Category Archives: Roger Caillois

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roger Caillois – Race, Games and a Ceremonial Sword

Posted on December 28, 2025 by stuartelden

Roger Caillois and Claude Lévi-Strauss both spent the war in exile from France. Lévi-Strauss had done fieldwork in Brazil in the 1930s, but when he left France he went through Martinique and was detained in Puerto Rico before going to … Continue reading →

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil, Roger Caillois, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Huguette Fugier’s study of the vocabulary of the sacred in Latin, and Giorgio Agamben’s other sources for the notion of the homo sacer

Posted on December 7, 2025 by stuartelden

Huguette Fugier’s 1963 book Recherches sur l’expression du sacré dans la langue latine seems little known today, which is unfortunate given its interest and importance. In the opening lines, she describes it is “a study of historical semantics, applied to the Roman … Continue reading →

Posted in Giorgio Agamben, Roger Caillois, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil and Benoîte Groult: the Académie française and the debate about feminine nouns for professions

Posted on October 19, 2025 by stuartelden

In his dialogues with Didier Eribon, published in 1989, Claude Lévi-Strauss commented on the linguistic work of the Académie française, and especially a campaign to amend the gender terminology of professions. Should, for example, a female politician be referred to … Continue reading →

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil, Roger Caillois, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Michel Foucault’s early English translations – indications from the archives of the Georges Borchardt literary agency, the memoirs of André Schiffrin and the Susan Sontag connection

Posted on August 24, 2025 by stuartelden

Now it is almost automatic: a new book by Foucault in French is translated within a couple of years. The Collège de France courses, the Vrin series of critical editions of lecture courses and now other material, the fourth volume … Continue reading →

Posted in Georges Dumézil, Michel Foucault, Roger Caillois, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Elisabeth Raucq, animal names and approaches to Indo-European vocabulary

Posted on April 13, 2025 by stuartelden

In the preface to the second edition of his Mitra-Varuna, Georges Dumézil mentions some of the people who attended the lecture course which became the book. Delivered at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1938-39, this was the last year … Continue reading →

Posted in Antoine Meillet, Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Roger Caillois, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Georges Bataille correspondence – taking a look at the bound volumes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Posted on November 16, 2023 by stuartelden

A lot of letters to and from Georges Bataille have been published (for example, here), but the two bound volumes of correspondence at the Bibliothèque nationale are still something to behold. Given how much of his library and correspondence has … Continue reading →

Posted in Albert Camus, Alexandre Koyré, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Karl Jaspers, Kostas Axelos, Maurice Blanchot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mircea Eliade, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois, Uncategorized | 3 Comments