Douglas Kellner and Rainer Winter eds. Research Handbook on Critical Theory – Edward Elgar, September 2026
This insightful Research Handbook examines the development and continuing relevance of critical theory. Expert contributors assess the central concepts and differing research perspectives, providing a panoramic and global overview of this approach and its significance for understanding the present.
Adam Geczy, Georg Lukács Reinvented: Realism in Contemporary Culture – Bloomsbury, November 2026
The first study to make use of Lukàcs’s theory of realism to understand contemporary cultural phenomena more broadly and in the fields of art and television in particular.
Adam Geczy focuses on contemporary cultural trends and problems to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Georg Lukács’ philosophy. The Marxist critic Lukács wrote in defence of realism in art, and especially in literature. Geczy shows why there is a growing need to return to realism in both theory and practice, given the predominance of cultural practices that rely on representative and narrative devices, ones that speak directly to the conditions of the present.
Geczy applies Lukács’ philosophical aesthetics to examples in contemporary film, television and graphic literature. We see that realism for Lukács has a profoundly ethical caste. From it emerge issues such as the moral duty of the author, the aptness of the work of art, and its capacity to bring knowledge and insight to the life-world in which it is read or received. Approached from this aesthetic standpoint, Geczy presents the many cultural wars waged in the new millennium as between what is real and authentic as opposed to the mendacious and abstruse.
In rethinking realism with Lukács, Geczy brings earlier theories up to date and provides a compelling new way of looking at how and why we engage in today’s cultural practices.
A special issue of Le Nouvel Obs – Michel Foucault Le visionnaire
Includes pieces by Judith Butler, Michaël Fœssel, Michelle Perrot, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, Didier Fassin and others, and an excerpt from the soon-to-be-published La Croisade des enfants.
Thanks to Arnaud Gonzague for sending me a copy – I helped with locating the source of one of the photographs used.
Nasar Meer, The Social Life of Justice – Polity, September 2026
In an age of crisis and uncertainty, Nasar Meer asks what justice means in an unjust world, and how it might be sustained in uncertain times. The Social Life of Justicepresents clear, vivid examples to reimagine justice as a social practice of design: something we make, repair and contest through our institutions, histories and everyday relations.
Ranging from Plato to climate change, from social contracts to international humanitarian law, the book traces how the moral vocabularies of law, policy and borders have been shaped by power, and suggests ways by which they might yet be redesigned to minimize harm and distribute benefits more fairly. Using examples of racial, gender, epistemic and environmental justice, Meer invites readers to see how ideas of justice are created and contested through lived human experience rather than from the theories we inherit.
Written with clarity and urgency, this book will appeal to readers interested in sociology, political theory, law and global studies.
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.
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.
That page links to a few publications about them and their connections to other thinkers, including the re-edition of Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty (print and open access pdf). I have a book chapter on their work forthcoming next year: “Benveniste, Dumézil and Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France”, in Roger Woodard (ed.), Cambridge History of Mythology and Mythography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
They have also been the subject of several of my ‘Sunday History’ posts:
1. Benveniste, Dumézil, Lejeune and the decipherment of Linear B – 5 January 2025
3. Benveniste and the Linguistic Circle of Prague – 19 January 2025
13. The Territory of the Vocabulary and the Vocabulary of Territory: Émile Benveniste – 30 March 2025
17. Émile Benveniste and the Sogdian Word for ‘Knee’ – 27 April 2025
28. Two Greek Words for Kings and the Question of Territory: Wanax, Basileus and Émile Benveniste’s Vocabulaire – 13 July 2025 (updated 6 August 2025)
30. Émile Benveniste on auxiliarity – an Acta Linguistica Hafniensia article, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, a misplaced abstract and a 1965-66 Collège de France course – 27 July 2025
31. Herman Lommel and the ancient Aryans – Hegel’s great-grandson, Saussure translator and his links to Benveniste, Dumézil and Wikander – 3 August 2025
33. Lucien Gerschel, Georges Dumézil, William Shakespeare and the history of Coriolanus – 17 August 2025
HS 5. Jean de Menasce’s dedication to Émile Benveniste: “in memory of the year of exile”– 1 October 2025
41. Did Benveniste read Derrida’s Of Grammatology? – 12 October 2025
42. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil and Benoîte Groult: the Académie française and the debate about feminine nouns for professions – 19 October 2025
60. The French contributors to Herman Hirt’s 1936 Festschrift: Linguistics, Nationalism and Nazism – 22 February 2026
64. The limited copies of the 1940 edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna – 22 March 2026
66. Maurice Blanchot’s Politics and His War-Time Reviews of Georges Dumézil – 5 April 2026
HS 9. Two dedications from Georges Dumézil – to Alfred Ernoux and Luc Estang – 8 April 2026
68. Julia Kristeva’s portrait of Émile Benveniste in The Samurai – 19 April 2026
72. Georges Dumézil, Geographer of the Russian World? (and some notes on the series in which it was supposed to appear) – 17 May 2026
76. Jean de Menasce and Émile Benveniste as translators of T.S. Eliot – 14 June 2026
78. Did Émile Benveniste try to escape to the USA from Lyon in the Second World War? – 28 June 2026
80. The Stockholm Appeal against Atomic weapons – Émile Benveniste, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Jean Boulier and Cold War Politics – 12 July 2026
81. The Georges Dumézil-Mircea Eliade correspondence – a chronological listing with publication details or archive locations – 19 July 2026
84. The Georges Dumézil-Michel Foucault correspondence – a chronological listing with archival locations – 9 August 2026
90. Georges Dumézil’s 1924 account of the Tutankhamun discovery – 20 September 2026
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 Situations X. I’m sure I’ve missed some of the pieces which appeared in journals or other collections.
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 Les Temps 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.
If you have a spare £4000 you could buy a fragment of Sartre’s manuscript!
I’ll add Situations VIII, IX and X to this list soon: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Situations – contents and a guide to the English translations
References
Alexandre Feron, “Sartre vs. Lefort: The Meaning of Proletarian Experience”, Journal of the CIPH 96, 2019, 65-79.
Claude Lefort, “Sartre et le marxisme”, Les Temps Modernes 89, 1953, 1540-70.
Claude Lefort, “De la réponse à la question”, Les Temps Modernes 104, 1954, 157-84.
Claude Lefort, Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, Genève: Droz, 1971; reprint without the two pieces on Sartre, Paris: Gallimard/Tel, 1979.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations VI: Problèmes du marxisme, 1, Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations VII: Problèmes du marxisme, 2, Paris: Gallimard, 1965.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Communists and Peace, trans. Martha H. Fletcher with John R. Kleinschmidt, New York: George Braziller, Inc. 1968.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Communists and Peace, trans. Irene Clephane, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations IV: Avril 1950-Avril 1953, ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, Paris: Gallimard, 2015.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations V: Mars 1954-Avril 1958, ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, Paris: Gallimard, 2018.
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.
I discuss what I am doing in this series in “Writing the ‘Sunday histories’ – an experiment in sharing short pieces on a blog”, my contribution to the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly “Reflections on Writing” Series – all pieces are open access.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
Details of the Bibliothèque nationale de France sent for Foucault’s centenary.
Richard Wilson, Shakespeare’s Fascist Followers – Bloomsbury, September 2025; paperback April 2027
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.
Axel Cherniavsky, Deleuze, Philosophy and the Creation of Concepts – trans. Taylor Adkins – Edinburgh University Press, November 2024, paperback May 2026
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.
Michel Foucault: storico della verità – video of 1 February 1978 interview
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.
