Parts of Georges Bataille’s library for sale (and a fascinating downloadable catalogue and inventaire)

Posted on November 5, 2022 by stuartelden

Parts of Georges Bataille’s library are for sale – story here. As you’d expect, things are rather expensive…

A catalogue is available to buy – La bibliothèque de Georges Bataille – and to download as pdf here.

petit in-4, broché, couverture illustrée à rabats, non paginé (248 p.), nombreuses reproductions en couleur, index. Catalogue illustré comprenant une sélection chronologique de plus de 500 titres, la plupart dédicacés et emblématiques du parcours intellectuel de l’écrivain.

Update: an alternative link to the catalogue is here; and to the full inventaire here.

While this isn’t the whole of his library, the catalogue is interesting for telling us at least some of the books he owned. For example, it’s nice to know he did indeed have a copy of Henri Lefebvre’s book Nietzsche from 1939 – which, like his own work On Nietzsche was an attempt to rescue him from the Nazi appropriation. And I was pleasantly surprised to see he had a copy of Foucault’s Maladie mentale et psychologie, which appeared the year he died (1962).

Lots of stuff by Blanchot, Camus, Klossowski, Lacan (who married Bataille’s ex-wife), Nietzsche, Sartre (who wrote a really critical review of him)… Surprised to see only one thing by Walter Benjamin, who entrusted some of his papers to Bataille, who was among things in his life a numismatist at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The only trace of Georges Dumézil, who he discusses in a few places, is that Bataille had a copy of Mircea Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions, for which Dumezil wrote the preface. There are some other things by Eliade, some dedicated to Bataille. I’ve only skimmed the catalogue, but it is well worth a look, and will become of lasting value, as this collection is sadly dispersed through its sale.

Update: there are a few early articles by Kostas Axelos, with dedications to Bataille. Axelos is, I think, the only person I’ve met who had met Bataille. “He was always so immaculately dressed. But the things he wrote!”

Update 2: A couple of years ago, during the first UK covid lockdown, I put together an attempt at a comprehensive list of English translations of works in George Bataille’s Oeuvres complètes and other French collections of his work.

Update 3: there is a wikipedia page with all the people mentioned in the catalogue and a link to their wikipedia pages – a useful resource. Thanks to David Palfrey for this.

Posted in Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Georges Dumézil, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Mircea Eliade, Pierre Klossowski | 3 Comments

Gérard Deledalle and Denis Huisman (eds), Les philosophes français d’aujourd’hui par eux-mêmes: autobiographie de la philosophie française contemporaine, 1963 (table of contents)

Posted on November 4, 2022 by stuartelden

Given the interest in the collection Gérard Deledalle and Denis Huisman (eds), Les philosophes français d’aujourd’hui par eux-mêmes: autobiographie de la philosophie française contemporaine, 1963, which I mentioned in the previous post, from which the Lefebvre piece at the Verso blog was taken, here’s the cover and table of contents. It’s not an easy book to find.

Despite the title, not all the pieces are written by the philosophers themselves – the piece on Sartre is by M. [Marc?] Beigbeder and the one on Merleau-Ponty is by Alphonse de Waelhens.

Clicking on each image will bring up a bigger file.

Posted in Emmanuel Levinas, Henri Lefebvre, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty | 2 Comments

“I am not a good Communist” – Henri Lefebvre’s Autobiography from 1957, translated by David Fernbach at the Verso blog

Posted on November 4, 2022 by stuartelden

“I am not a good Communist” – Henri Lefebvre’s Autobiography from 1957, translated by David Fernbach at the Verso blog

Thanks to Adam David Morton for the alert to this. The original was in a collection of autobiographical sketches by French philosophers – Gérard Deledalle and Denis Huisman (eds), Les philosophes français d’aujourd’hui par eux-mêmes: autobiographie de la philosophie française contemporaine, published with some delay in 1963. The pieces were written between 1956 and 1959, and some authors were dead by the time the book appeared. It is not the easiest book to find, but it’s an good collection – other pieces in the book include ones on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and by Roger Callois, Levinas and Jean Wahl [misspelt as Jean Whal]. Interestingly, it gives Lefebvre’s date of birth as 1905 – usually given as 1901, but I’ve seen 1895 too. Very good to have Lefebvre’s piece available in English.

