Today marks forty years since the death of Georges Dumézil (1898-1986); it was fifty years since the death of Émile Benveniste (1902-1976) a few days ago.
Émile BenvenisteGeorges Dumézil
Benveniste and Dumézil are the main focus of my very long manuscript Mapping Indo-European Thought: Mythology, Linguistics and Politics in Twentieth Century France, which I discuss more here.
Back in 2024 I complained about how hard it was to navigate Jean-Paul Sartre’s Situations. I went looking for the French version of “What is a Collaborator?”, only to find it was in volume III of the original edition and volume II of the revised edition. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? [What is Literature?] is in volume II of the first edition, and volume III of the second. I then found these were not isolated examples, but that the second edition broke with Sartre’s own organisation and went with a more chronological one, including many essays he had not included in the original edition.
Sartre published ten volumes of Situations, thematically organised though with some volumes more so than others. The more comprehensive and chronological arrangement of the second edition has merit, not least in collecting some other pieces, but I said that calling it Situations again seemed needlessly confusing. Chroniques might have been clearer to mark the differences. The second edition was initially edited by Arlette Elkaim-Sartre, and nine volumes have appeared to date. Almost none of the second edition volumes are close to the first edition volumes in their content.
In 2024, I made a list of the contents of the first five volumes of the first edition, along with their English translations. The English translations are themselves confusing. The English book Situations is a partial translation of Volume IV, while Literary and Philosophical Essays picks essays from volumes I and III. Seagull have done important work in translating Volumes I, III and IV of the first edition complete as Critical Essays, The Aftermath of War and Portraits, but they are not explicitly labelled as translations of the series. The essays translated in those three volumes are also reprinted in Seagull’s series of thematic volumes. Colonialism and Neocolonalism is a translation of volume V of the first edition. The US edition of What is Literature? has essays not in the UK version.
As far as I know, there are no plans to translate the second, more complete, and chronological edition of Situations. In the list of the volumes I provided links to the Gallimard pages of the second edition and the useful Wikipedia pages which list the revised contents.
I’ve now updated the listing on this site to include two other volumes of the first edition, along with the translations I know about. Parts of Situations VI, VII, VIII and IX are translated, and the whole of SituationsX. I’m sure I’ve missed some of the pieces which appeared in journals or other collections.
A photograph of the first seven volumes of the first edition of Situations.
One example from Situations VI and VII (first edition) and Situations IV and V (second edition) will indicate the change from a thematic arrangement by Sartre to a more chronological one, and the unsystematic English translations.
Sartre published three long essays under the title “Les communistes et la paix” in LesTemps Modernes in issues 81, 84-85 and 101 – the first two in 1952 and the third in 1954. They are generally seen as the beginning of his communist phase, or at least his closeness to the French Communist Party. The three parts are on “The Demonstration of May 28, 1952”, “The Strike of June 4, 1952” and “The Causes”. They appeared together in Situations VI: Problèmes du marxisme 1 in 1964. The first piece in Situations VII: Problèmes du marxisme, 2 in 1965 was “Réponse à Claude Lefort”, which also appeared in Les Temps Modernes in issue 89 in 1953.
All these four texts were translated into English, confusingly twice, a year apart: The Communists and Peace, trans. Martha H. Fletcher with John R. Kleinschmidt, New York: George Braziller, Inc. 1968; The Communists and Peace, trans. Irene Clephane, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969. This was a period when US and UK rights were sometimes sold separately, and while sometimes different presses used the same translation, in this case they commissioned different ones. (The English translation of Situations X is a good example of the former – the US and UK editions have different titles, but use the same translation.) It’s a shame that duplication of effort and expense happened with The Communists and the Peace when other essays were not translated. Both English books are out of print; the Clephane translation is available on archive.org
Sartre’s “Réponse” engages with Claude Lefort, “Sartre et le marxisme”, Les Temps Modernes 89, 1953, which was itself an engagement with the first two parts of “Les Communistes et la paix”. Lefort replied to Sartre’s response in a letter published as “De la réponse à la question”, Les Temps Modernes 104, 1954, to which Sartre added a brief note:
Sur les problèmes précis que j’avais étudiés dans ma réponse à Lefort, cette lettre n’apporte rien de nouveau. Quant aux autres questions qu’elle pose, et aux inquiétudes qu’elle exprime, la suite des Communistes et la paix y répond d’elle-même (p. 184).
