I’m overdue an update on this project, but while I’ve been working hard, I haven’t felt there has been much to say until now. I’ve also had some further health problems, leading to another shorter stay in hospital and the fitting of a pacemaker. It feels like a small setback, which I recovered from quickly, and I’m now back doing everything again.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been working on Benveniste for the most part, completing a draft of the chapter on the 1949-63 period which attempts to connect the Benveniste and Dumézil stories. Much of what I’ve done has concerned his teaching, and trying to show how his courses at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and at the Collège de France connect to his publications. Some pieces he published are directly the result of his teaching, and some of his publications find their way into his classes. This is appropriately much more the case with the Collège de France courses, since Professors there are supposed to report on their ongoing research, whereas at the EPHE there is a more pedagogical purpose. The Annuaires of both institutions give brief details of each year’s classes, and there are some materials in the archive which also help, as well as a few student notes in different places. Occasionally reading between the course and a publication of a similar time can help make sense of a cryptic remark in either a summary or text, though I’m sure I’ll find more connections as I continue this work.

In this draft chapter, the two key books by Benveniste I discuss are both very technical – Études sur la langue ossète and Hittite et indo-européen. But there are a number of shorter pieces too, many collected in Problems in General Linguistics and a few in Langues, Cultures, Religions. Others are harder to track down, but I’m trying to connect them to the teaching records. Benveniste worked on multiple projects in parallel, and trying to create a clear narrative is challenging.

I then continued with Benveniste’s final years, beginning to draft a chapter that will also cover his teaching and writing alongside Dumézil. Where Dumézil lived long enough to provide an ambitious summation of his life’s work, and then embarked on new projects in his last decade or so, Benveniste’s career was cut brutally short by a stroke which left him aphasic and unable to do any work for the last seven years of his life. The Last Lectures volume gives some idea of where he might have gone in one direction.

Many of the essays Benveniste wrote in this final period are collected in the second volume of his Problèmes, only a few of which are translated into English. (I’ve made a list of those I know about here.) The second volume of Problèmes was compiled by Mohammed Djafer Moïnfar and Michel Lejeune, and unlike the first which Benveniste selected across over two decades, it took texts from just a few years. Quite a few of the texts again directly relate to teaching, and I found it useful to be able to compare the reports to the published work. What is clear to me from the teaching records and these publications is how much else Benveniste planned to do – there are indications of much larger projects which his health prevented him from completing. Of course, his illness came as a sudden shock, but he left so many promises of things he planned to do. There are also two very late projects with some manuscript traces on Baudelaire and poetic language, published by Chloé Laplantine, and on axiology, partly published by Irène Fenoglio. The first has generated some secondary discussion, but the second is rather enigmatic and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it all. It sent me off looking at the work of the Chilean philosopher Auguste Salazar-Bondy to whom Benveniste was responding.

At the end of November I gave a seminar on the research to the University of St Andrews, to the Social Anthropology seminar, where I was kindly invited by Christos Lynteris. It was a good opportunity to try to shape some of the thoughts into a form I could share with others. I spoke about Dumézil and Benveniste’s careers at the Collège de France, picking a few themes from their work to show how I think exploring their teaching is helpful in reconstructing their careers. I expect I will give this talk again at some point, perhaps in a revised form.

In mid-December I was briefly back in Paris, where I finally completed a first pass through the Benveniste material at the Bibliothèque nationale, so I now have a good sense of where everything is. When I’m next back I can return to some material with a clearer sense of how it fits together. The boxes are not chronological, and not thematic, so looking at them in number sequence was a necessary first step, but a different order will hopefully make more sense of some material. I also went back to the Collège de France to look at some extra things and go over a couple of familiar files again. At the Bibliothèque nationale I also looked at two more boxes of the Tzvetan Todorov papers, which I thought might be useful for this project. One of those contained something I wasn’t expecting. It’s a document I knew existed, but which I thought I wouldn’t be able to see until I was able to get to the Roman Jakobson archive at MIT. It’s the transcript of a long interview with Jakobson for French television, and which it turns out Todorov was involved with writing the questions. This was shortly before Todorov edited a French collection of Jakobson’s work – Questions de poétique. The interview is very interesting and biographical, and touches upon, among many other themes, Jakobson’s friendship with Nicolai Trubetzkoy and his first meeting with Benveniste. As far as I can tell, this interview was never published.

Following this I also made a trip to Oxford which I found has some papers relating to Jakobson in the Second World War. Jakobson left Prague shortly before the Nazi invasion in early 1939, and spent time in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, before moving to New York in 1941. There are some published letters which shed some light on this. But there were attempts to get him to England, and there is quite a bit of correspondence about this attempt, less of which is published. The archive gave a lot more information than I’d seen before. Once he was in New York, he was introduced to Claude Lévi-Strauss by Alexandre Koyré, and all three taught at the École Libre des Hautes Études. This meeting was so important for Lévi-Strauss, and post-war French theory. That is fairly well-known, and I’d planned to say only a little about it. But I was also interested in his pre-war meeting with Benveniste, when Benveniste gave a talk in Prague to the linguistic circle. There is an interesting scrap of information about that talk, for which the manuscript was lost in the war. After the war, Benveniste and Jakobson met several more times, in the USA and Paris, and there was a correspondence between them. Their pre-war correspondence though is lost – Jakobson burned most of his papers before leaving Czechoslovakia; and most of Benveniste’s papers were destroyed when his apartment in Paris was occupied during the war.

The Paris trip is the last I will make there until June at the earliest, since I’ll be in the USA in early 2025. I’ll be in a visiting post at the Remarque Institute at New York University, and I’m looking forward to that very much. I’m not going to do many talks on this trip, except at NYU, and one in Buffalo, but am looking forward to less formal conversations. It’s also a chance to get to visit some archives – some in New York, and some a bit further away but accessible from there. I had hoped to go to New York with more of the book in draft, since work on Benveniste and Dumézil’s publications is actually easier at home, where I have almost all their books, more than in any library I know. But I think that I should have most of the Benveniste material drafted, and the Dumézil parts up to around 1963. The later parts of Dumézil’s career are possible to work on with good libraries, since those books are more easily accessible than some of the earlier ones. But part of the aim of being in New York is to research and write about some of the other figures in the wider story I want to tell, many of whom spent crucial years there. Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson and Koyré are some of those people, but there are others.

Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications. The re-edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna is now published. There is a lot more about the earlier Foucault work here. The final volume of the series is The Archaeology of Foucault,and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society I co-edited on “Foucault before the Collège de France” has some important contributions on the earlier parts of Foucault’s career, and is currently available free to access. My article “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” was recently published in the Journal of the History of Ideas (currently open access); “Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France” is online first and open access.