[Update: following some interest, the table of contents of the French collection is here]

Originally published in: Richard [Gérard] Deledalle and Denis Huisman (eds), Les philosophes français d’aujourd’hui par eux-mêmes: autobiographie de la philosophie française contemporaine, CDU (Paris), 1963

A collection of philosophical autobiographies? A set of ‘intellectual’ itineraries? The very indiscretion of the project piqued my interest, and I await its results with curiosity. And yet, when I try to write my own contribution, I struggle to find the right style. I reflect. I sense that this reflection will produce something other than an autobiography. An essay, or a kind of essay. Why not?

I’m offered twelve pages. I’d need eight hundred if not fifteen hundred. I would have to tell a good number of anecdotes, a few love stories (painful and happy, dramatic, and burlesque) and a dozen political tales. As far as I am concerned, philosophical thought cannot be detached from a fairly dense and hellishly complicated web of events. I believe I’ve been involved in most of the great ideological and political struggles of our time: the formation and dissolution of surrealism, the formation and fragmentation of existentialism, the rehabilitation of Hegel, discussions on the essence of Marxist philosophy and the fate of philosophy – liquidation of bourgeois nationalism and formal individualism – today the critique and balance sheet of what is globally called ‘Stalinism’. Now, for me, as a thinking individual, ideas are bound up with men, women, intrigues, loves. One day, if the great historic criminals such as Beria leave us time, I shall say everything: what I have seen, what I have understood, what I have not understood, what I have accepted and why, and what I could not accept.

Posted in Henri Lefebvre | 1 Comment

Foucault’s seminars at the Collège de France – a list of their pre-announced titles

Posted on November 3, 2022 by stuartelden

All of Foucault’s lecture courses at the Collège de France have been published and translated into English. Thirteen courses were delivered over a fourteen-year period from 1970-84 – Foucault took 1976-77 as a sabbatical year.

A detailed page about his parallel seminars with all the details, references and other information is here.

Much less is known about his seminars. Until 1981, Foucault ran a seminar class in parallel to the lectures. It was usually held on Monday afternoons or early evening. From 1981-82 he opted to increase the number of lecture hours instead, which is why the courses from The Hermeneutic of the Subject onwards have first and second hours for each week. In the course summaries which Foucault wrote for the Annuaire du Collège de France each year he reported both on the lecture course and, usually, on what had been done in the seminar. These summaries were available as pdfs on the Collège de France site but they seem to have been removed (several were mislabelled when they were available). They were collected in Résumé des cours in 1989, included in chronological order in Dits et écrits in 1994, and translated in the first volume of Essential Works in 1997. They were also included in each of the published courses.

But the Annuaire does not just report on what had happened in the current academic year, but also lists the courses to be delivered in the next. With his lectures, Foucault usually stuck to the announced topic, but occasionally not – ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’ in particular doesn’t reflect the topic very well, though Foucault kept the original title even if the material changed. Some of the course summaries did not provide the course title, but the editors took the ones pre-announced.

As far as I know, the seminar titles which were announced have not been collected, and it took a little work with the Annuaire to find them, so I’ve put this list together in the hope someone else might find it useful. 

Foucault’s Seminars at the Collège de France [pre-announced titles]

1970-71: Le fonctionnement du système pénal en France à partir du XIXe siècle

1971-72: Psychiatrie et pénalité au XIXe siècle

1972-73: Pierre Rivière et ses œuvres

1973-74: Explication de textes médicaux et juridiques du XIXe siècle

1974-75: L’expertise médico-légale en matière psychiatrique

1975-76: L’Utilisation des techniques psychiatriques en matière pénale

1976-77: no seminar [sabbatical year]

1977-78: La médicalisation en France depuis le XIXe siècle

1978-79: Problèmes de méthode en histoire des idées

1979-80: Libéralisme et Étatisme à la fin du XIXe siècle

1980-81: Problèmes du libéralisme au XIXe siècle

1981-82: no seminar

1982-83: no seminar

1983-84: no seminar

With regards to the seminars this is interesting for a few reasons – mainly that Foucault usually had a clear idea of what he intended, but that his reports suggest he didn’t always follow that exactly. In English, the I, Pierre Rivière book and The Foucault Effect give some indications of what was done. Foucault of course would publish on the ‘dangerous individual’, and some of the early seminars provide material he discussed in his lectures. In French, several of the people who presented their work went on to publish it.

