Category Archives: Emile Benveniste

Roland Barthes and the Question of Territory – Animals, Spaces and Sound

Roland Barthes only taught at the Collège de France for a short period, from the 1976-77 academic year until shortly before his premature death in early 1980. I was drawn to his lecture courses there for my current work because he sometimes … Continue reading

Posted in André Leroi-Gourhan, Boundaries, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emile Benveniste, Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Music, Noam Chomsky, Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Territory, Theory | Leave a comment

Clémence Ramnoux – Mythology, Psychology, Philosophy

Clémence Ramnoux (1905-1997) was an important French scholar of ancient Greece. She worked mostly on the pre-Socratics, especially Heraclitus. Alongside Simone Pétrement she was one of the first two women who entered the philosophy programme of the École Normale Supérieure in 1927. Simone Weil … Continue reading

Posted in Clémence Ramnoux, Emile Benveniste, Gaston Bachelard, Jacques Lacan, Jean Gottmann, Jean Hyppolite, Kostas Axelos, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Stuart Elden, “Visuality and Vocabulary in Political Geography”, Dialogues in Human Geography, review forum on Juliet Fall, Along the Line: Writing with Comics and Graphic Narrative in Geography, online first

My contribution to a review forum on Juliet Fall’s remarkable books Bornées: Une histoire illustrée de la frontière (Mētis); Along the Line: Writing with Comics and Graphic Narrative in Geography (EPFL) has now been published online first in Dialogues in Human Geography Stuart Elden, … Continue reading

Posted in Boundaries, Emile Benveniste, Juliet Fall, My Publications, terrain, Territory | Leave a comment

My publications in 2025 – on Koyré, Foucault, Lefebvre and some reviews

Most of this year was spent working on my very long manuscript Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France, which is coming together but has been hard work to reach this point. I have shared a few updates on the research and … Continue reading

Posted in Adam David Morton, Alexandre Koyré, Emile Benveniste, Ernst Kantorowicz, Georges Dumézil, Henri Lefebvre, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France update 30 – archive work in Paris, Bern and Cambridge, MA, and Benveniste’s library

The formal end of the Leverhulme major research fellowship for the Indo-European thought project was at the end of September, but I have a no-cost extension until the end of January. This is invaluable, and is effectively to extend the grant for … Continue reading

Posted in Étienne Wolff, Claude Lévi-Strauss, David Harvey, Emile Benveniste, Ernst Kantorowicz, Erwin Panofsky, Georges Bataille, Georges Canguilhem, Georges Dumézil, Jacques Derrida, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Andrea Rosenthal Memorial Lecture – “Émile Benveniste, the Second World War and the Making of the Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions”, Brown University, 22 October 2025, 5.30pm

The Andrea Rosenthal Memorial Lecture – “Émile Benveniste, the Second World War and the Making of the Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions”, Brown University, 22 October 2025, 5.30pm The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for Émile Benveniste, the … Continue reading

Posted in Conferences, Emile Benveniste, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France | 1 Comment

Did Benveniste read Derrida’s Of Grammatology?

Jacques Derrida was certainly a careful reader of Émile Benveniste. He wrote a critique of Benveniste in “Le supplément de copule. La philosophie devant la linguistique” which appeared in 1971, in a special issue of Langages, “Épistémologie de la linguistique” edited … Continue reading

Posted in Alexandre Koyré, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emile Benveniste, Felix Guattari, Ferdinand de Saussure, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Julia Kristeva, Marcel Mauss, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Books received – Levinas, de Menasce, Braudel, Bloch and Febvre

Books relating to the new interest in stories of French academics who spent time in German prisoner of war camps, a book about Émile Benveniste’s former student Jean de Menasce (see here), and a few relating to the Annales school … Continue reading

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Emmanuel Levinas, Fernand Braudel, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Jean de Menasce’s dedication to Émile Benveniste – “in memory of the year of exile”

I already knew that Jean de Menasce dedicated his edition and translation of the 9th century Zoroastrian theological text Škand-Gumānīk Vičār to Émile Benveniste. Benveniste had taught de Menasce Iranian languages, especially Pahlavi, in the late 1930s at the École Pratique des Hautes … Continue reading

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Pierre Bourdieu and Erwin Panofsky: Architecture, Scholasticism and the Concept of Habitus

In 1967, Pierre Bourdieu translated Erwin Panofsky’s 1951 book Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism into French. The German-born Panofsky is best known for his work in art history, and for developing Aby Warburg’s distinction between iconography and iconology. He was teaching alternate semesters … Continue reading

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Erwin Panofsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Sunday Histories | 5 Comments