Category Archives: Sunday Histories

Émile Benveniste on auxiliarity – an Acta Linguistica Hafniensia article, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, a misplaced abstract and a 1965-66 Collège de France course

Posted on July 27, 2025 by stuartelden

In 1965, Émile Benveniste published “Structure des relations d’auxiliarité” in Acta Linguistica Hafniensia – a journal founded by the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen. Its initial editors were Viggo Brøndal and Louis Hjelmslev. Although the journal had been founded in 1939, and published five … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 1 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

Two Greek Words for Kings and the Question of Territory: Wanax, Basileus and Émile Benveniste’s Vocabulaire

Posted on July 13, 2025 by stuartelden

In his Vocabulaire, the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, Émile Benveniste mentions some questions relating to spatiality and territory that I have briefly surveyed here. One question he raised I said was worthy of further attention. In his French text, and its English … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Sunday Histories, Territory, The Birth of Territory | 3 Comments

Eugenio Donato and “The Structuralist Controversy” conference – proceedings, recordings, Foucault and Flaubert

Posted on July 6, 2025 by stuartelden

The 18-21 October 1966 Baltimore conference on structuralism has long been recognised as important for the reception of French theory in the United States. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Lucien Goldmann, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan and Jean-Pierre Vernant were some of … Continue reading →

Posted in Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, René Girard, Sunday Histories | 5 Comments

Six Months of ‘Sunday Histories’ – weekly short essays on Progressive Geographies

Posted on June 30, 2025 by stuartelden

At the beginning of 2025 I decided to try to post a short essay each week on Progressive Geographies. I felt the blog had become too much of a noticeboard, sharing information about interesting books, talks or shorter pieces by … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Kojève, Alexandre Koyré, Edward Said, Emile Benveniste, Erwin Panofsky, Henri Lefebvre, Jean Hyppolite, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Territory, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Leonard Robert Palmer, Elisabeth/Elizabeth Palmer and the “Studies in General Linguistics” series – a note on the English editors and translators of André Martinet and Émile Benveniste

Posted on June 29, 2025 by stuartelden

Leonard Robert Palmer (1906-1984) was a British linguist, important both for his own work and as an editor. Early in his career he taught Classics at the Victoria University of Manchester, became Chair of Greek at King’s College London, and from … Continue reading →

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

Henri Lefebvre and the “Liste Otto” of Prohibited Books in Occupied France

Posted on June 22, 2025 by stuartelden

The “Liste Otto” was named after Otto Abetz, German ambassador to France under the Occupation, from August 1940 until the Liberation. The list indicated which books had to be removed from sale, with existing copies destroyed, after the German invasion … Continue reading →

Posted in Adam David Morton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Henri Lefebvre, Karl Marx, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized, Understanding Henri Lefebvre | 5 Comments

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

Gillian Rose and the Indo-Europeanists

Posted on June 8, 2025 by stuartelden

While I’ve been working on my Indo-European thought project, I’ve looked at a few books from the University of Warwick’s library which came from the Gillian Rose collection. Some of the books from that collection could not be borrowed – ones … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Gillian Rose, Mircea Eliade, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Louis Althusser’s 1967-68 course on ‘philosophy for scientists’ – the resulting publications and the archive of its lectures

Posted on June 4, 2025 by stuartelden

Louis Althusser’s seminars at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) are of course best known for the famous Reading Capital volume, which developed from his 1964-65 seminar. He ran seminars on the young Marx in 1961-62 and Lacan and psychoanalysis in 1963-64. I’ve … Continue reading →

Posted in Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Georges Canguilhem, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Pierre Macherey, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 3 Comments