Category Archives: Georges Bataille

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

Posted on November 12, 2025 by stuartelden

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

Étienne Wolff and the biology of monsters – writing as a prisoner of war, Collège de France administrator, and the engagement with his work by Georges Canguilhem, Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault

Posted on September 21, 2025 by stuartelden

In exploring the histories of professors and their teaching at the Collège de France, I’ve often looked at correspondence between chairs, candidates and the administrator. Administrators are elected from within the professoriate and have quite a lot of power in … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Koyré, Étienne Wolff, Canguilhem (book), Fernand Braudel, Georges Bataille, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Ryan L. Allen, Adventures in the Archaic: Primitivism, Degrowth, and the French Social Sciences, 1945-1975 – University of Chicago Press, January 2026

Posted on August 13, 2025 by stuartelden

Ryan L. Allen, Adventures in the Archaic: Primitivism, Degrowth, and the French Social Sciences, 1945-1975 – University of Chicago Press, January 2026 Examines how four intellectuals with ties to the French social sciences articulated a new primitivist sensibility between 1945 … Continue reading →

Posted in Georges Bataille, Henri Lefebvre, Mircea Eliade | Leave a comment

Books received – Braudel, Wolff, Bourke, Bataille, Felsch

Posted on August 12, 2025 by stuartelden

Some second-hand copies of Fernand Braudel, and Etienne Wolff’s Les chemins de la vie, and copies of Richard Bourke, Hegel’s World Revolutions, Georges Bataille, Critical Essays 2, and Philipp Felsch, The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990. Wolff … Continue reading →

Posted in Étienne Wolff, Bradley Garrett, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georges Bataille | Leave a comment

Alexandre Kojève, Henri Lefebvre and the translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology

Posted on July 20, 2025 by stuartelden

This is a revised, expanded and more fully referenced version of a post from March 2024. There is a Spanish translation of the earlier version here. Alexandre Kojève’s seminars on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, given at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Kojève, Alexandre Koyré, Emmanuel Levinas, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georges Bataille, Georges Canguilhem, Georges Dumézil, Hannah Arendt, Henri Lefebvre, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Lacan, Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Maurice Blanchot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Stefanos Geroulanos, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Georges Bataille, Critical Essays 2 – updating the list of English translations of Oeuvres complètes on this site

Posted on July 15, 2025 by stuartelden

With the publication of Georges Bataille, Critical Essays Volume 2: 1949-51 (trans. Chris Turner, eds. Alberto Toscano and Benjamin Noys), English readers now have access to all of the essays in volume 11 of Bataille’s Œuvres complètes and a good … Continue reading →

Posted in Alberto Toscano, Georges Bataille | Leave a comment

Josué V. Harari, the Marquis de Sade, and Michel Foucault’s 1970 lectures in Buffalo

Posted on June 15, 2025 by stuartelden

Josué V. Harari plays a small but important role in the story of Foucault in the United States. A PhD researcher at the University at Buffalo when Foucault visited in the early 1970s, he went on to edit a 1979 volume … Continue reading →

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edward Said, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Sunday Histories | 6 Comments

The Other Bataille: An Interview with Benjamin Noys and Alberto Toscano – Journal of the History of Ideas blog

Posted on March 6, 2025 by stuartelden

The Other Bataille: An Interview with Benjamin Noys and Alberto Toscano On the occasion of the publication of the second volume of Bataille’s Critical Essays, which collects previously untranslated texts by George Bataille, Jared Bly interviewed its editors, Benjamin Noys and Alberto Toscano. … Continue reading →

Posted in Alberto Toscano, Georges Bataille | Leave a comment

The Friendship between Hannah Arendt and Alexandre Koyré

Posted on March 2, 2025 by stuartelden

Although they both studied in Germany, and were among those who attended Heidegger’s lecture courses in the 1920s, Hannah Arendt and Alexandre Koyré didn’t meet at that time. (Arendt attended lectures in 1924-26 in Marburg; Koyré in 1928-29 in Freiburg.) Their first … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Koyré, Georges Bataille, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Sunday Histories | 6 Comments

Georges Bataille, Critical Essays Volume 2: 1949-51 – ed. Benjamin Noys and Alberto Toscano, trans. Chris Turner – Seagull, December 2024

Posted on November 1, 2024 by stuartelden

Georges Bataille, Critical Essays Volume 2: 1949-51 – ed. Benjamin Noys and Alberto Toscano, trans. Chris Turner – Seagull, December 2024 An introduction for English-language readers to Georges Bataille’s postwar philosophical and critical writings. In the aftermath of World War … Continue reading →

Posted in Georges Bataille | Leave a comment