engaging with contemporary debates across the life sciences, social sciences, and philosophy, Metapersons offers a groundbreaking, person-centered perspective on transcendence, animism, and spirituality. It challenges disciplinary boundaries while providing an innovative framework for rethinking prayer, religion, and the very conditions of human coexistence with the more-than-human world.
This book explores the Situationist International’s paradoxical relationship with cinema from 1957 to 1972. The SI was a postwar avant-garde that condemned representation’s erosion of social life. Yet its membership cared deeply for cinema, the epitome of capitalist representation for that era. How did the Situationists reconcile their interest in filmic social space with their hopes to revolutionize social space in city streets?
The Situationist International and the Social Space of Film: With and Against Cinema traces the SI’s attempts throughout the 1960s to work with cinema’s associative power and against its passivity. It follows this project from early encounters with Lettrist cinema to 1968 and beyond, all the while contextualizing Situationist theory with the work of friends and foes like Henri Lefebvre, Marcel Mariën, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda.
Meticulously researched and thoughtfully argued, Stob’s book offers timely lessons for today’s media artists, scholars and activists. Cinema is revealed to be a vital Situationist paradigm for social togetherness as well as for social separation.
Julia Kristeva often references Fyodor Dostoyevsky in her work. She read him while growing up in Bulgaria, and continued after her move to France. She recalls her initial reading was against her father’s directive. As well as Dostoyevsky’s famous novels, she was also struck by his A Writer’s Diary – actually a major collection of short fictional pieces and non-fiction originally published in a periodical. Her reading of Dostoyevsky was, like her wider work, multilingual – in Bulgarian originally, then in French and in Russian.
Kristeva’s earliest references to Dostoyevsky are mediated through Mikhail Bakhtin, and her work on Bakhtin was important in his early Western European reception. Bakhtin’s book on Dostoyevsky had been published in 1929, and appeared in an expanded edition in 1963. But although his study of François Rabelais had been submitted as a thesis in 1940, it was not published in Russian until 1965. By the late 1960s, Bakhtin was in poor health and largely unknown in the west. Kristeva reviewed Bakhtin’s books on Dostoyevsky and Rabelais for Critique in 1967, in their 1963 and 1965 Russian editions, before they had been translated into French. She contributed a preface to the translation of his La Poétique de Dostoïevski in 1970, and the French translation of the Rabelais book appeared the same year. The English Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics followed in 1973; Rabelais in his World had appeared a few years before. Kristeva’s colleague and fellow Bulgarian exile Tzvetan Todorov wrote the first major book on Bakhtin’s work in 1981. (I wrote briefly about Bakhtin in one of my earliest articles, on Henri Lefebvre’s book about Rabelais, “Through the Eyes of the Fantastic: Lefebvre, Rabelais and Intellectual History” [or here]. I haven’t yet seen the new MIT Press translation of Rabelais and his World which came out last year.)
Until recently, though, Kristeva’s most sustained reading of Dostoyevsky was a long chapter in Black Sun, entitled “Dostoyevsky, The Writing of Suffering, and Forgiveness”. He is only briefly discussed as part of her wider theorisation of the abject (Pouvoirs de l’horreur, pp. 25-27; Powers of Horror, pp. 18-20). Black Sun is a book about depression and melancholia, and psychoanalysis as a counter-depressant. It’s part of the development of her work toward psychoanalysis from earlier themes around language and literature, but the first chapter is on the speech of the depressed, and as well as Dostoyevsky she also discusses Gérard de Nerval and Marguerite Duras. The book shows her interest in art too, including a long discussion of Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. As she notes, that’s a painting mentioned in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. There is an account of Dostoyevsky’s visit to see the painting on the Kunstmuseum Basel website which, like Kristeva’s book, quotes from his wife’s memoirs. In the chapter, Kristeva discusses sorrow and melancholia in relation to epilepsy as key themes in Dostoyevsky’s work. Religious art also features in her later The Severed Head: Capital Visions.
