I’m really pleased to have an article in the new issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas:

Stuart Elden, “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol 85 No 3, July 2024, 571-600

The biographical links between Michel Foucault and the comparative mythologist and philologist Georges Dumézil have received more attention than their intellectual connections. This article contributes by surveying Foucault’s engagements, from a 1957 radio lecture to his late lectures at the Collège de France. Particular focus is on lectures on structuralism and history in 1970, some references between 1970 and 1981, and the use of Dumézil’s work in each of Foucault’s two final courses at the Collège de France. In each, Foucault takes up Dumézil’s analyses of mythology in developing his own projects concerning history and antiquity.

The article is behind a paywall, but email me if you don’t have institutional access to a copy.

This piece is a sequel to an earlier book chapter on Foucault and Dumézil’s understandings of sovereignty, published last year in the Handbook on Governmentality, and a piece published earlier this year on the relationship between three of Foucault’s mentors – “Canguilhem, Dumézil, Hyppolite: Georges Canguilhem and his Contemporaries“. In my mind these make an informal trilogy of articles which bridge the Foucault and Canguilhem books, on the one hand, and my new project on Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France, on the other.

Preprints are available at Warwick’s WRAP site if you don’t have library access or, as I said above, I’ll share if you send me an email.