On the specific problems that I had examined in my answer to Lefort, this letter contributes nothing new. As for the other questions that it raises, and the concerns that it expresses, the next installment of ‘The Communists and Peace’ will serve as a response (translated in Alexandre Feron, “Sartre vs. Lefort: The Meaning of Proletarian Experience”, Journal of the CIPH 96, 2019, 65-79, 78 n. 4).
To reconstruct the original chronology, it is necessary to read the texts out of the sequence in which they are presented in Situations VI and VII, and the two English translations of The Communists and the Peace. You would need to read“Les Communistes et la paix”, part I, part II, “Sartre et le marxisme”, “Réponse à Claude Lefort”, “De la réponse à la question”, Sartre’s brief note above, and then “Les Communistes et la paix”, part III. If you were being historically careful, you should probably check the original issues of Les Temps Modernes to see if those texts are the same as the versions in Situations.Lefort’s two contributions are reprinted in the first edition of his Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie in 1971, but not the 1979 Tel edition.
In the second edition of Situations, the first two parts of “Les Communistes et la paix” and “Réponse à Claude Lefort” appear in Situations IV. The third part is in Situations V. This arrangement therefore organises Sartre’s pieces chronologically, but of course only includes his parts of the exchange. Feron’s article is a valuable guide to this debate, and the related split between Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
This is the 93rd post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and so far through 2026. 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.
Pleased to see a paperback of this important book listed for April 2027. Here you can read my opening remarks to a roundtable celebrating the book at an event on Shakespeare and British Inter-war Philosophy (1918-1939) held at Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare on 27 June 2026.
‘Richard Wilson’s meticulously researched, powerfully argued and brilliantly written account of Shakespeare’s 20th-century fascist followers is not just an important but a genuinely essential book.’ Robert Shaughnessy, Guildford School of Acting, UK In this illuminating book, Richard Wilson demonstrates how in the 20th century Shakespeare and his plays were subjected to a sustained institutionalized misreading, which served the purposes of proto-, present and future fascism. It exposes how Shakespeare was misappropriated by the far right to represent Britain’s supposedly glorious history, and the ways in which they utilized him and the cultural capital of his work. Wilson argues that in Britain the plays were invoked as a way to anglicize fascism, as its leaders campaigned ‘to recover theatre for the national cause’ by ‘looking back fondly to Elizabethan England’. His extensive and rigorous research also gestures beyond Britain, taking in case studies from North America, Germany and France.
Some of the names this book unearths will surprise: many of the right-wing political views or leanings of the prominent figures discussed have been brushed under the carpet, left unexplored or ignored. Across its ten chapters, this book provides in-depth case studies of a wide variety of figures, from A. K. Chesterton, who was both editor of the British Union of Fascists’ newspaper Blackshirt and former manager of press and publicity at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, to celebrated Shakespeareans such as G. Wilson Knight, through to writers, artists and theatre practitioners including W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Edward Gordon Craig and Philip Larkin, among many others. At a time when democracy is under threat, populism is on the rise and far right views are increasingly prominent in our political landscape, Richard Wilson’s book makes an especially vital and timely contribution to Shakespeare scholarship.
Reconstructs Deleuze’s methodology in its interdisciplinary context
Shows the connections between philosophy, the arts and the sciences, outlining a theory of what has become the new scientific standard: multidisciplinarity
Proposes solutions to the paradoxes of creation: can creation follow a method? How is it possible to simultaneously continue a tradition and break with it?
Demonstrates the originality of the Deleuzian conception of philosophy as well as how it addresses the most traditional philosophical problems
Functions as a dictionary that ‘translates’ the experimental Deleuzian terminology into the vocabulary of everyday language
One feature of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is its effort to establish connections with other disciplines and to appeal to non-philosophers. However, Deleuze never establishes these connections without a constant and unconditional reaffirmation of the uniqueness of philosophy. How does he conceive of philosophy? What are its elements? What are its methods? How is philosophy connected to other fields of knowledge and other activities? Axel Cherniavsky provides an answer to these questions by analysing the definition of philosophy Deleuze gives throughout his entire oeuvre: creation of concepts. Through this analysis, you will discover a reconstruction of a creative methodology, a detailed theory of the philosophical concept, a reflection on interdisciplinarity and altogether one of the most precise and systematic conceptions that philosophy has ever given of itself.
