I’ll be teaching Butler in the autumn term. I endorsed the Sloterdijk and Erdur translations for Polity. I write about Wolff here – he was an important biologist who became the administrator of the Collège de France, and his work is used by, among others, Bataille, Canguilhem and Foucault. He also spent the war as a German prisoner of war, and will be one of the people I discuss in my next research project.
Susana kindly sent a copy of the CERFI book, about the research centre led by Guattari, which is also available open access, and Duke University Press sent copies of Patchin and Neale’s studies.
I’ve written about Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900-1940), an important scholar of Celtic languages and mythology, briefly before in this series. From various accounts, there are two pieces of information about her.
After the death of her first husband Michel Jonval in 1935, Sjoestedt married the Sanskrit scholar Louis Renou (see here).
One of the reasons for Sjoestedt’s suicide in December 1940 was the arrest of her second husband by the German occupying forces (see here).
If both are true, then Renou (1896-1966) was arrested in 1940. But I’ve found no explicit mention that he was. It’s the sort of thing which would have important in his own biography. Why was he arrested and when was he released? We do know that Renou survived the war and remarried. Renou and Louis Robert were able to save some of Benveniste’s library when his flat was occupied and ransacked during the Occupation, when he was first in a POW camp and then a refugee.
Renou and Sjoestedt certainly knew each other, as part of the remarkable group of students taught by Antoine Meillet, Jules Bloch and Joseph Vendryes, among others, between the wars. The group also included Émile Benveniste, Pierre Chantraine, René Fohalle and Jerzy Kuryłowicz. There are a couple of photographs of the group with Meillet in 1928. Renou and Benveniste wrote a book together in 1934, and Benveniste travelled with Sjoestedt’s sister, the painter Yvonne. Georges Redard gives some information about all this in his biographical notes included in Benveniste’s Last Lectures.
So, the idea of a marriage between Sjoestedt and Renou is entirely plausible.
Renou wrote a biographical note for the Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900–1940): In Memoriam collection, which also included tributes by Benveniste and Georges Dumézil. In his “Notice biographique”, Renou talks of her first marriage, and says that she remarried “a man who loved her and who she loved”. He also says a bit about the previous suicide attempts and how the final time she was not saved in time (p. 11).
In his discussion of Sjoestedt’s life and work, Seán Ó Lúing says of this note that “The name of her second husband is not given and the details of the tragedy have been shaded and softened. In reality she was a victim of the war” (p. 92). As I said in the earlier piece on Sjoestedt, Dumézil also acknowledged her death in the second edition of his Mitra-Varunain a somewhat guarded way: “she was not to survive France’s first misfortunes” (p. 16/xxxvii). As well her as attending his classes, he had learned Welsh and Irish from her.
Renou’s major work was his multi-volume Études védiques et paninéennes. He was author of the book on Hinduism in the Que sais-je? series, and editor of an English collection of its sacred texts. Renou gave the inaugural series of Jordan lectures in Comparative Religion at SOAS in London in 1951, published as Religions of Ancient India. Benveniste wrote an obituary for his friend in 1966. A massive 800-page book of essays was published in 1968 – it was originally planned for his 70th birthday but because of his death became a tribute. A collection of Renou’s shorter texts was compiled in a two-volume study in 1997, which also reprints Benveniste’s obituary.
But I’m drawing a blank for information on Renou’s possible arrest.
References
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900–1940). In Memoriam, suivi de Essai sur une littérature nationale, la littérature irlandaise contemporaine, Paris: E. Droz, 1941.
Mélanges d’indianisme à la mémoire de Louis Renou, Paris: Boccard, 1968.
Émile Benveniste, Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Louis Renou, Institut de France, 1966.
Émile Benveniste and Louis Renou, Vrtra et Vrθragna: Étude de Mythologie Indo-Iranienne, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1934.
Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: Essai sur deux représentations indo-européennes de la souveraineté, revised second edition, Gallimard, 1948 [1940]; Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, trans. Derek Coltman, ed. Stuart Elden, Chicago: Hau, 2024.
