Mapping Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France

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

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, forthcoming 2024.

“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, forthcoming July 2024.

“Foucault and Structuralism”, in Daniele Lorenzini (ed.), The Foucauldian Mind, London: Routledge, forthcoming 2026 (briefly discussed here).

Online pieces and recordings

“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)

Resources

Georges Dumézil’s work on the warrior function – preliminary textual comparison

Georges Dumézil’s Mythe et épopée series and its partial English translations

Georges Dumézil, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus – the sources of the texts in the 1955 Italian collection

Saussure’s notes on German legends – cross-references between the different editions of these manuscripts