In French, dubbed into Italian. English subtitles are due to be added.
Difensore della libertà umana, il filosofo Michel Foucault è sempre stato contro ogni forma di coercizione, da qualunque parte questa provenisse. Da “Ritratti”, 01.02.1978. Di Matteo Bellinelli e Roland Jaccard.
Thanks to Jonas Lang for the link and to Donovan Schaefer and Daniele Lorenzini for uncovering this – first screened at a conference last month for Foucault’s centenary.
Lors de l’année universitaire 1985-1986, Gilles Deleuze décide de rendre hommage à la pensée de Michel Foucault, disparu en 1984, dont il fut longtemps proche et dont l’œuvre constitue à ses yeux « la plus grande philosophie moderne ». Ce cours est un témoignage vivant de l’admiration qu’il lui portait.
Ce volume aborde principalement la question du Savoir à travers l’analyse de ce que Foucault nomme « archéologie ». En quel sens les histoires de Foucault (histoire de la folie, de la clinique, de la sexualité…) sont-elles différentes de celles des historiens ? Deleuze dégage les deux conditions du Savoir chez Foucault : d’un côté, le grand tableau des visibilités ; de l’autre, le vaste tissu des énoncés.
Qu’est-ce qu’une époque fait voir ? Qu’est-ce qu’elle peut énoncer ? Ces deux questions permettent à Deleuze de confronter la pensée de Foucault à la phénoménologie, au structuralisme et à la linguistique dont elle se démarque singulièrement, mais sont aussi l’occasion pour Deleuze de revenir sur des thèmes et des auteurs qui lui sont chers : le masochisme, les multiplicités, la jalousie, Faulkner, Tchekhov, à côté de Raymond Roussel, Magritte ou Blanchot.
Si voir et parler, ces deux dimensions irréductibles l’une à l’autre, s’entrelacent pour constituer les strates du Savoir, ne faut-il pas introduire, pour l’expliquer, quelque chose d’une tout autre nature, un élément « non-stratifié » : les foyers de Pouvoir, deuxième axe de la pensée de Foucault ?
Jacques Derrida, Secrets of Responsibility – ed. Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton, trans. E.S. Burt and Katie Chenoweth, University of Chicago Press, April 2027
Jacques Derrida on the problem of secrecy, the first in a ten-seminar series on questions of responsibility.
Delivered at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris during the 1991–92 academic year, Secrets of Responsibility is the first of ten seminars given by Jacques Derrida under the umbrella “Questions of Responsibility,” a cycle that includes Hospitality, Perjury and Pardon, Death Penalty, and The Beast and the Sovereign—each also published by the University of Chicago Press.
In this seminar, Derrida asks a basic question—what is a secret?—which he then explores across scientific, technical, social, political, and religious domains. Over twelve sessions, we are treated to analyses of industrial, state, military, professional, and religious secrets as well as secret societies and secret police. Derrida also tackles secrecy in literary fiction (especially in Melville, James, Poe, and Baudelaire) and philosophical texts (including Freud, Kant, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Patočka, Nietzsche, Levinas, and others). The result is a set of profound and surprising insights delivered as only Derrida can.
Good to see this scheduled, after a slower pace of recent translations – the French volumes are quite a few ahead of the English now. This volume is a translation of Répondre – du secret. Témoigner was published in 2025; and Être témoin is due in November 2026. That will mean only the 1994-95 seminar of the late sequence mentioned in the description above is still to come, though there are several from the earlier periods also being published.
There are massive disparities, globally, nationally and regionally, in the provision of healthcare services and access to them. This textbook from one of the foremost geographers of health examines the unequal production and consumption of healthcare and seeks explanations for such diverse distribution, in particular, asking why place is such a key determinant for access to healthcare services. The analysis includes international comparisons of expenditure and performance as well as national case studies. The geographies of supply of both services and workforce are interrogated to reveal alarming inequalities. The book offers students a critical analysis of the governance of healthcare and is suitable for courses on the geography of health, as well as wider medical humanities, social policy and development studies courses.
I’m teaching Marx, Sartre and Mbembe this term, though I bought this Sartre book because it has a translation of an essay in his Situations which is unavailable elsewhere. I’ve been making a list of English translations from those volumes here. Mbembe’s book is due out in English translation next year. Duke University Press kindly sent the copy of Jessie Luna’s book. Its introduction is available open access.
