Category Archives: Jean Wahl

Initial Thoughts on Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History

Posted on June 21, 2026 by stuartelden

There was a lot I learned, and much I liked, about Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s recently published The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History (University of Chicago Press, 2026). There was also a great deal which has … Continue reading →

Posted in Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Georges Dumézil, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Wahl, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, The Early Foucault, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Jean Wahl, The Idea of the Instant in Descartes’s Philosophy – ed. and trans. Alan D. Schrift, Edinburgh University Press, May 2026

Posted on June 6, 2026 by stuartelden

Jean Wahl, The Idea of the Instant in Descartes’s Philosophy – ed. and trans. Alan D. Schrift, Edinburgh University Press, May 2026

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Books written by French professors while prisoners of war in World War II, and the Université de Captivité in Oflag XVII-A

Posted on September 28, 2025 by stuartelden

There are many famous books written in prison, from Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy to Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Socrates’ final words in prison are dramatized by Plato in the Crito. The Marquis de Sade wrote some of his books in prison, and Miguel … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Negri, Étienne Wolff, Emmanuel Levinas, Fernand Braudel, François Ellenberger, Georges Canguilhem, Hannah Arendt, Jean Cavaillès, Jean Wahl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Raymond Ruyer, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized, Walter Benjamin | 9 Comments

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, Jean Wahl, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, Uncategorized | 8 Comments

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 Wahl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Maurice Blanchot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Stefanos Geroulanos, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Roman Jakobson, Franz Boas, and the Paleo-Siberian and Aleutian material at the New York Public Library

Posted on June 1, 2025 by stuartelden

The support for refugee scholars to come to the United States of America in the 1930s and 1940s is well known. Varian Fry famously helped several hundred European artists and intellectuals to flee Vichy France between 1940 and 1941. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Koyré, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Kantorowicz, Jean Wahl, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

W.C. Hackett, Outside the Gates – Angelico, 2021 (historical novel about Jean Wahl)

Posted on December 8, 2023 by stuartelden

W.C. Hackett, Outside the Gates – Angelico, 2021 The gates of Drancy Internment Camp in the northeast suburbs of Paris served as a holding pen for thousands of Jews during the German occupation of France in World War II. Jean … Continue reading →

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Jean Wahl, Transcendence and The Concrete: Selected Writings reviewed at NDPR

Posted on September 20, 2017 by stuartelden

Jean Wahl, Transcendence and The Concrete: Selected Writings is reviewed at NDPR. Although not that well known in English, Wahl was a significant figure in France in the mid-twentieth century, and among other things was one of Foucault’s teachers. His book … Continue reading →

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