Expensive hardback only, of course. Thanks to Tim Howles for the link.
French philosophy is an internationally celebrated national philosophical tradition, and this Oxford Handbook offers a comprehensive approach to its history since 1800. The Handbook features essays written by renowned international specialists, illuminating key movements and positions, themes and thinkers in nineteenth-, twentieth- and even twenty-first-century French philosophy. The volume takes into account developments in recent historical scholarship by broadening the notion of Modern French Philosophy in two ways. Whereas recent approaches in the field have often ignored early nineteenth-century developments, this volume offers comprehensive treatment of French thought of this period in order to grasp better later developments. Moreover, the volume extends the canon at the other end of the period of Modern French Philosophy by including work on philosophers who have come to prominence only in the last ten or twenty years. The volume takes ‘French philosophy’ in a broad sense to include all philosophy carried out in France over the last 200 years, and it illuminates the institutional and cultural background of this national philosophical tradition in such a way as to provide a fuller and more comprehensive understanding of its unity and of its more famous moments in the twentieth century.
This book articulates international political theory in dialogue with economics on several questions. It asks: how has modern international theory been adjusted and nourished by economic ideas, theories and practices? How far has the distinctive contribution of some theorists to international theory been informed by their views on economy? What has been the impact of the theory of the state for economic and international theory? What sort of economic thinking has led to revise the debates constitutive for the modern international realm? How have economic debates been rhetorically connected to political debates in the field of international relations?
From machine learning and artificial intelligence to blockchain or simpler newsfeed filtering, automated systems can transform the social world in ways that are just starting to be imagined.
Redefining these emergent technologies as the new systems of knowing, pioneering scholar David Beer examines the acute tensions they create and how they are changing what is known and what is knowable. Drawing on cases ranging from the art market and the smart home, through to financial tech, AI patents and neural networks, he develops key concepts for understanding the framing, envisioning and implementation of algorithms.
This book will be of interest to anyone who is concerned with the rise of algorithmic thinking and the way it permeates society.
This is starting to appear in online bookshops (i.e. Decitre), but I can’t yet find a publisher page. It’s the next volume in the collection of Foucault’s Cours et travaux before the Collège de France – a course at Vincennes, lectures in North America, and essays. I’ll update when I can find more information.
Update 19 April 2024 – the publisher page is here.
It’s easy to miss the Fondazione Gramsci, tucked away off the street in a little building along via Sebino, at number 43A, in Rome’s Trieste neighborhood. Its glass door entrance lies at the end of a discreet courtyard, modestly beyond the gaze of any undiscerning passersby. On the afternoon of my visit–a mild, gray, late January day–things were brightened by the warm welcome I’d received. I said I was a big Gramsci fan, had written a few things about him, and came curious about the Fondazione’s resources. I’d heard about their extensive library, crammed with every Left book under the sun, in scores of languages, which I now saw filling the glass cabinets on the walls of the main biblioteca. I said I wanted to tap Gramsci’s digital archive as well, especially those legendary prison notebooks, whose real thing, I knew, were housed in a special vault somewhere on the Fondazione’s premises…
French philosopher Simone Weil’s best known work that promotes mindful living and instructs readers how they can once again feel rooted, in a cultural and spiritual sense, to their environment
One of the foremost French philosophers of the last century, Simone Weil has been described by André Gide as “the patron saint of all outsiders” and by Albert Camus as “the only great spirit of our time.” In this, her most famous work, she diagnoses the malaise at the heart of modern life: uprootedness, from the past and from community. Written towards the end of World War II for the Free French Army, Weil’s work is an indispensable and perpetually intriguing text for readers and students of philosophy everywhere. The book discusses the political, cultural and spiritual currents that ought to be nurtured so that people have access to sources of energy which will help them lead fulfilling, joyful and morally good lives.
The concept of territory is central in international law, but a detailed analysis of how the concept is used in both discourse and practice has been lacking until now. Rather than reproducing the established understanding of territoriality within the international legal order, this study suggests that the discipline of international law relies on an outmoded spatial paradigm. Gail Lythgoe argues for a complete update and overhaul of our understanding of territory and space, to engage more effectively with key processes, structures and actors relevant to contemporary global governance. In this new theoretical account of an essential aspect of public international law, she argues that territory is a dynamic social reality created by the exercise of power. Territories are constituted by the practices of a more diverse array of actors than is acknowledged. As a result, functions are re-assembling in territories constituted by state and non-state actors alike.
This book provides a detailed account of the role of property in German Idealism. It puts the concept of property in the center of the philosophical systems of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel and shows how property remains tied to their conceptions of freedom, right, and recognition.
