Two recent editions of texts by Marc Bloch, Étienne Wolff’s Science des monstres, two recent books by Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? and What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, Peter Sloterdijk’s The Continent without Qualities: Bookmarks in the Book of Europe, Onur Erdur, School of the South: The Colonial Roots of French Theory, Catherine Klein-Gousseff ed., Retours d’URSS: les prisonniers de guerre et les internés français dans les archives soviétiques, 1945-1951 and Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi, Puzzles: A Seminar on the ‘Benefit of Christ’. 

I’ll be teaching Butler in the autumn term. I endorsed the Sloterdijk and Erdur translations for Polity. I write about Wolff here – he was an important biologist who became the administrator of the Collège de France, and his work is used by, among others, Bataille, Canguilhem and Foucault. He also spent the war as a German prisoner of war, and will be one of the people I discuss in my next research project.