July has been a steady month of progress on this project. I’d hoped to complete the chapter on Georges Dumézil’s work between 1938 and 1949 well before now, but it continued into this month too. It is another very long chapter – somehow, I am going to have to find ways to condense the treatment.
Earlier this month I had a couple of weeks in Paris, when I worked almost exclusively on the Emile Benveniste manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale. I went through some more boxes of material, going in number sequence for the most part. But the boxes are not organised chronologically or thematically, so it jumps around a lot. There are some indications of contents for some boxes on the BnF website, but lots of material isn’t indicated, and some of what is described is partial or inaccurate. The archivist responsible for this collection is going through the boxes ahead of me and producing a much more comprehensive listing of what’s there. So, I’m trying to look both at the more obviously interesting things in each box, but also take notes to build up a more detailed outline of where things are, with a view to returning to material at a later date. But even a first pass through all this material is going to take me well into the autumn, especially as I’ve been avoiding Paris from the Olympics buildup through August and won’t be back before September.
Box 40 is one of the ones which didn’t have any description online, but it’s an interesting box for many reasons. One of these is that it includes the manuscript of his 1968-69 Collège de France course published in Last Lectures. The manuscript is very organised by Benveniste’s standards, with fifteen subfolders bearing a lecture number and the date delivered. But while it is the main source of the published version, the editors filled in detail from notes taken by auditors (marked in the published version by a different typeface). But there are also parts of Benveniste’s manuscript which are not included. I will have to return to this box, in particular, when I’ve written a discussion of these lectures. Box 41 has an earlier lecture course, again fairly well organised and which accords with the summary published in the Collège de France Annuaire for that year. But the difference between the manuscript of the 1968-69 course and its published version gives some indication of the relation between this manuscript and what he might have said in the class, and how limited it is to rely on just this source alone.
The non-chronological ordering of the archive is one of the challenges of the work I’m doing. In the research and writing at home I’m broadly proceeding chronologically; but in archival work it’s often personal-specific or thematic (all the Lévi-Strauss papers that seem relevant in one go, for example), dependent on archival sequence (Benveniste or Dumézil’s papers, across multiple visits), or geographically (archives in Switzerland). So, I’ll often find something in the archive which I think might be useful when I’ve reached that moment in the story at a later point; or realise only later that something I’ve seen, somewhere, might be more interesting than I realised at the time. This is why I try to take notes that will help me in the future, so I don’t think “I’ve seen that in a box somewhere…” But it’s easier said than done when it’s not always clear what a page or folder in the archive actually is.
Perhaps working through everything in print first, and then through the archives, writing it all up, and then going back to the archives to finish up, before returning to my written text, would be more sensible. But that would require being in the archives for a consolidated period of many months towards the end of the project, which would be difficult logistically and financially – the limited research funds on this fellowship are on a year-by-year basis. So, the work continues in different registers in alternation.
One of Benveniste’s books, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européens, is particularly well represented in its archival traces. There are materials relating to the book in a few boxes I’ve looked at, and in box 73 there are a lot of drafts of chapters of the second volume. These are interesting because there are typed texts which are very close to the published version, and earlier typed texts with a lot of corrections, rewriting on the typed page, and supplemental handwritten pages. I don’t think that Benveniste typed his own manuscripts, though I don’t know that for sure. For some of the chapters there are summaries of the content in a different hand: the book says the summaries are by Jean Lallot, so it’s presumably him. In other words, there is an incomplete but interesting record of the development of the book. It is incomplete in that the written version (or versions) which preceded the first typescript seems to be missing, nor are there the proofs which presumably had amendments for the relatively few changes between the last typed version and the published text. Not all chapters are in the files I’ve looked at so far.
While in Paris I had a couple of part-days at the Mitterand site of the BnF, working on some published texts which are not easy to find in the UK, and I made a short trip to the Archives nationales to look again at the text of a lecture by Benveniste which I don’t think is in his own archives.
Outside of Paris, another Swiss archive digitised a few things they had, which filled in a little more detail in the Benveniste story. It’s great that some archives will do this, sometimes with a charge, and sometimes without. Uppsala University, for example, was willing to scan the correspondence between Benveniste and Dumézil with Stig Wikander and H.S. Nyberg. But other archives say it isn’t possible – either logistically for them to do, or because of copyright reasons. There is one archive I’d need to visit in Copenhagen, for example, but it’s for a relatively limited task, and I have the worry that if I go now I might discover something else to do there later. So, I’m deferring that visit, though I hope to get there at some point. But from the visit to Geneva and Fribourg, and the archives which have digitised material, I have now built up a detailed and I think compelling account of Benveniste’s experiences in the Second World War. I know, for example, the military units he was in, where he was deployed and captured, something of his movements after his escape, how and where he crossed into Switzerland, and the internment camps he was in there before being released to work in the library in Fribourg. The broad contours of the story told by Georges Redard and others are correct, but there is a lot of new detail I’m able to add. (As I mentioned in the previous update Juliet Fall has been invaluable on some of the Swiss geography.)
In another post, I said that my article “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” was recently published in the Journal of the History of Ideas. The article is behind a paywall, but email me if you are interested but don’t have institutional access to a copy. As I said in that earlier post, I see this piece as the third of an informal trilogy of articles which bridge the Foucault and Canguilhem books and this new project.
It doesn’t directly relate to this new project, but over the years I’ve been working on Foucault I’ve done quite a lot of comparisons between variant forms of texts, which have informed my writing, and many of which I’ve shared here on Progressive Geographies. I’ve now made a list with an attempt at a comprehensive survey of those texts, with links to comparisons I’ve done or where they can be found elsewhere. There are still texts where comparison is yet to be done. For this project, I’ve done a few textual analyses of Dumézil (linked here) and on Saussure’s work on German legends. I hope these are helpful – all work in progress, so comments or corrections welcome.
The end of July 2024 is the half-way stage of this three-year project – I’m adding four months to the original schedule to make up for the time I lost due to illness last year, and now have a notional end date of January 2026. I don’t feel half-way done, by a long way, though I have written a lot of material – far more than half of a possible book.
Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and published or forthcoming publications. The re-edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna is now scheduled for December 2024. There is a lot more about the earlier Foucault work here. The final volume of the series is The Archaeology of Foucault and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society I co-edited on “Foucault before the Collège de France” has some important contributions on the earlier parts of Foucault’s career.