Hans Holbein, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, Kunstmuseum Basel, via Wikimedia
In 2019 and 2021, two books by Kristeva on Dostoyevsky were published. One was in the “Authors of my Life” series, a long essay by Kristeva introducing an anthology of texts. The texts were a few letters and excerpts from his novels, translated by André Markowicz, Anne Coldefy-Faucard, Gustave Aucouturier and Boris de Schœzer. The excerpts were organised thematically – myths, dream, nation, idea, double, carnival, play, crime, punishment, time, epilepsy, children, jouissance.In French this book had the simple title Dostoïevski, and Kristeva’s own text was just over 70 pages. In English the text by Kristeva alone and not the excerpts appeared as Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language. This made for a very short text of just 68 pages, which was supplemented with a preface by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.
Much more substantial was a second book, Dostoïevski face à la mort, ou le Sexe hanté du langage, translated as Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunted by Sex. The second French book appears to have been timed for the bicentenary of Dostoyevsky’s birth. The second part of its title is a phrase Kristeva takes from her Tel Quel colleague and husband Philippe Sollers. In Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language this phrase is translated as “sex haunted by language” (8/xxx). Given both translations are with the same press, albeit with different translators, it is surprising they didn’t coordinate this choice.
The books continue themes from her previous work. Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language is part autobiographical, recalling the early encounters with his work, and seeing him as a psychoanalyst before Freud. Chapter 3 returns to the reactions to Holbein’s Dead Christ (36-38/26-28). She also discusses Dostoyevsky’s role as a narrator of the human condition, the crimes committed in his novels, the portrayal and treatment of women. The references in this longer book to the COVID-19 pandemic as the context of its writing makes it seem that this period allowed her to return to themes in much more detail. There isn’t much in the shorter English book which isn’t treated more expansively in the longer book.Kristeva is explicit that her reading is indebted to Freud’s 1928 essay “Dostoyevsky and Parricide”. This where Freud describes The Brothers Karamazov as “the most magnificent novel ever written” [p. 441]. Sollers had written about that reading in 1978, reprinted as a chapter of his Théorie des exceptions. Another aspect of the books are her discussions of sexual crimes, and reports of a child rape which found its way into Dostoyevsky’s fiction. But Kristeva’s discussion is so convoluted that it took me a while, and some looking for other sources, to discover the event happened when Dostoyevsky was a child, and that he was apparently a close witness of the aftermath, rather than actively involved.
One reviewer, Samuel C. Still, criticised how “Kristeva’s anachronistic superimposition of Freudian psychosexual categories onto Dostoyevsky’s novels (1) serves to perpetuate this line of misinterpretation and (2) only undermines their ultimate character as religious texts, the hermeneutical key to which is the kenotic suffering of Christ understood through the lens of Dostoyevsky’s Orthodox Christian faith” (p. 91). Kristeva does however clearly foreground the importance of Holbein’s image of the dead Christ. Religious themes are crucial to her readings. Williams’s preface is also explicitly about the religious aspects of Dostoyevsky’s work, and how he sees Kristeva’s work as complementary. There is a lot more, especially Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death. This has some limited discussion of Shakespeare, too, especially Hamlet.
Two previous pieces in this series have discussed other aspects of Kristeva’s work:
Mikhaïl Bakhtine, La Poétique de Dostoïevski, trans. Isabelle Kolitcheff, Paris: Seuil, 1970.
Mikhaïl Bakhtine, L’œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, trans. Andrée Robel, Paris: Gallimard, 1970.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984 [1968].
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World: A New Translation, trans. Sergeiy Sandler, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025.
Stuart Elden, “Through the Eyes of the Fantastic: Lefebvre, Rabelais and Intellectual History”, Historical Materialism10 (4), 2002, 89-111.
Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide”, in The Penguin Freud Library 14: Art and Literature, trans. D.F. Tait, ed. James Strachey, 1985, 435-60.
Elena Galtsova, “Les Présages”, Critique 905, 2022, 818-29.
Julia Kristeva, “Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue, le roman”, Critique 239, 1967, 438-65; reprinted in Shmeiwtikή: recherches pour une sémanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1969, 82-112; “Word, Dialogue and Novel”, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, 64-91.