The book begins with a critical genealogy of the concept of property in modern legal philosophy, followed by a reconstruction of the theory of property in Kant’s Doctrine of Right, Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right, and Hegel’s Jena Realphilosophie. By turning to the tradition of German Rechtsphilosophie as opposed to the more standard libertarian and utilitarian frameworks of property, it explores the metaphysical, normative, political, and material questions that make property intelligible as a social relation. The book formulates a normative theory of property rooted in practical reason, mutual recognition, and social freedom. This relational theory of property, inspired by German Idealism, brings a fresh angle to contemporary property theory. Additionally, it provides crucial philosophical background to 19th-century debates on private property, inequality, labor, socialism, capitalism, and the state.
The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in 19th-century German philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, political theory, and political economy.
A very expensive hardback and e-book listed at the moment.
The Natural Border tells the recent history of Mediterranean rural capitalism from the perspective of marginalized Black African farm workers. Timothy Raeymaekers shows how in the context of global supply chains and repressive border regimes, agrarian production and reproduction are based on fundamental racial hierarchies.
Taking the example of the tomato—a typical ‘Made in Italy’ commodity—Raeymaekers asks how political boundaries are drawn around the land and the labor needed for its production, what technologies of exclusion and inclusion enable capitalist operations to take place in the Mediterranean agrarian frontier, and which practices structure the allocation, use and commodification of land and labor across the tomato chain. While the mobile infrastructures that mobilize, channel, commodify and segregate labor play a central role in the ‘naturalization’ of racial segregation, they are also terrains of contestation and power—and thus, as The Natural Borderdemonstrates, reflect the tense socio-ecological transformation the Mediterranean border space is going through today.
Square de Port Royal, rue Méchain, rue Emile Faguet and rue Monticelli
In my chapter on Émile Benveniste from roughly 1934 to 1949, I’ve been finding all sorts of interesting things to explore. Looking for some of Benveniste’s early publications in the Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris led me to do a systematic trawl through all the issues available on Gallica. As well as a lot of short papers, not included in Benveniste’s essay collections, the Bulletin reports on the Société’s meetings, including who attended, and this helped to clear up a couple of details. A simple attendance list is a good, but not definitive sign that someone was there – it’s easy for mistakes to be made here. But a report given at a meeting or a paper delivered is a stronger indication. People can’t be in more than one place at a time, and this was an age when journeys took substantially longer. The run of journals on Gallica is incomplete, and if I’m working through a sequence of a journal to check things like meeting reports or mastheads over a long period, it’s a pain to have to order each issue separately, especially with the ongoing British Library problems. Fortunately there is an Oxford library with a long sequence on open shelves. I’ve been using the Bodleian libraries quite a bit recently, so have been working through a few years each time I’m there.
Despite his very thorough work, this process has created a few doubts about some of the dates reported by Georges Redard in his “Bio-Bibliography” of Benveniste and the chronology included in the Dernières Leçons/Last Lectures volume. I need to complete the work with the Bulletin and do the same for the Journal Asiatique, which reports on the Société Asiatique.
There are also various reports about some manifestos or open letters which Benveniste signed – the surrealist manifesto of 1925, a statement in opposition to the Rif war in Morocco that same year, and Marc Bloch’s open letter against the Union Générale des Israélites de France – a Vichy organisation claiming to represent all Jews in France. While there are repeated claims of these, I wanted to check the original sources. The first was straight-forward: La Révolution surréaliste is on Gallica, and Benveniste’s name appears as a signatory to “Révolution d’abord et toujours” in issue 5.
The opposition to the Rif war was started by an initial challenge by Henri Barbusse in l’Humanité in July 1925, co-signed by Barbusse’s colleagues on the Clarté editorial team, the surrealists, and the team behind the Philosophies journal, including Norbert Guterman, Henri Lefebvre and Georges Politzer. The best source I know on these questions is often Jean-François Sirinelli,Intellectuels et passions françaises: Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990), and he does reproduce the text from l’Humanité as well as the pro-colonialist response published in Le Figaro. His list of signatories for the first misled me, because Benveniste is not there. From the various sources online, I knew the initial challenge was followed by names in a July 1925 issue of Clarté, but that isn’t as easy to find. In the end, I used a microfilm at the Bibliothèque nationale. But checking l’Humanité showed Benveniste was an initial signatory, despite Sirinelli’s list. I also looked at the piece in Le Figaro, to see who put their name to that. Quite apart from the politics, the first is by far the better company to be in. There was a later piece in L’Humanité co-signed by Benveniste, and La Révolution surréaliste manifesto was also published there, but these seem to be the only pieces.