Seán Ó Lúing, “Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, Celtic Scholar (1900-1940)”, Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society 20, 1987, 79-93.
Georges Redard, “Bio-bibliographie”, Émile Benveniste, Dernières Leçons: Collège de France 1968 et 1969, ed. Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio, EHESS/Gallimard/Seuil, 2012,149-76; “Bio-Bibliography of Émile Benveniste”, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, trans. John E. Joseph, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 128-56.
Louis Renou, “Notice biographique”, in Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900–1940). In Memoriam, 3-11.
Louis Renou, Études védiques et paninéennes, Collège de France Institut de Civilisation Indienne, seventeen volumes, 1955-69.
Louis Renou, Hinduism, Prentice-Hall, 1961.
Louis Renou, Religions of Ancient India, trans. Sheila M. Fynn, New York: Schocken, 1968.
Louis Renou, L’hindouisme,PUF, 1983 [1951].
Louis Renou, Choix d’études indiennes, eds. Nalini Balbir & Georges-Jean Pinault,Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, two volumes, 1997.
Joseph Vendryes, “Nécrologie: Marie-Louise Sjoestedt”, Études Celtiques 4 (2), 1948, 428-33.
Thanks to Rebecca Rogers for some information on the group with Benveniste, Renou and Sjoestedt.
This is the 82nd 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.
I’ve previously shared some of the many tributes to Ginzburg, who died in June. I hadn’t seen that this early seminar was now translated. I’m writing a short piece on Ginzburg for the ‘Sunday Histories‘ series, which I’ll share soon.
A seminar, a sixteenth-century heretical text, and the art of slow reading—this is historical research as you’ve never seen it before.
Patience Games: A Seminar on the ‘Benefit of Christ’ invites readers into the unpredictable world of scholarly discovery, where interpretation is not a straight path but a labyrinth of dialogue revision. At the heart of this book is a seminar held forty years ago at the University of Bologna, where students wrestled with The Beneficio di Cristo, the incendiary sixteenth-century text that questioned Church authority and championed salvation through grace alone. This is not a neatly packaged historical study, however—it is an unfiltered look at the errors and insights that emerge in the collective process of reading and debating a text.
Through shifting hypotheses and the sheer unpredictability of research, Patience Games dismantles the illusion of scholarship as a sterile pursuit, revealing instead a messy, deeply human endeavor. Blending sharp analysis with wit and self-irony, the book makes a compelling case for the continued importance of slow reading—even in an age where knowledge is just a click away.
(I’ve taken the description above from the University of Chicago Press website, the distributor for Seagull, which has a different title for the book, Patience Games, despite what appears elsewhere on that page.)
In Infrastructured Landscapes, Elvan Cobb reveals how the arrival of railways originating from the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir reshaped the very fabric of space and experience in western Anatolia during the transformative decades of the late 19th century in the Ottoman Empire. The author argues that trains were significant not only in modernizing the region but also in altering how people perceived and practiced Ottoman spaces. Foregrounding the inherently spatial nature of railways, she examines issues such as how they shifted the sensory geographies of the region, facilitated emergent practices such as tourism and archaeology, and acted as performative spaces where the Ottoman Empire’s modernizing ambitions were put on display.
Cary Wolfe, Jagged Ontologies – University of Minnesota Press, July 2026
Rethinking life, justice, and the biosphere through the sharp edges of jagged ontology
In this groundbreaking book, Cary Wolfe dismantles some of the most entrenched assumptions in contemporary interdisciplinary thought, foremost among them the idea that “flat” ontologies are adequate to the challenge of a robust, posthumanist pluralism. Against the fantasy of nature as an interconnected, egalitarian web, Wolfe proposes a “jagged ontology” in which species and systems intersect not through seamless cooperation but through friction, contestation, and uneven exchange. Wolfe pushes back equally, however, against the reductive tendencies of neo-Darwinian competitive individualism, insisting that what separates us from the world is also what binds us to it—a paradox at the core of all living systems, where autopoietic closure unexpectedly creates environmental openness.
