Category Archives: Sunday Histories

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 | 4 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

From a Watershed to the Parting of the Waters: A Note on Michel Foucault and Peter Brown

Posted on October 5, 2025 by stuartelden

Back in November 2014, while I was researching Foucault’s Last Decade, I wrote “A minor note on Michel Foucault and Peter Brown: From a watershed to the parting of the waters” for this site. I was interested in Foucault’s use of an idea … Continue reading →

Posted in Foucault's Last Decade, Michel Foucault, Peter Brown, Sunday Histories | 3 Comments

Jean de Menasce’s dedication to Émile Benveniste – “in memory of the year of exile”

Posted on October 1, 2025 by stuartelden

I already knew that Jean de Menasce dedicated his edition and translation of the 9th century Zoroastrian theological text Škand-Gumānīk Vičār to Émile Benveniste. Benveniste had taught de Menasce Iranian languages, especially Pahlavi, in the late 1930s at the École Pratique des Hautes … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

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

Erwin Panofsky’s dog and Ernst Kantorowicz

Posted on September 15, 2025 by stuartelden

In the archives of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, there are some papers relating to Erwin Panofsky, the art historian, collected by his second wife Gerda Panofsky (née Sörgel). I was led there by the question of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Ernst Kantorowicz, Erwin Panofsky, Pierre Bourdieu, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Pierre Bourdieu and Erwin Panofsky: Architecture, Scholasticism and the Concept of Habitus

Posted on September 14, 2025 by stuartelden

In 1967, Pierre Bourdieu translated Erwin Panofsky’s 1951 book Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism into French. The German-born Panofsky is best known for his work in art history, and for developing Aby Warburg’s distinction between iconography and iconology. He was teaching alternate semesters … Continue reading →

Posted in Emile Benveniste, Erwin Panofsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Sunday Histories | 5 Comments

Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies – Samuel Weber, Deconstruction and the American Reception of French Theory

Posted on September 7, 2025 by stuartelden

Several journals played a significant role in introducing so-called ‘French Theory’ to the United States. They would include Yale French Studies, Diacritics, boundary 2 and Semiotext(e). Yale French Studies claims to be “the oldest English-language journal in the United States devoted to French and Francophone literature and … Continue reading →

Posted in Jacques Derrida, Sunday Histories | 1 Comment