Now the last of my Foucault books is published, the next major project will be a study of Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France, looking at both French and émigré scholars, with a particular focus on Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Mircea Eliade and Julia Kristeva.
This project is funded by a Leverhulme major research fellowship, to run for three years from 1 October 2022. Here’s the opening part of the grant proposal I submitted.
What is Europe? Where is it located, who are its people and what languages do they speak? Thinking historically about these questions usually traces a lineage from classical Greece and Rome, through the Christianization of late antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present. In this fellowship I will explore a quite different tradition of thinking. This is the pioneering research conducted on Indo-European mythology, language and thought in twentieth-century France, by both French and émigré scholars.
Indo-European scholarship makes a central contribution to Europe’s self-understanding and its relation to the wider world. Although twentieth-century French scholarship has often been accused of Eurocentrism or orientalism, this fellowship will explore a much more complicated picture. This tradition shows the importance of extra-European sources in India and Iran, and the crucial role of Europe’s geographical peripheries – Ireland, Scandinavia and the Caucasus as well as its core of Greece, Rome, France and Germany. The vision of a classical world that emerges is much more unsettling and unfamiliar than uncritical lineages from antiquity to the modern West might suggest. This tradition therefore situates Europe within a broader heritage which challenges many of the boundaries drawn in more conventional accounts, both geographical, linguistic and racial.
While French theory has been extensively discussed in Anglophone scholarship, with studies and biographies of nearly all the key figures and movements, the work on Indo-European thought has not been analysed in the same way, despite its importance and often obscured influence. This project will explore this body of work in detail. Four thinkers will be examined in particular: the comparative mythologist and philologist Georges Dumézil (1898-1986), the linguist Émile Benveniste (1902-1976), and two émigré scholars who worked in France, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) and the early work of Julia Kristeva (1941-). For this project I will utilise the approach I have developed and successfully employed in previous work. My research is distinguished by working with texts in their original language, comparative work between editions, the use of archival sources, and a careful contextualisation of the history of ideas. The research will therefore be historical, philological and philosophical in its approach, and political, geographical and sociological in its importance.
As expansive as this work was, one crucial and troubling question is what is meant by Indo-European? A hypothetical language, from which others developed; a civilisation, with myths and history; or, most problematically, a racial ideal? These questions are inherently political, and there are controversies around this work which need to be fully explored. Such issues remain important and pressing today with a rise of populism, nationalism and reactionary politics, as well as a crisis of democracy and the appropriate of mythology by the right. A historical study, embedding these writings in an intellectual context and a European network of ideas, is thus both timely as well as overdue.
Research Updates
As with the earlier Foucault work, I share updates on the research for this project. These are not draft material for the planned book or related articles, but reports on the process of doing the research, talking about what I’ve been reading and writing, libraries and archives I’ve visited and some of the challenges along the way.
Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France – the next major project – 10 December 2021
Editing Georges Dumézil’s Mitra Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty – 25 April 2022
Update 3: Paris – Foucault, Canguilhem, Dumézil – 9 May 2022
and see also my request for help – Challenging reference problems with Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna [now all resolved]
Update 4: Editing and Introducing Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna, and working with Foucault’s Lecture Courses – 11 July 2022
Update 5: Reading Saussure – 25 August 2022
Update 6: beginning the Leverhulme fellowship, my self-imposed guidelines for writing and time-discipline, and some summer cycling and writing – 7 October 2022
Update 7: Working on Dumézil’s teaching, a few research resources, and some archival work in Paris – 14 November 2022
Update 8: working on Barthes, Lévi-Strauss and the Mission Paul Pelliot – 23 December 2022
Update 9: Dumézil’s courses; Benveniste’s teaching records; Barthes, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida; and a forthcoming article on “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” – 31 January 2023
Update 10: Dumézil’s early work and archives; the Collège de Sociologie and Blanchot; Eliade in Paris; Lévi-Strauss – 27 March 2023
Update 11: Dumézil and Charachidzé’s work on Ubykh; Lévi-Strauss and his archive; Eliade’s correspondence; Koyré’s networks; and continuing work with Dumézil’s archive – 28 April 2023
Update 12: working in some UK archives; Benveniste’s EPHE teaching; some talks on the research – 26 May 2023
Update 13: work on Benveniste, Saussure and in UK archives, a seminar on the research, and a brief health update – 31 August 2023
Update 14: returning to work, tracking Benveniste’s teaching, and working with archives including the Aurel Stein collections in London – 31 October 2023
Update 15: A first trip to the Paris archives since the spring and more archive work in the UK – 30 November 2023
Update 16: archive work in the UK and working around the British Library disruption – 31 December 2023
Update 17: contextualising Benveniste – 12 February 2024
Update 18: further work on Benveniste and more archives in Paris – 18 March 2024
Update 19: back to Dumézil, politics, and Benveniste in Persia and Afghanistan – 30 April 2024
Update 20: writing about Dumézil and Benveniste’s archives – 31 May 2024
Update 21: writing about Dumézil in the 1930s and 1940s and some archival work in Switzerland – 28 June 2024
Update 22: finishing a draft of a chapter on Dumézil between 1938 and 1949; continuing work on Benveniste’s archive; and an article on “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” – 31 July 2024
Update 23: Emile Benveniste and Georges Dumézil at the Collège de France, and an article on Alexandre Koyré – 9 September 2024
Update 24: Emile Benveniste’s archives of teaching and publishing, the Festschrift, and the Alexandre Koyré side-project – 14 October 2024
Update 25: Benveniste’s teaching, a talk at St Andrews, Tzvetan Todorov, Roman Jakobson, and some archival work in Paris and Oxford – 20 December 2024
Update 26: Benveniste’s late publications; Sunday Histories; beginning archival work in the United States – 14 February 2025
Update 27: more archive work on Saussure, Blanchot, Foucault, Jakobson and Koyré, two recordings, and a talk at the University at Buffalo – 24 March 2025
Update 28: archives in Princeton, Chicago and final work in New York – 20 May 2025
Update 29: working on Benveniste’s Vocabulaire, Dumézil’s Bilan and other work – 18 August 2025
Update 30: archive work in Paris, Bern and Cambridge, MA, and Benveniste’s library – 12 November 2025
Outputs
“The yoke of law and the lustre of glory: Foucault and Dumézil on sovereignty” in Martina Tazzioli and William Walters (eds.) Handbook on Governmentality, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2023, 38-53.
Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, translated by Derek Coltman, edited and introduced by Stuart Elden, Hau, December 2024 (print and open access pdf).
“Canguilhem, Dumézil, Hyppolite: Georges Canguilhem and his Contemporaries”, Revue Internationale de Philosophie No 307, 2024, 27-48 – special issue on Canguilhem beyond Epistemology and the History of Science, edited by Federico Testa.
“Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol 85 No 3, 2024, 571-600.
“Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France”, History of European Ideas, Vol 51 No 2, 276-89 (open access).
“Foucault and Structuralism”, in Daniele Lorenzini (ed.), The Foucauldian Mind, London: Routledge, forthcoming 2026 (briefly discussed here).
