I didn’t publish much this past year – The Archaeology of Foucault has a 2023 date but was officially published in December 2022, and the special issue of Theory, Culture and Society on Foucault was completed some time before. I only gave a couple of talks, had nothing new accepted, and made slow progress on the new writing project. Much but not all of this is due to the heart surgery I had in July, after suddenly becoming seriously unwell. I’m now doing much better, recovery going well, and steadily regaining fitness, mainly by cycling on an indoor set-up.

The middle of this year saw the longest pause here since I started Progressive Geographies in 2010, and when I got back home from hospital I mainly used the blog as a noticeboard for other people’s work, to keep things going. Some of the posts and pages that I did post about my own research or related resources might still be of interest, and some of these are listed below.

Two pieces on political ceremony (open access) – 30 January 2023

The Archaeology of Foucault (Polity, 2023) – New Books Network discussion with Dave O’Brien (with links to the discussions of all the other books in the Foucault series) – 6 April 2023

Whatever happened to the Festschrift? And has anyone written about them? – 25 April 2023

Alexandre Koyré and a Network of Ideas – 26 April 2023, with some additional readings

Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900-1940) – an important scholar of Celtic languages and mythology – 2 May 2023

Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Fondation Loubat lectures – 18 May 2023

Henri Lefebvre’s Musset – the copy he gave to Georges Bataille – 5 June 2023

Saussure’s notes on German legends – cross-references between the different editions of these manuscripts – 14 June 2023

Henri Lefebvre’s 1939 book on Nietzsche and the ‘Liste Otto’ – which books of his were banned? – 3 July 2023

On the trail of Aurel Stein – working in archives for the Indo-European thought project – 27 October 2023

A new translation and critical edition of Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic – edited by Stefanos Geroulanos and Stuart Elden, translated by Marie Satya McDonough – beginning a new project – 9 November 2023

Georges Bataille correspondence – taking a look at the bound volumes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France – 16 November 2023

Six degrees of T.S. Eliot – the links through Jean de Menasce to Émile Benveniste – 15 December 2023

Several of these relate to my new research project, for which you can find all the research updates, a couple of talks, and a few more research resources here – Mapping Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France

The best summary of the work I’ve done so far is in a video recording of an online talk for the Warwick Seminar for Interdisciplinary French Studies on 31 May 2023: “Indo-European Thought in Post-War France“

There is hopefully still value in some of the older resource pages which continue to be updated.

Kostas Axelos in English – a bibliography with links

Georges Bataille – Oeuvres complètes and other French collections; English translations

Where to start with reading Henri Lefebvre?

Foucault Resources

and other resources listed here

The academic books I liked this year are listed here; and the music here.

Thank you for reading the blog this past year. I’m really hoping 2024 will be a better year!