Update: Last year Latour generously engaged with one of my papers on terrain in a forum for Dialogues in Human Geography. Two years before we both contributed pieces to the excellent A Moving Borderproject. I only heard him speak once, and we didn’t meet in person, though the idea of a dialogue had been proposed around the border project.
There is a good thread on Latour from Tim Howles here
1. It is with great sadness that we learn the news of Bruno Latour’s passing today. He was an intellectual giant, a friend, & someone whose work inspired me greatly. A thread for those who want to know more about this extraordinary life. pic.twitter.com/h2Bi6XbL35
Use afternoon (and frequently evening) for email, meetings, admin, editing, and reading.
Facebook, Twitter, Feedly, etc. are not to be used on main computer; you have an iPad (kept in a different room) for that.
Go to the British Library regularly, even if you don’t need to consult things. The Rare Books room is a place you’ve done a lot of good work before. Renew ticket to the Warburg Institute for the same reason.
Concentrate on the primary literature; the secondary literature can come later.
Try to only agree to do talks that move the writing forward.
You really can’t take on any other writing or editing projects.
Going to see Shakespeare in the theatre counts as research (for a possible future project).
Go to Paris regularly.
Long bike rides help with coming up with ideas.
Analogue Sunday – or at least, no work.
I’ve begun this week mainly by trying to get my existing notes on Georges Dumézil into some sort of order.
In the last part of the summer I had a couple of weeks away in Wales – one in mid-Wales, near Builth Wells; the other in Penrhyndeudraeth in Snowdonia. I’ve been to the first place a few times, but the second was new to me. Both of these were writing and cycling breaks – basically if I wasn’t on the bike I was trying to write, or reading. I did a lot of cycling, the first week was entirely dry, which is highly unusual for Wales, and the second week I was dodging most of the rain and high winds. I did most of the famous climbs around Snowdonia I hadn’t done before (Crimea Pass, Llanberis Pass, Electric Mountain, Prenteg, Migneint Pass, Drys-Y-Cowd, etc.), including what is probably a new favourite climb in Wales, Stwlan dam. Not only is it as beautiful as many of the other rides, it also has some great hairpins and the road is closed to traffic. I also cycled both ways along the Dyfi forest road, between Aberangell and Aberliefenni, which was probably the toughest ride of the lot.
Stwlan dam
On these trips I finished the draft of a paper – in the end, the biggest challenge was getting it below the submission word limit. I also began work on another paper on Foucault’s Penal Theories and Institutions. Although I discuss this in Foucault: The Birth of Power, I’d made a pre-pandemic commitment to write something new on it. I wasn’t sure what else I had to say, but I think I’ve found a different way to approach it. With a lot of things I’ve done this summer I’m now waiting on others – reviewers, editors, co-authors… It would have been nice to have moved a few more things from the in progress/under review part of the cv to the forthcoming one. But there isn’t much I can do until some of these come back.
Much of the summer then was taken up with other, albeit often related, work, and quite a lot of reading. But now I’m fully committed to the Indo-European thought project.
I have a trip to Paris next week, when I’ll keep working through things in the Dumézil archive at the Collège de France, and do some work with printed sources at the Mitterand site of the BnF.
Previous updates on this project can be found here; and there is a lot more about the Foucault work here. Details of the reedition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna can be found here.
Putting police power into the centre of the picture of capitalism
The ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power.
Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics…
A classic text that develops one prong of Dumézil’s tripartite hypothesis of Indo-European tribes: the sacred sovereign.
Georges Dumézil’s fascination with the myths and histories of India, Rome, Scandinavia, and the Celts yielded an idea that became his most influential scholarly legacy: the tripartite hypothesis, which divides Indo-European societal functions into three classes: the sacred sovereign, the warrior, and the producer. Mitra-Varuna, originally published in 1940, concentrates on the first function, that of sovereignty. Dumézil identifies two types of rulers, the first judicial and worldly, the second divine and supernatural. These figures, both priestly, are oppositional but complementary. The title nods to these roles, referring to the gods Mitra, a rational mediator, and Varuna, an awesome religious figure.
Stuart Elden’s critical edition, based on the 1988 English translation by Derek Coltman, identifies variations between the first and second French editions and completes—and in places corrects—Dumézil’s references. The editor’s detailed introduction situates Mitra-Varuna within Dumézil’s career, outlines how his treatment of its themes developed over time, and relates the book to the political controversy around his ideas. Two new appendices contain passages that did not appear in the second French edition.
I’ve discussed something of the editing work here, and this is the first output of my new research project on Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France. This project is funded by a Leverhulme major research fellowship, to run for three years from 1 October 2022. I also have a chapter on Foucault’s use of Dumézil’s ideas on sovereignty forthcoming in the Handbook on Governmentality.
University of Minnesota Press sent Álvaro and Parastou’s books; the Rowman ones were recompense for review work, and Ulrich generously sent a copy of his book.
Après Jeunesse (Gallimard) paru en 2021, l’historien Pierre Nora présente le second volet de ses Mémoires : Une étrange obstination (Gallimard). En revenant sur son parcours, mêlant portraits, anecdotes savoureuses et genèse de ses travaux d’historien, il évoque avec passion ses années Gallimard et son compagnonnage avec différentes figures marquantes, parmi lesquelles Michel Foucault, Georges Dumézil, ou encore Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Un entretien modéré par Jean Birnbaum, directeur du Monde des Livres. Il est l’auteur de nombreux essais dont récemment La Religion des faibles (2018, Seuil) et Le Courage de la nuance (2021, Seuil) qui ont rencontré un vif succès.
Update: The Gallimard page for Mémoires and Jeunesse is now in the cheaper Folio series.
Looks interesting, but that price is terrible, especially given the topic…
Recent years have seen a gathering interest in the importance of real estate development to the growth and development of cities. This has included theoretical work on such topics as land rent and property rights as well as empirical studies on property investments, assetization, securitization, and the effects of changing property values on economic growth and the global status of cities. In the field of urban political economy, attention has turned particularly to the financialization of land and the built environment and to the globalization of property ownership, real estate development, and architectural design. This edited volume brings together a collection of original investigations of the current thinking on three broad themes: the assetization of land and buildings, the relationship of land rent to valuation and speculation in the markets for private and public properties, and the different ways in which land functions as a social relation. In order to ground the discussion, each chapter combines a theoretical perspective with empirical evidence. And, to convey a sense of the global nature of these phenomena, the book includes cases from Finland, India, Spain, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Italy, China, and the United States.
Although its prime goal is to solidify and extend the political economy of land, the book is also a celebration of the Finnish scholar Anne Haila who was a major contributor to this literature and, specifically, to the work of the book’s authors. Prior to her sudden death in 2019, she was a key figure in the discussions that are at the core of the political economy of land: the book, in part, is a public acknowledgement of her contributions.
Foucault’s historical method is often understood to have had two overlapping phases or alternating modalities: an archaeological one and a genealogical one. His accounts of historical “biopower,” of scholarly “ascesis” and of “history of the present” have all stimulated new historical forms of inquiry in several disciplines in the twenty-first century.
We propose to delve beneath the widespread influence of Foucault in historical inquiry to ask what it means to engage with history in a Foucauldian manner.
For example, the notion of a genealogical method is now in widespread use among historians. While Nietzsche often serves in that regard as a philosophical predecessor, that does not in itself provide a circumstantiated account…
In his final book, renowned philosopher Pierre Hadot explores Goethe’s relationship with spiritual exercises—transformative acts of intellect, imagination, or will. Goethe sought both an intense experience of a single moment as well as a kind of cosmic consciousness through practices that alternatively concentrated on or distanced himself from his present life. These practices, in Hadot’s reading of the poem “Urworte,” shaped Goethe’s audacious hope against mortality’s Momento mori (don’t forget to die)—the demonic, chance, love, and necessity that condition human life. Ultimately, Hadot reveals how Goethe cultivated a deep love for life around a new commandment: don’t forget to live.
The British Marxist Historians remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influential contemporary academic traditions in history and social theory. In this classic text, Kaye looks at Maurice Dobb and the debate on the transition to capitalism; Rodney Hilton on feudalism and the English peasantry; Christopher Hill on the English Revolution; Eric Hobsbawm on workers, peasants and world history; and E.P. Thompson on the making of the English working class. Kaye compares their perspective on history with other approaches, such as that of the French Annales school, and concludes with a discussion of the British Marxist historians’ contribution to the formation of a democratic historical consciousness. The British Marxist Historians is an indispensable book for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the late twentieth century.