Julia Kristeva, “Une poétique ruinée”, in Mikhaïl Bakhtine, La Poétique de Dostoïevski, trans. Isabelle Kolitcheff, Paris: Seuil, 1970, 5-27; “The Ruin of a Poetics”, trans. Vivienne Mylne, in Russian Formalism. A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation eds. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973, 102-21.
Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, Paris: Seuil/Points, 1983 [1980]; Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Julia Kristeva, Soleil noir: Dépression et mélancolie, Paris: Gallimard, 1987; Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia,trans. Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, trans. Jody Gladding, New York: Columba University Press, 2012.
Julia Kristeva, Dostoïevski, Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2019; Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language, trans. Jody Gladding, New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
Julia Kristeva, Dostoïvski face à la mort, ou le Sexe hanté du langage, Paris: Fayard, 2021; Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunted by Sex, trans. Armine Kotin Mortimer, New York: Columbia University, 2023.
Philippe Sollers, “Dostoïevski, Freud, la roulette”, Théorie des exceptions, Paris: Gallimard/Folio Essais, 1986, 57-73.
Samuel C. Still, “Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language by Julia Kristeva”, Christianity and Literature 72 (1), 2023, 87-91.
Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhaïl Bakhtine: Le principe dialogique, Paris: Seuil, 1981; Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
This is the 75th 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.
« Marc Bloch était mon grand-père. Un homme exceptionnel, un savant, un républicain et un patriote acharné dont l’engagement contre le nazisme lui coûta la vie.
Historien majeur du XXe siècle, il révolutionna l’histoire en l’ouvrant aux sciences sociales, en brisant les cloisons entre les disciplines et en mettant fin aux récits purement chronologiques. En 1929, il fonda avec Lucien Febvre la revue des Annales, encore vivante aujourd’hui.
Soldat des deux guerres, héros de la Résistance, persécuté par les lois anti-juives, arrêté à Lyon, emprisonné et torturé à la prison de Montluc, il fut exécuté par la gestapo, le 16 juin 1944, avec 29 de ses camarades.»
Suggests that the simultaneity and discontinuity of the instant is the central idea in Descartes’s entire philosophy
Provides the English translation of a major and influential interpretation of Descartes’s philosophy
Offers English translations of three essays on Wahl’s work by Frédéric Worms, his most important French interpreter
Presents an original account of temporality that has influenced a variety of 20th -century French thinkers
Contributes to the recent and increasing anglophone interest in the work of Jean Wahl and to the developing links between Wahl’s writings and those of Henri Bergson
The Idea of the Instant in Descartes’s Philosophy is the first English translation of a major and influential interpretation of Descartes’s philosophy by one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century French philosophy. While discussing the role of the instant within Descartes’s philosophy, Jean Wahl develops an original account of temporality that is central to Wahl’s entire and extensive oeuvre and that has influenced a variety of 20th -century French thinkers, most notably Gilles Deleuze. In addition to including the original French text, the volume contains an introduction to Jean Wahl by Alan D. Schrift and English translations of three essays, one written exclusively for this book, by Frédéric Worms, Director of the École Normale Supérieure, Wahl’s most important French interpreter, and one of the most influential philosophers working in France today.
A pile of books – Philippe Sollers, Théorie des exceptions; Julia Kristeva, Dostoïevski and the translation Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language; Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar; Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault and the Coils of Critical History and Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture.
A literary history spanning borders and centuries to explore radicalization as portrayed in fiction
Tracing the evolution of socialist world literature from the nineteenth century to the present, Benjamin Kohlmann uncovers the formal repertoires through which a set of political ideals found aesthetic expression. At the heart of this study is the radical bildungsroman, a genre that subverts dominant narratives of individual formation. Broad in scope, Revolutionary Subjects explores the work of Balestrini, Chernyshevsky, Ding Ling, Lessing, Nizan, Sartre, Weiss, Wright, and many others. These novels challenge conventional ideas of selfhood and belonging, presenting new ways to imagine the self in relation to collective struggle and global solidarity.
