A complete portrait of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who plumbed both science and imagination.
This is the first English biography of Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher who bridged the worlds of science and imagination. Raised in rural France, Bachelard served in the First World War, worked for the post office and pursued degrees in science and philosophy while teaching in his local school. His journey led to a professorship at the Sorbonne, where he influenced many prominent postwar French thinkers. Known as both a philosopher of science and author of works on the imagination inspired by the elements – earth, air, fire and water – Bachelard needed to negotiate a constant tension between science and poetry, calculation and dream. This biography provides a complete portrait of Bachelard, illuminating his struggles with the nature of knowledge itself.
Professor Ron Johnston OBE, FAcSS, FBA was one of the most celebrated geographers of his generation. Producing a prolific research record that spanned six decades, Johnston was an insightful, thoughtful, and open-minded contributor to debates and research practices in human geography, to understanding the histories and productions of geographical knowledge in modern Anglo-American geography, and to the study of electoral, political, urban, and social geographies. He was widely recognised as a champion of geography whose work continues to influence the field today.
Geography and a Geographer: Reimagining the Discipline After Ron Johnston brings together contributors whose work speaks to the geographies Johnston helped to shape. It offers an invitation to revisit Johnston’s body of work and consider its relevance for the future of the discipline. Across the volume, authors reflect on Johnston’s intellectual legacy, the evolution of human geography, disciplinary history and memory, mentorship, collaboration, and collegiality. Other chapters respond to calls to decolonise and pluralise how geography is narrated and practised, and encourage fresh thinking about the role of quantitative approaches in human geography.
Thought-provoking and forward-looking, this collection reflects Johnston’s passion for geography and celebrates his extensive contributions to the discipline. It pays tribute to his scholarship through engagement with the ideas and concepts he developed in his research, and reflects on where his work can take us next.
Now published – a major, and very expensive, reference work, though the e-book is less. I say a bit about my chapter, on Foucault and structuralism, here.
Michel Foucault is one of the most influential, and controversial, thinkers of the twentieth century. His work has had a transformative effect on the study of the humanities and social sciences. His engagement with topics such as truth, power and language continues to exert significant influence on a huge range of disciplines, from philosophy, sociology and anthropology to history, politics, law, literature, religion and many others. Yet, paradoxically, Foucault’s work is rarely discussed systematically within philosophy in the Anglophone world.
The Foucauldian Mind is an outstanding exploration and assessment of Foucault’s thought, demonstrating its coherence, insight and continuing relevance to current debates in a multiplicity of fields within philosophy, and beyond. Comprising over forty chapters authored by an international team of expert contributors, it addresses the following topics and more:
the formation of Foucault’s thought and his most important writings, from History of Madness and The Order of Things to Discipline and Punish, the History of Sexuality, and his later works on governmentality and the aesthetics of existence
Foucault’s theoretical and methodological engagements, including with phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, pragmatism and feminism
Foucault’s contributions to ethics, political philosophy and law
Foucault’s often misunderstood engagements with science, race and gender
the legacy of Foucault’s thought, including for environmental studies, biopolitics, migration studies and philosophy of disability.
With its comprehensive analysis of Foucault’s work and its original discussion of both traditional and new topics, The Foucauldian Mind is a superb resource for anyone studying Foucault’s thought from a broadly philosophical standpoint.
This book explores the interaction of European Enlightenment thinkers with Chinese theory and shows how ideas from China and ideas about China had a profound impact on Enlightenment thought.
Challenging the orthodox account of the Enlightenment as an innovation that emerged solely among European men, the book argues that many ideas which led to human progress originated outside Europe. Focusing on the cultural interaction between Europe and China it demonstrates how Chinese theory precipitated debate and demanded theorization by fundamentally challenging the intellectual framework inherited from European antiquity. The result was neither European nor Chinese, but a dynamic fusion that has continued to produce theory right up to the present day.
In illustrating how cultural interaction with alien perspectives, civilizations, and worldviews can further human development, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese and European history and philosophy.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra– trans. Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley, Stanford University Press, August 2026
Thus Spoke Zarathustra stands alone among Nietzsche’s published works as a poetic and narrative rendering of his most sophisticated ideas through the medium of Zarathustra’s uniquely prophetic voice. It is also the first place where Nietzsche proposes his theory of will to power, and it is the only place in his published works where he elaborates his concept of the superhuman and his doctrine of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche himself regarded this book as his most important philosophical contribution because it proposes solutions to the problems he poses but does not resolve in his other works—for example, his cure for the human disposition to vengefulness and his creation of new values as the antidote to nihilism.
This translation precisely and consistently renders each element so that readers may experience Nietzsche’s phrasing, wit, and wordplay in equivalent English. The extensive editorial notes in this edition include numerous cross-references to earlier drafts and variants that are found in his notebooks, and published in Volumes 14 and 15 of The Complete Works, thus allowing the reader to view the evolution of Nietzsche’s thought from first drafts to their final published versions. The Translators’ Afterword includes a discussion of translation issues unique to Zarathustra, and a glossary of key terms, as well as a discussion of Nietzsche’s views concerning this book’s contributions to the development of the German language.
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche inches towards completion, with the works Nietzsche published now all available. I think just two volumes of notes and the final volume, with Editors’ comments, Chronology and index will remain after this.