“Benveniste, Dumézil and Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France”, in Roger Woodard (ed.), Cambridge History of Mythology and Mythography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
Online pieces and recordings
Michel Foucault and the Social Contract – Stuart Elden, Mark Kelly and Chris Watkin, 13 April 2021 (video)
“Editing Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna“, Berfrois, 8 December 2022
“From the Archive to the Edited Translation: Lefebvre, Foucault, Dumézil”, Translation and the Archive in the Continental Tradition workshop, Senate House, London, 19 May 2023 (audio)
“Indo-European Thought in Post-War France“, Warwick Seminar for Interdisciplinary French Studies, 31 May 2023 (video – link broken)
“Alexandre Koyré and Georges Canguilhem” at ‘On Concrete Human Problems’: Georges Canguilhem on Medicine and the Human Sciences workshop, University of Bristol, 26 September 2024 (audio)
“Indo-European Thought at the Collège de France”, Social Anthropology research seminar, University of St Andrews, 29 November 2024 (audio)
“The Ideology of the Indo-Europeans”, Future of Ideologies webinar, University of Nottingham, 29 January 2025 (audio) – this is a shorter version of the St Andrews talk, with a little additional material
“Émile Benveniste and the Sogdian Word for ‘Knee'”, Remarque Institute, New York University, 11 April 2025 (text; video) – with papers by Brooke Holmes and Anurima Banerji
Any forthcoming talks, some related to this project, are listed here.
Resources
Georges Dumézil’s work on the warrior function – preliminary textual comparison (October 2022; updated August 2024)
Georges Dumézil’s Mythe et épopée series and its partial English translations (October 2022)
Georges Dumézil, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus – the sources of the texts in the 1955 Italian collection (May 2023)
Saussure’s notes on German legends – cross-references between the different editions of these manuscripts (June 2023)
Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale – Problems in General Linguistics and other English translations (December 2024)
If you find these useful, please let me know – corrections and additions welcome. There are a lot of other research resources here.
Connected Posts
Alexandre Koyré and a Network of Ideas – 26 April 2023, with some additional readings
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900-1940) – an important scholar of Celtic languages and mythology – 26 January 2025 (previously posted in a much earlier form on May 2, 2023)
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Fondation Loubat lectures at the Collège de France: A Structural Analysis of the Wolverine in North American Mythology – 18 May 2023, revised 10 August 2025
On the trail of Aurel Stein – working in archives for the Indo-European thought project – 27 October 2023
Georges Bataille correspondence – taking a look at the bound volumes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France – 16 November 2023
Six degrees of T.S. Eliot – the links through Jean de Menasce to Émile Benveniste – 15 December 2023
Alexandre Kojève, Henri Lefebvre and the translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology – 5 March 2024; Spanish translation: Alexandre Kojève, Henri Lefebvre y la traducción de la Fenomenología de Hegel
Emile Benveniste’s Second World War – 2 May 2024; updated 21 and 29 May 2024
Alexandre Koyré in Cairo – 20 September 2024; updated 18 May 2025
Canguilhem-Koyré-Gottmann – 22 September 2024
Benveniste, Dumézil, Lejeune and the decipherment of Linear B – 5 January 2025
Benveniste and the Linguistic Circle of Prague – 19 January 2025
Thomas Sebeok, Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Nuclear Waste – 2 February 2025
Vladimir Nabokov, Roman Jakobson, Marc Szeftel and The Song of Igor – 9 February 2025
Walter B. Henning, Robert Oppenheimer, Ernst Kantorowicz, the Institute for Advanced Study and the Khwarezmian Dictionary Project – 23 February 2025
The Territory of the Vocabulary and the Vocabulary of Territory: Emile Benveniste – 30 March 2025
Elisabeth Raucq, animal names and approaches to Indo-European vocabulary – 13 April 2025
The Murder of Ioan Culianu – Eliade, Anton, Eco, Lincoln and the University of Chicago – 11 May 2025
Roman Jakobson, Franz Boas, and the Paleo-Siberian and Aleutian material at the New York Public Library – 1 June 2025
Gillian Rose and the Indo-Europeanists – 8 June 2025
Herman Lommel and the ancient Aryans – Hegel’s great-grandson, Saussure translator and his links to Benveniste, Dumézil and Wikander – 3 August 2025
Lucien Gerschel, Georges Dumézil, William Shakespeare and the history of Coriolanus – 17 August 2025
Several of these are part of the ‘Sunday Histories‘ series of posts which I began in 2025. That series also has pieces on Foucault, Kantorowicz, Koyré, Arendt and others.