[Some of these seminars led to collaborative publications, which I’ve listed here.]

I discuss some of this in my books Foucault: The Birth of Power and Foucault’s Last Decade, but I think a lot more could be done to uncover what actually took place in these seminars.

Perhaps the most interesting thing announced, but not ultimately fulfilled, was the 1978-79 seminar on ‘Problèmes de méthode en histoire des idées’.

And it’s striking to me, looking at the list, how much of this was focused on the 19th century.

The full list, with references, reports of what he says they actually discussed, and a few comments is here.

There are a lot more resources on this site relating to Foucault – bibliographies, audio and video files, some textual comparisons, some short translations, etc.

Posted in Foucault's Last Decade, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Michel Foucault | 2 Comments

Daniel Bertrand Monk and Michael Sorkin (eds.), Between Catastrophe and Revolution: Essays in Honor of Mike Davis – OR Books, 2021

Posted on November 2, 2022 by stuartelden

Daniel Bertrand Monk and Michael Sorkin (eds.), Between Catastrophe and Revolution: Essays in Honor of Mike Davis – OR Books, 2021

It is all worse than we think. It is even worse than Mike Davis, for whom “every day is judgment day” (The Nation), could have imagined. The contributions to this volume are explorations of what Davis—in typical wry fashion—once referred to as the field of “disaster studies.” Collectively, they show how our “disaster imaginary” has been rendered inadequate by the existing order’s ability to feed off and coopt our resistance to it.

Contemporary mass protests are now subsumed as instances of an established, profitable politics of rage. Geopolitical conflict poses not as a threat to hegemonic power but rather serves the interests of a global market which capitalizes on lucrative, permanent war. Climate change itself, if it was ever thought to be a universalizing phenomenon, is now treated as an extensive market opportunity by global risk insurance conglomerates and predatory lenders who bet against any rescue of the planet.

Such catastrophic developments resist the language we use to describe and deconstruct them. The contributions to this volume seek to reimagine our understanding of disaster, and, following the example of Davis himself, to refuse outdated models of political transcendence as vigorously as they reject narratives of resignation.

Contributors: Mauro Caraccioli, Bruno Carvalho, Charmaine Chua, William Connolly, Mustafa Dikeç, Jairus Victor Grove, Waleed Hazbun, Andrew Herscher, China Miéville, Don Mitchell, Jacob Mundy, Ana Muñiz, Christian Parenti, Andrew Ross, Rob Wallace, Kenichi Okamoto, Alex Liebman, and Michael Sorkin.

“Some of the essays in this volume patiently argue; some sweep forward in righteous fury. All borrow Mike Davis’s grammar of catastrophe to anticipate a revolutionary moment when, at last, humanity pulls the handbrake. Whether they eulogise places and peoples laid waste by violence and war, or report on heating oceans and air and land, these essays are electrifying and urgently necessary.” —Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade

“Over the course of the decades, Mike Davis has mobilized his cool intelligence, breathtaking scholarly creativity, intellectual fearlessness and radical political imagination to illuminate the spatial violence and ecological madness of modern capitalism, as well as ongoing struggles for alternative forms of collective life. In this remarkable volume, several generations of radical thinkers engage with and take inspiration from Davis’s ideas. In so doing, they not only celebrate Davis’s wide-ranging insights, but illustrate their urgent importance for contemporary scholarship on the catastrophes and revolutions of our time.” —Neil Brenner, author of New Urban Spaces

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Alexander Vasudevan, The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting – Verso, new edition, January 2023

Posted on November 2, 2022 by stuartelden

Alexander Vasudevan, The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting – Verso, new edition, January 2023

The Autonomous City is the first popular history of squatting as practised in Europe and North America. Alex Vasudevan retraces the struggle for housing in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Detroit, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milan, New York, and Vancouver. He looks at the organisation of alternative forms of housing—from Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiana to the squats of the Lower East Side—as well as the official response, including the recent criminalisation of squatting, the brutal eviction of squatters and their widespread vilification.