Over the last 500 years, capitalism has produced a world that is highly interdependent and at the same time highly asymmetrical. These asymmetries were often established by violent means and are in many cases vigorously defended to this day. In his ambitious global history of capitalism, Friedrich Lenger charts the course of these developments, which have left no one unaffected – from the indigenous people of America to the silk weavers of Bengal. This is a story of flagrant wealth and extreme poverty, of violence and oppression, and of the relentless exploitation both of labour and of our planet, for which we are now paying the price.
Among the global inequalities produced by capitalism are the unequal consumption of fossil fuels and the environmental degradation that affects different parts of the world in different ways and to different extents. The indifference capitalists display towards the natural world resembles their past indifference to human suffering. The millions of slaves forced to work on American plantations until well into the nineteenth century is just one example of how oppressive labour and a capitalist economy go hand in hand.
This brilliant and wide-ranging book tells the story of the rise and triumph of capitalism from the fifteenth century to the present day and lays bare its fundamental dynamic: capitalism will never place limits on itself, underlining the fact that any restrictions have to be imposed from outside. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the modern world, the fundamental problems we face today, and the economic solutions upon which our survival as a species will depend.
Review in The New York Times; feature in The New Yorker (requires subscription). Thanks to dmf and Alin Constantin for the alert. Update: there is also a piece in the Financial Times (requires subscription).
When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors. This was French theory, a set of recondite ideas that had taken American campuses by a storm during the preceding decades. In retrospect, the influence of these men and their writings seems both extraordinary and improbable. The Frenchmen argued that language is all-powerful, meaning unstable, and the self is an illusion. Their prose was brilliant, dazzling even, but often mystifyingly elaborate and highly abstract. Yet American students and scholars flocked to their books and lectures, intoxicated by a powerful new means of understanding—and perhaps even changing—the world. For Eakin, an unsophisticated graduate of a small-town Midwestern high school, theory was no mere intellectual exercise but a way of being—a heady shortcut to worldly glamour and wisdom.
The Frenchmen is the story of Eakin’s youthful love affair with French theory, alongside a wider examination of its rise and fall. Looking closely at Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and the French-speaking Belgian Paul de Man, Eakin untangles their famously difficult works with peerless, delightful clarity. What’s more, she brings to light the eccentric, scandalous—at times criminal!—lives of thinkers who themselves were often highly averse to biography, in a daringly original weave of storytelling and exegesis.
As she explores the magnetism of their work, Eakin illuminates not just the Frenchmen’s enduring legacy but some of today’s deepest political, social, and intellectual arguments. She neither rejects nor flatters the Frenchmen’s ideas but instead reveals how they indelibly changed our understanding of power, truth, and identity. Eakin shows how, for better or worse, the Frenchmen continue to shape and unsettle our lives today.
The reviews and previews are not encouraging, and I fear that the stories are going to be reheated versions of things in existing biographies, or some of the unfounded allegations previously made.
When capitalism feels inescapable, theory becomes a weapon to challenge fatalistic totalities. This book explores the limits of the colonization of everyday life by economic logic gone mad.
Wherever we are we find ourselves choking, trapped in a world built against us we feel we don’t belong to. A world that is going down the drain. Unable to stop this process as if history has surpassed us, we seem to have missed our opportunity to take hold of the future. We must ask ourselves: why are fatalistic and totalising narratives so prevalent in our times? What would it take to work against fear, to restore a sense of agency and critical comprehension over capitalism’s runaway processes? By tracing and uncovering the subterranean history of the Marxist concept of subsumption within the French ultraleft, Operaismo, the Frankfurt School and Mexican movements, as well as through heated debates within communist circles in the last decade, Abolishing Capitalist Totality offers a profound and critical inquiry into what we understand by capitalist totality and its dominating powers. It addresses radical forms of antagonism: the self-abolition of the proletariat, of gender and race, and explores how these relate to other forms of abolition, thereby opening possibilities for new alliances and constellations.
As an integral aspect of interrogating and reorganising the form of the book, poets and artists have been invited to challenge what we perceive as the totality of this book by intervening into its conventions. Our hope is that readers will be able to grasp not only the concepts presented in the book but also its form, in a multifaceted and engaged manner. What has been perceived in recent years as an enclosed capitalist totality is, in fact, composed of concrete processes that we can act upon: how we understand capitalism determines how we abolish capital.
Includes texts and interventions from Anthony Iles, Mattin, Andrés Saenz De Sicilia, Bolívar Echeverría, Négation, Federico Corriente, Roland Simon, Anne Boyer, Lisa Jeschke, Em Hedditch, Loss Choi, Danny Hayward, Sean Bonney, Sacha Kahir, Théorie Communiste, Ray Brassier, Neil Gray, Rob Lucas, Nadia Bou Ali, Jessika Khazrik, Andrei Chitu, Marina Vishmidt, Dimitra Kotouza, and Endnotes.
On November 16, 1980, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser strangled his wife in their Parisian apartment, in a period when she was thinking of leaving him. What do we know about Hélène Legotien today? Almost nothing, except that she was murdered by her illustrious spouse. In a sense, Althusser killed her twice, first, by his own hands and second, by dominating the public space to talk about himself.
What then is the political significance of this femicide and the discourse about it which has taken shape in the public space? Delving into the writings of the murderer and his allies in the French intelligentsia, Killer Althusser reasserts the patriarchal violence of the murder, masculine solidarity, and the complacency of a cultural elite.
There is a piece about the story with discussion of this book here. Her archives are at IMEC. I’ve previously linked to Johanna Luyssen, Les Fragments d’Hélène – Julliard, September 2025 – also about this case. I don’t know of plans for an English translation of that book.
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.