Marc Bloch’s open letter is included in the Gallimard edition of his L’étrange défaite, which is reprinted in the Quarto collection L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance. Benveniste is listed as a signatory. Carole Fink’s biography of Bloch indicates that there were several drafts of the letter, with the final version only bearing the names of Benjamin Crémieux, René Milhaud and Bloch. Fink does not mention Benveniste in her discussion (pp. 273-75). She provides some archival sources, one of which is at the Archives Nationales but unfortunately this is not accessible due to the condition of the document. She also gives some references to the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris. That might be worth a visit at some point.
Another minor Benveniste piece reprinted in Langues, Cultures, Religions on the Indo-European people raised a little question for me, and so I went looking for its original place of publication in the Revue de Synthèse, thinking that would resolve it. It did, but it also made me realise the reprint was completely detached from the piece’s original context, where it was not just a standalone lecture, but followed by other contributions, including one by Marcel Mauss, and a discussion, with contributions by linguists and historians, including Marc Bloch. And that was just the first day of a week of discussions. A minor piece suddenly seemed much more interesting and opened up yet another network of ideas and contacts to explore.
This chapter on Benveniste has taken me much longer to complete than I’d expected. Even on my revised plan after returning to work I’d hoped to have a draft by the New Year, and I’m still working on it. But a large part of this is because of the interesting material and the relative lack of secondary literature discussing this. Some of the work of Irène Fenoglio has been particularly useful, though there is a lot more which I will go through in time. I quickly realised that trying to write summaries of all Benveniste’s essays in this period, on top of discussions of his books, would take up far too much space, so I’m trying to synthesise some key themes and only write more extended discussions of a few particularly interesting or illustrative analyses. In this early period “Les mages dans l’Ancien Iran” and “The Nature of the Linguistic Sign” seem to me to be worth that more concentrated work, along with the discussion of the Indo-European people paper. Other essays help supplement the discussions of these, or the books, though I’m also struck by not just the reach of his work, but how many different things he was working on around the same time. The same goes for his teaching, which I’ve mentioned working on before (here and here), and which I’m trying to place in this chapter.
I also had a good trip to Paris where I worked on a lot of different things. I had authorisation to look at a few restricted files at the Archives nationales, which provided some interesting information about funding for Dumézil and Eliade from the CNRS, and about Dumézil’s teaching after the Liberation. At the Bibliothèque nationale I had requested a few specific things from the Lucien Tesnière, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alexandre Kojève collections. These were mostly correspondence files. I also had a visit to the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations (BULAC), where I looked at two boxes of the Fonds Jean de Menasce, which has some letters from Benveniste and Dumézil, among many others. And I now have a card for the library at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, which has some potentially interesting things I will need to spend time with.
That was a lot of back-and-forth across Paris, but I spent most of my time at the Collège de France, continuing work on the Dumézil archives and beginning to look through the Benveniste archives there. The latter has the partial manuscript of Redard’s biography of Benveniste which was edited for Last Lectures, but as well as papers from Benveniste himself, it also has Redard’s working notes and files for his uncompleted biography. These include photocopies of a lot of material from other archives, which was extremely helpful both in revealing possible sources and possibly saving me from some trips. In particular I now have a much better idea of what happened to him in the war, though still have several unanswered questions.
There are other Benveniste archives at the Bibliothèque nationale, which I’ve yet to begin work with. I already know these are far from complete, with much material, especially pre-war, long lost. In Last Lectures there is a useful piece by Emilie Brunet discussing where the different parts of Benveniste’s papers ended up, including his notes on indigenous languages of the Pacific Northwest which are at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. A trip to Alaska was always unlikely, especially since this is material outside the Indo-European focus of my project, but I was curious as to what was there. There are also good discussions of this work by Chloé Laplantine, among others, and fortunately, quite a bit of material has been photocopied and scanned and is available online. I’ve also realised there are questions which will only be resolved by the archives of others, some of which are in Paris, but others are further afield.
I also took a walk through a bit of Paris I didn’t know before, walking between different places Benveniste lived before and after the war in the 13th and 14th arrondissements. While obviously a lot will have changed, the buildings do all seem to be still there. One of the pre-war addresses, near La Santé prison, was an address in which Henri Lefebvre also lived, though not, I think, at the same time. And rue Monticelli, where Benveniste spent most of his post-war years, was also the street where Fernand Braudel and Jacques le Goff lived.
Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications, including the still-delayed reedition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna. There is a lot more about the earlier Foucault work here. The final volume of the series, The Archaeology of Foucault, is now out worldwide. The special issue of Theory, Culture & Society I co-edited on “Foucault before the Collège de France” is also now published.
