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.
New translations of Persian literature into French, the invention of the Aryan myth, increased travel between France and Iran, and the unveiling of artefacts from ancient Susa at the Louvre Museum are among the factors that radically altered France’s perception of Iran during the long nineteenth century. And this is reflected in the literary culture of the period. In an ambitious study spanning poetry, historiography, fiction, travel-writing, ballet, opera, and marionette theatre, Julia Hartley reveals the unique place that Iran held in the French literary imagination between 1829 and 1912. Iran’s history and culture remained a constant source of inspiration across different generations and artistic movements, from the ‘Oriental’ poems of Victor Hugo to those of Anna de Noailles and Théophile Gautier’s strategic citation of Persian poetry to his daughter Judith Gautier’s full-blown rewriting of a Persian epic. Writing about Iran could also serve to articulate new visions of world history and religion, as was the case in the intellectual debates that took place between Michelet, Renan, and Al-Afghani. Alternatively joyous, as in Félicien David’s opera Lalla Roukh, and ominous, as in Massenet’s Le Mage, Iran elicited a multiplicity of treatments. This is most obvious in the travelogues of Flandin, Gobineau, Loti, Jane Dieulafoy, and Marthe Bibesco, which describe the same cities and cultural practices in altogether different ways. Under these writers’ pens, Iran emerges as both an Oriental other and an alter ego, its culture elevated above that of all other Muslim nations. At times this led French writers to critique notions of European superiority. But at others, they appropriated Iran as proto-European through racialist narratives that reinforced Orientalist stereotypes. Drawing on theories of Orientalism and cultural difference, this book navigates both sides of this fascinating and complex literary history. It is the first major study on the subject.
The giant of literary theory analyses the novel: Conrad, James, Atwood, Oe, Mailer, Grass, Grossman, Garcia Marquez, Gibson, Knausgaard and more
A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naïve reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation, and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living.
The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try – and sometimes succeed – in awakening our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience; opening up a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and class or community. But even if this happens (rarely!), one must go on to find traces of collective praxis hidden away within the mere awakening of a feeling of multitude.
And, since it is in the sense of the nation and nationality that collectivity is most often expressed, it is urgent to disengage the possibilities of genuine action within these nationalisms.
This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politicality of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the old Soviet Union; from East Germany to Japan, Latin America and the Nordic countries. Like any such voyage, it is an arbitrary movement across the world of historical situations which, however, seeks to dramatize their common kinship in late capitalism itself.
Transcribed and edited from audio recordings taken by Octavian Esanu of the original seminar at Duke University in 2003, Mimesis, Expression, Construction reproduces Jameson and his students’ engagement with Aesthetic Theory, one of the most influential theories of modernist aesthetics.
The first and only published record of Jameson’s teaching and pedagogic style, the seminar delves into modern and modernist aesthetics through the perspectives of Kant, Hegel, Freud, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; Benjamin and other members of the Frankfurt School; the literary works of Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett; the music of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg; the films of Chaplin, Vertov and Eisenstein; the aesthetic implications of psychoanalysis and biblical exegesis; classical music; and more.
Presented in the format of a play, with stage setting, student interruptions and exchanges, interjections, auditory noises, and ambient sounds, and complemented with scans of students’ notes, Mimesis, Expression, Construction is a groundbreaking addition to the work of one of the greatest modern cultural critics.
Ana Antić is a professor in the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on the history of modern Europe and its global connections, history of war and violence, and history of the ‘psy’ sciences. Antić’s first monograph is Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the Violence of the Nazi New Order (Oxford University Press, 2017); she is currently completing the second one, titled Non-aligned Psychiatry in the Cold War.
Le 11 juin 1949, Foucault soutient en Sorbonne son mémoire de diplôme d’études supérieures de philosophie intitulé « La constitution d’un transcendantal historique dans La Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel », qu’il avait préparé sous la direction de Jean Hyppolite. Dans ce texte que la présente édition offre pour la première fois au public, on découvre un jeune Foucault fin lecteur de la philosophie allemande classique, qui joue Hegel contre Kant afin de repenser la question « Que puis-je savoir? ». La Phénoménologie de l’esprit est interprétée comme une historicisation du transcendantal, qui culmine dans la figure énigmatique du « savoir absolu ». Un programme philosophique est par là même esquissé : « toute philosophie sera science de l’histoire et de l’envers de l’histoire ».
Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape brings us to the mid-2000s, when the Tanzanian government struck a deal with a foreign investor to convert more than 20,000 hectares of long-settled coastal land to establish a sugarcane plantation. Ten years on, the deal was abruptly abandoned. Popularly deemed a case of hubristic global development, critics classified this project another in a line of failed modern resource grabs.
Youjin B. Chung argues such tidy accounts conceal myriad and profound implications: not only how gender, history, and culture shaped the project’s trajectory, but also how, even in its stalled state, the deal upended social life on the land by setting in motion incomplete processes of development and dispossession.
With rich ethnographic detail and visual storytelling, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape traces the lived experiences of diverse rural women and men as they struggled for survival under a seemingly endless condition of liminality. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the directions and stakes of postcolonial development and nation-building in Tanzania, and the shifting meanings of identity and belonging for those on the margins of capitalist agrarian transformation.
There is a New Books Discussion here. Thanks to dmf for the link.
This book is a wide-ranging collection of essays that makes the case for the humanities as central to our self-understanding, for theory as the latest incarnation of a perennial concern with the relation between words and things, and for the ancient as constitutive of the modern. Theory Does Not Exist: Comparative Ancient and Modern Explorations in Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, and Rhetoric makes a strong argument for a comparative approach to what we term “theory” today. It argues that our disciplinary boundaries create artificial divisions between philosophy, rhetoric, and literature, which historically would not have been recognized and have come to function as conceptual straitjackets.
These essays contend that a concerted engagement with the crucial texts in these debates over the last 2500 years not only offers a better understanding of the issues involved but also provides the necessary political, ethical, and existential tools for fashioning a better and more inclusive life. They offer extended readings of Plato, Cicero, and Sophocles, as well as Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Žižek, and Lacan. Theory Does Not Exist offers a full-throated defense of the humanities and crucial counterarguments against the reduction of education to the vocational and the operational.
The situation of internally displaced persons has been a matter of international concern – and legal debate – since at least the late 1990s and early 2000s, and its salience has only increased in the context of extreme weather events produced by intensifying climate change. Research in political philosophy, however, has so far barely touched on this issue, despite its close connection to and relevance for lively and expansive debates on migration, refugees, territorial rights, state sovereignty, and climate change. This volume aims to set the philosophical agenda for articulating a political ethics of internal displacement, and to highlight the importance of the phenomenon for these wider theoretical issues. Across 12 chapters that explore different aspects of internal displacement, authors working at the forefront of these debates construct a compelling research agenda for the political philosophy of internal displacement.
