Category Archives: Sunday Histories

Foucault’s Multiple Plans for his History of Sexuality

Posted on November 16, 2025 by stuartelden

Some years ago, Philippe Chevallier alerted me to the importance of the 1977 German translation of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality as Sexualität und Wahrheit: Der Wille zum Wissen. This text included a brief preface by Foucault … Continue reading →

Posted in Foucault's Last Decade, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

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

Books received – Foucault, Duby, Stratford, Hage, Ramnoux

Posted on November 11, 2025 by stuartelden

The newly published transcription of Foucault’s 1972 course in Buffalo, two autobiographical accounts by Georges Duby, Elaine Stratford’s remarkable book The Drowned: Elements of Loss and Repair, Ghassan Hage, Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being, and the two volumes of … Continue reading →

Posted in Clémence Ramnoux, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Sunday Histories | Leave a comment

Vladimir Nabokov’s original and unpublished translation of The Discourse of Igor’s Campaign; and Roman Jakobson’s enduring wish to complete his English edition

Posted on November 9, 2025 by stuartelden

In two previous pieces in the ‘Sunday Histories’ series, I have discussed the planned but unrealised collaboration between Vladimir Nabokov and Roman Jakobson on an edition and translation of “The Song of Igor”, an old Russian poem of the 12th century. Jakobson had … Continue reading →

Posted in Georges Dumézil, Mircea Eliade, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized, Vladimir Nabokov | 4 Comments

Foucault’s Hermaphrodites – from Herculine Barbin to a planned volume of the History of Sexuality and the recently published manuscript

Posted on November 2, 2025 by stuartelden

In May 1978, Foucault edited the memoir of a “hermaphrodite”, Herculine Barbin, for publication. In the dossier of documents appended to that text he says that “the question of strange destinies like these and which posed such problems for medicine … Continue reading →

Posted in Étienne Wolff, Canguilhem (book), Foucault's Last Decade, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault | 7 Comments

The Early Edward Said, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Swift – reposted for the 90th anniversary of Said’s birth

Posted on November 1, 2025 by stuartelden

Edward Said was born 90 years ago today – one day after David Harvey. Here’s a piece on Said I wrote earlier this year about his early career – The Early Edward Said, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Swift Given all his … Continue reading →

Posted in David Harvey, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

David Harvey and Paris: a tribute for his 90th birthday

Posted on October 31, 2025 by stuartelden

In a retrospective of his long career, first published in 2021, David Harvey made the following claim: I have written quite a few books over the course of my academic career, beginning with Explanation in Geography (Harvey, 1969) and most recently Marx, Capital … Continue reading →

Posted in Andy Merrifield, David Harvey, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized, urban/urbanisation | 3 Comments

Roman Jakobson’s paper to The First World Conference on Yiddish Studies, 1958: “The Languages of the Diaspora as a Particular Linguistic Problem”

Posted on October 26, 2025 by stuartelden

In an earlier piece in the ‘Sunday Histories’ series, I discussed the work Roman Jakobson did for Franz Boas on the Paleo-Siberian and Aleutian material at the New York Public Library. In his initial time in the United States, as a refugee from … Continue reading →

Posted in Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories | 3 Comments

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

Did Benveniste read Derrida’s Of Grammatology?

Posted on October 12, 2025 by stuartelden

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