There are essays by Johanna Oksala and Philipp Kender, and a special section on Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, with pieces by Orazio Irrera, Federico Testa, Emmanuel Salanskis, Daniele Lorenzini and Frédéric Porcher.
This issue includes a ‘Buffalo dossier’ – an article by me about what the University at Buffalo archives tell us about Foucault’s two visiting posts there in 1970 and 1972, and an article by Leonhard Riep with a detailed discussion of Foucault’s 1972 Buffalo course.
All essays and reviews are available open access.
From the editorial:
Foucault visited the State University of New York at Buffalo twice at the beginning of the 1970s. In 1970, he gave a course on the desire for knowledge in French literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He came back two years later to lead a seminar on the figure of the criminal in the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to give an important lecture series on the “History of Truth,” which was recorded and has just been published in French under the title Histoire de la vérité (ed. H.-P. Fruchaud and O. Irrera, Paris: Vrin, 2025). This dossier offers an invaluable overview of Foucault’s teaching at SUNY Buffalo in those years, with special focus on his lectures on the history of truth.
In “Foucault at Buffalo in 1970 and 1972: The Desire for Knowledge, The Criminal in Literature, and The History of Truth,” Stuart Elden(University of Warwick, UK) provides an invaluable survey of the archival material available at the University at Buffalo concerning Foucault’s visits. In particular, using the personnel files and correspondence with John K. Simon, as well as the audio recordings of the 1972 lectures on the history of truth and parts of the 1970 course on the desire for knowledge, Elden reports on what we know of Foucault’s teaching there and its role in the initial reception of his thought in the United States.
In “‘The History of Truth’: Foucault in Buffalo, 1972,” Leonhard Riep(Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany) offers a reading of Foucault’s 1972 lecture series on the “History of Truth” based on the audio recordings available in the archives at the University at Buffalo. In particular, Riep reconstructs the two main knowledge-power complexes that Foucault analyzes there: the “truth of measure” in relation to the question of justice in the ancient Greek legal system and the “truth of investigation” within the discourse on war and the appeasement of society in medieval law. Riep shows that these lectures provide invaluable insight into the methodological foundations of Foucault’s archaeological approach.
A daring reassessment of the critical method that reshaped the humanities—and an invitation to imagine new ways of doing history. The genealogical method—a mode of historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is in fact contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—has become the dominant paradigm of humanistic inquiry. In The Genealogy of Genealogy, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm turns this influential practice back on itself, tracing its unlikely rise through Nietzsche and Foucault and uncovering its suppressed ties to eugenics and racism. He rethinks the very stakes of critical history and proposes new tools for thinking about historical continuity, change, and difference.
Provocative and timely, The Genealogy of Genealogy offers both a diagnosis and a vision, challenging scholars across the humanities and social sciences to rethink how we write history and whether our most trusted methods are fit for the futures we seek to build.
Léopold Sédar Senghor, Writings on Politics – ed. Yohann C. Ripert, Duke University Press, November 2025
Introduction open access at this link
Senghor: Writings on Politics brings Léopold Sédar Senghor’s most vital essays, speeches, and political writings to English-language readers for the first time. Spanning the colonial and postcolonial years between 1937 and 1971, this volume captures Senghor’s evolution from a pioneering poet and cofounder of Négritude to the president of Senegal as he grappled with the complexities of postcolonial identity, governance, and cultural hybridity. Senghor’s reflections on topics ranging from federalism and decolonization to Francophonie reveal his commitment to weaving African and European cultural threads into a vision of global solidarity in ways that resonate with contemporary debates on race, culture, and politics. Inviting readers to engage with a seminal figure whose legacy continues to inspire new ways of thinking about freedom, independence, and coexistence, this landmark book furthers our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most influential cultural thinkers.
How do we know through atmospheres? How can being affected by an atmosphere give rise to knowledge? What role does somatic, nonverbal knowledge play in how we belong to places? Atmospheric Knowledge takes up these questions through detailed analyses of practices that generate atmospheres and in which knowledge emerges through visceral intermingling with atmospheres. From combined musicological and anthropological perspectives, Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr investigate atmospheres as a compelling alternative to better-known analytics of affect by way of performative and sonic practices across a range of ethnographic settings. With particular focus on oceanic relations and sonic affectedness, Atmospheric Knowledge centers the rich affordances of sonic connections for knowing our environments.