Through a combination of systems theory, deconstruction, theoretical biology, and biopolitical philosophy, Wolfe develops a radically posthumanist framework for addressing the ethical, social, and political stakes of life in the biosphere. Extending his approach across disciplines and practices—from ecological theory and continental philosophy to law, public policy, and contemporary art—he lays bare the contradictions embedded in even the most progressive attempts to account for the imbrication of the human and the more-than-human. Through a detailed and long-overdue examination of the popular notion of sympoiesis and a skeptical reading of the anthropomorphism of the “new forestry,” Wolfe reveals how well-intentioned theories can undermine the very posthumanist pluralism that they claim to champion.
More than a critique, Jagged Ontologies opens onto new philosophical terrain for understanding multispecies justice, environmental responsibility, and the structural dynamics of individuation and creativity in the biosphere. Here, Wolfe offers a crucial rethinking of what it means to live and think ethically in a shared yet jagged world.
The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives offers the most comprehensive collective overview of Locke’s political thought in over fifty years. It brings together research essays by political theorists, historians of political thought, and intellectual historians to survey Locke’s political writings in their immediate historical and intellectual contexts and in the longer perspective of the history of their reception up to the present. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government is now one of the most widely taught texts in the canon of political theory. Discussions of this work also provide important touchstones for methodological discussions in multiple disciplines, beginning with John Dunn’s germinal monograph, The Political Thought of John Locke (1969). This volume traces the long shadow of Dunn’s book, while in dialogue with other interventions since. The chapters shed fresh light not only on Locke’s Two Treatises (its publication, its international dimensions, and its resistance theory, for example) but also his writings on toleration, on his relationship with contemporary theology and with Thomas Hobbes, and on his contributions to the histories of liberalism, colonialism, and post-colonial theory. Taken together, they offer a timely and much-needed opportunity for conversation among historical, critical, and theoretical approaches to Locke’s thought as well as stimulating resources for scholars, teachers, and advanced students concerned with Locke’s political thought and with political theory more broadly.
Through wide-ranging thematic chapters, this book offers students a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of monarchy across Europe in the Middle Ages.
The volume is separated into four themes: Concepts of Rulership, Exercising Authority, Dynasty and Succession, and Ritual and Representation. Each theme has four chapters that give the student an overview of key concepts supported by rich examples taken from monarchies across Europe, both in the text and in the Spotlight and Source Studies. The textbook offers an examination of areas which are frequently overlooked, such as the Balkan region, the Scandinavian kingdoms, and the Crusader States in the Latin East. In addition, a prologue, written by Rutger Kramer, discusses the legacy of the Carolingians on medieval rulership, and an epilogue places the monarchies of medieval Europe in context with their global counterparts. Further reading suggestions at the end of each chapter will help students develop their knowledge of medieval monarchy and the history of rulers and realms of the period.
Exploring Monarchy in Medieval Europe, 1000–1500 is a foundational text for courses on medieval monarchy as well as a useful supplementary text for students of medieval European history.
This book offers a bold reinterpretation of Michel Foucault’s late work, reconstructing him as an ethical philosopher whose account of antiquity provides crucial resources for understanding contemporary forms of power. Bringing Foucault into original dialogue with Habermas, Beck, and Giddens, the book develops a genealogical reading that bridges Foucault’s analyses of self‑formation, governmentality, and modernity. It shows how key democratic and globalisation‑related theories—often assumed to stand apart from neoliberal modes of rule—can themselves reproduce subtle forms of governmentality.Through a sustained engagement with ancient ethical practices, cognitive ethics, reflexive modernisation, and global third‑way politics, the book demonstrates how Foucault’s late thought offers both a critique of modern Western societies and a heuristic framework for creative self‑care in the present.
Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced.
Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.
Moving between the practical and the philosophical, Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice. Border Afterlives offers a border-scale comparative account of forensic practices, critiques the limits of “best practices” in under-resourced systems, and calls for a reimagining of forensic humanitarianism grounded in reciprocity and dignity, beyond human rights. This is a book that insists on remembering the dead.