Pictured as a way to reimagine and reclaim the city, squatting offers an alternative to housing insecurity, oppressive property speculation and the negative effects of urban regeneration. We must, more than ever, reanimate and remake the urban environment as a site of radical social transformation.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

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

Posted on October 31, 2022 by stuartelden

Towards the end of his career, Georges Dumézil began to produce some works summarising the results of his decades of research. The most important was the Mythe et épopée series published by Gallimard in three volumes in 1968, 1971 and 1973. 

  1. L’Idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuples indo-européens
  2. Types épiques indo-européens : un héros, un sorcier, un roi 
  3. Histoires romaines

Each volume was revised in new editions in Dumézil’s lifetime, and they are still in print as separate volumes. There were plans for a fourth volume, but this was abandoned. In 1995 the three volumes were reprinted as a single volume in the Quarto series, a mammoth book which has both the original pagination of each volume and a running pagination for the volume as a whole – 1463 pages! 

For reasons that in retrospect don’t make a lot of sense, Mythe et épopée became, in Jaan Puhvel’s words, “a kind of quarry, subject to piecemeal extractions into the English language” (“Editor’s Preface, The Stakes of the Warrior, vii). This means the series has been incompletely translated. A page on this site tries to show what is, and what isn’t, available.

In brief, none of the first volume has been translated, although there was a plan for at least the first part; almost all of the second volume is translated, but in three English books (pictured), and quite a lot of the third volume is translated in Camillus: A Study of Indo-European Religion as Roman History (California, 1980).

The Stakes of the Warrior includes Appendix I, which provides some excerpts from Colonel Antoine Louis Polier, Mythologie des Indous (2 vols, 1809). One of Dumézil’s last books was Le Mahabarat et le Bhagavat de Colonel de Polier (Gallimard, 1986) in which he wrote a preface to introduce some chapters from Polier’s Mythologie. At the end of the 1986 edition of Mythe et Épopée II he recognises that the fragments of the appendix are there put back in their place.

With the exception of The Destiny of a King, all the above-mentioned English translations are out of print. 

The page is part of the research for a new project on Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France. For some preliminary textual comparison of Dumézil’s major work on the warrior function, Heur et malheur du Guerrier, part-translated as The Destiny of the Warrior, see here.

Posted in Georges Dumézil, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France | Leave a comment

Books received – Leroi-Gourhan, Robertson, Allmer, Thompson, Gadoffre, Braudel, Gamsby

Posted on October 31, 2022 by stuartelden

A few second-hand books, along with Ritchie Robertson’s Friedrich Nietzsche, Patricia Allmer, René Magritte and Patrick Gamsby, Henri Lefebvre, Boredom, and Everyday Life, in recompense for review work.

Posted in E. P. Thompson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Lefebvre | Leave a comment

Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, Expanded Edition – HAU Books, August 2021 [now listed as February 2023]

Posted on October 31, 2022 by stuartelden

It is now listed as February 2023 – https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/P/bo101239368.html

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, Expanded Edition – HAU Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press, August 2021 [now listed as February 2023]

First published fifty years ago, Émile Benveniste’s two-volumeProblèmes de linguistique générale revolutionized the study of linguistics and remain among the most influential texts in the field. This expanded edition of the first volume presents the original English translation by Mary ElizabethMeek, produced in close collaboration with Benveniste himself, along with his hitherto untranslated articles on play, translation, singular and plural forms, and Indigenous North American languages. These works are contextualized by an introduction by editor Jordan K. Skinner and a preface by Roland Barthes.

This new edition will delight linguists and philosophers already familiar with Benveniste and introduce his work to a new generation of students. Benveniste studies are going through an enthusiastic revival in Europe; after reading this book, readers elsewhere will understand…

View original post 85 more words

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Daniel Hartley, Marxism Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide

Posted on October 29, 2022 by stuartelden

Daniel Hartley, Marxism Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide

English at historicalmaterialism.org; French at Revue Période

Marxist literary criticism investigates literature’s role in the class struggle. The best general introductions in English remain Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2002 [1976]) and, a more difficult but foundational book, Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form (Princeton UP, 1971). The best anthology in English remains Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell, 1996). The bibliographic essay that follows does not aim to be exhaustive; because it is quite long, I have indicated what I take to be the major texts of the tradition with a double asterisk and bold font: **.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment