It all began with plans for a birthday party. Gerhard Stroomann, chief physician and charismatic leader of the posh spa resort and sanitarium Bühlerhöhe (imagine Thomas Mann’s character Hofrat Behrens, transplanted to a postwar “magic mountain” in the Black Forest) would be turning sixty-five in 1952, and he wanted to celebrate it with a weekend of events devoted to his beloved poet Georg Trakl. Even more, he wanted to hear the philosopher Martin Heidegger speak about the poet. Heidegger had already given a few lectures at the spa while he was still prohibited from teaching at the university, including one on language under the guise of a commentary on Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening.” Although irritated by the overeager, elite milieu of the luxury retreat—“it was,” as one eyewitness reported about the event, “very highbrow, […] teeming with counts and princesses, a bit snobbish”—Heidegger accepted Stroomann’s invitation.
Julia Kristeva has been both attracted and repelled by Dostoyevsky since her youth. In this extraordinary book, by turns poetic and intensely personal, she brings her unique critical sensibility to bear on the tormented and visionary Russian author.
Kristeva ranges widely across Dostoyevsky’s novels and his journalism, plunging deep into the great works—and many of the smaller ones—to investigate her fascination with the Russian author. What emerges is a luminous vision of the writer’s achievements, seen in a wholly new way through Kristeva’s distinctive perspective on language. With her keen psychoanalytical eye, she offers brilliant insights into the passionate heroines of the great novels. Focusing on Dostoyevsky’s polyphonic writing, Kristeva also demonstrates the importance of Orthodox Christianity throughout his body of work, analyzing the complex ways his carnivalesque theology informs his fiction and commentary.
An original and profound interpretation of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest writers, this book’s insights are also relevant to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—up to our unsettled present, to which Kristeva’s humane reading of the suffering Russian author brings understanding and even solace.
Johan Östling and David Larsson Heidenblad, The History of Knowledge – trans. Lena Olsson, Cambridge University Press, January 2024 (print and open access)
Despite the date, the e-book is available now.
This Element provides a pedagogical overview of the history of knowledge, including its main currents, distinguishing ideas, and key concepts. However, it is not primarily a state-of-the-art overview but rather an argumentative contribution that seeks to push the field in a certain direction – towards studying knowledge in society and knowledge in people’s lives. Hence, the history of knowledge envisioned by the authors is not a rebranding of the history of science and intellectual history, but rather a reinvigoration of social and cultural history. This implies that many different forms of knowledge should be objects of study. By drawing on ongoing research from all across the world dealing with different time periods and problems, the authors demonstrate that the history of knowledge can enrich our understanding of past societies. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This is a continual work in progress, and updates and corrections should be sent to Daniele for inclusion in future versions (details in above link). Many thanks to Daniele for taking on this work, and Richard for creating this invaluable resource and updating it for 25 years.
Foucault: Art, Histories, and Visuality in the 21st Century OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design) University, Toronto/Tkaronto, Canada, May 29-30, 2024
The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1926–84) work has had a major effect on scholars of art and visuality since Les Mots et les choses (1966) appeared in English in 1970 as The Order of Things. His radical ideas galvanized artists and art writers into many different directions: to insert ruptures and incoherence into history; to reimagine the subject, subjectivity, and identity; to politicize the realms of vision, visuality, and visibility; to formulate critical approaches to technology and media; and to scrutinize the inner workings of art institutions, including museums, schools, and archives. The versatility of Foucault’s thought greatly contributed to major shifts across disciplines, including the interventions of the “new art history” in the 1970s, multiculturalism and identity politics in the 1980s, visual and cultural studies in the 1990s, the questions of contemporaneity and globalization in this century. Owing to the posthumous publications of his lectures and the papers deposited at archives internationally, Foucault’s oeuvre continues to shape current discussions on methodological, political, and ethical assumptions regarding visualities and art histories forty years after his death.
Carolyn Dever, How to Lose a Library at Public Books – the best thing I’ve read on the ongoing and very serious British Library problems (via @nescio13 on X/Twitter)
What’s business as usual at the Victoria and Albert Museum is far from the case fewer than four miles away, at the United Kingdom’s national public repository, the British Library. At the British Library, hopeful would-be readers of the library’s prodigious catalogue of unique, rare, and contemporary materials are out of luck.
On Halloween, 2023, the British Library suffered a massive cyberattack, which rendered its web presence nonexistent, its collections access disabled, and even its wifi fried. Moreover, the cyberattack also swept the personal data of the British Library’s humans—its users, but, far more extensively, its staff—into the hands of an outside party. During the final week of November, images of the stolen data were presented for auction on the dark web, for sale to whoever’s willing to pay 20 bitcoin, or about £600,000. By making the library’s digital infrastructure into a commodity (in an open, albeit dark, market), a “ransomware gang” calling itself Rhysida hopes to pressure the British Library to pay up first.
Update 16 Dec 11am: after weeks of limited information, the British Library blog has been updated with a much more detailed statement from the chief executive. A phased return of some more services is due in the New Year.
St Cross Church, Holywell – historic collections centre of Balliol College, University of Oxford
Given how connected he was, I suppose it was only a matter of time before my Indo-European research project led me in the direction of T.S. Eliot. It came in the lead I was following with Jean de Menasce, who was instrumental in getting Émile Benveniste out of France in the second world war.
De Menasce was from a Jewish family, born in Egypt, who later converted and became a Catholic priest. He was a student of Benveniste’s in the 1930s, and became a major scholar of Zoroastrianism. De Menasce and Graham Greene were students together at Balliol College in Oxford in the early 1920s, and de Menasce got to know Eliot around that time. Eliot had only been at Oxford for a year, and left before de Menasce was there, but it seems it was on his return visits he got to know de Menasce. De Menasce translated Eliot into French, as he also did Bertrand Russell around the same time. Jean-Michel Roessli has written about Eliot and de Menasce (academia.edu).
It seems de Menasce’s archive used to be at the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir (which Foucault used at the end of his life, and which used to have the papers of the Centre Michel Foucault) but is now at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations (BULAC). There are a few letters from Benveniste and Dumézil there, so it’s on a list of places to visit at some point. [Update: there are papers by de Menasce at both BULAC and Saulchoir. I say a little about my visit to Saulchoir here.]
But then I found that de Menasce had donated some material relating to Eliot to Balliol College. And since I wanted to go to Oxford to see a couple of books at the Bodleian, this was an easy side-trip. The Balliol archive is not at the main college library, but at St Cross Church, Holywell, a short walk away. Going there was an interesting way to spend an afternoon, though cold, as the reading room is in the nave of the church. De Menasce’s donation includes the books Eliot dedicated to him, some of the translations he made, both in published form and proofs, a little correspondence and related materials. (The list of material is here.)
Update 24 May 2024: In the Benveniste archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, there are his translations of Eliot’s Four Quartets. Chloé Laplantine has dated these to 1947. As her abstract notes, there is no context to the translations in the file.
In a series of televised interviews broadcast in spring 2022, Bruno Latour explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic part of modern life. We have now come to realize that all life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical zone’. Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species, we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our connection to living beings, and face head-on the confrontation between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s resources and the ecologists.
This poignant reflection on the greatest challenge of our time was also an opportunity for Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the Anthropocene.