A captivating history of obsessive collectors: from ancient looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents, Freudian psychos, and hoarders.
Collectors are often praised for their taste in art or contributions to science, and considered great public benefactors. But collectors have also been seen as dangerous obsessives who love objects too much. Why? From looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents and Freudian psychos, A Noble Madness is a captivating history of obsessive collectors from ancient times to today.
From Roman emperors lusting after statues to modern-day hoarders, award-winning author James Delbourgo tells the extraordinary story of fanatical collectors throughout history. He explains how the idea first emerged that when we look at someone’s collection, we see a portrait of their soul: complex, intriguing, yet possibly insane. What Delbourgo calls “the Romantic collecting self” has always lurked on the dark side of humanity.
But this dark side has a silver lining. Because obsessive collectors are driven by passion, not profit, they have been countercultural heroes in the modern imagination, defying respectability and taste in the name of truth to self.
A grand portrait gallery of collectors in all their decadent glory, A Noble Madness recounts the saga of the human urge to accumulate, from Caligula to Marie Antoinette, Balzac to Freud, Norman Bates to Andy Warhol. Collectors’ love of objects may be mad, even dangerous. But we want to believe their love’s a noble madness because by expressing that love, they are themselves.
London Group of Historical Geographers seminar, Institute of Historical Research, online, 18 November 2025, 5.30pm. Registration required.
Rahel Jaeggi, Progress and Regression, trans. Robert Savage, Harvard University Press, July 2025
Despite widespread technological innovation, scientific and medical breakthroughs, and strides toward gender and racial equity, few believe that humanity is on the road of progress. Indeed, many are increasingly skeptical of the very notion of progress, seeing it as the stuff of hollow political speeches.
Nevertheless, this impassioned book argues that we are lost without a shared idea of progress. In the tradition of critical theory, Rahel Jaeggi defends a vision of progress that avoids Eurocentric and teleological distortions. Progress here is not an inevitable developmental trend but a kind of compass directing society’s never-ending journey toward emancipation. A nimble practitioner of dialectical reasoning, Jaeggi revitalizes progress by confronting its opposite: regression. Her analysis—sober and thoughtful, but urgent—reckons with the myriad signs of regression today, including growing inequality, ecological destruction, and above all the assault on educational institutions, critical thinking, and reason itself.
The task of imagining a human solidarity capable of transcending difference and promoting universal welfare has seldom been more pressing—or more complex. Progress and Regression is an indispensable resource for those ready to take up the challenge.
The formal end of the Leverhulme major research fellowship for the Indo-European thought project was at the end of September, but I have a no-cost extension until the end of January. This is invaluable, and is effectively to extend the grant for the months I lost in 2023 when I was in hospital and then off work recovering. I am on research leave in 2025-26, and am planning to use the first half of the year to try to complete this project. The second half will be to work on the new edition and translation of Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic.
The main writing task since the summer has been finishing the draft of the chapter on Dumézil’s ‘bilan’ period of consolidation and summary, which he worked on from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. I say a bit more about what books of his this included in the last update. I also discuss his retirement, his visiting posts in the United States at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Chicago and UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his replacements at the Collège de France and the École Pratique des Hautes Études. I then moved to a discussion of his Esquisses de mythologie series, and some of his other late books from the 1980s, including a book on Nostradamus and Socrates, and a republication of parts of Colonel de Polier’s Mythologie des Indous. The plan is this should then lead into a discussion of some of the legacies of Benveniste and Dumézil’s work.
Unitobler, Bern Universität, the Sprachwissenschaft library and the Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek
I was back in Paris for a few days in September, continuing work on Benveniste’s archives at the Bibliothèque nationale. I also made a short trip to Switzerland. Last year I went to Geneva and Fribourg, and this trip was to Bern, via Zurich. In Bern, I went to the Swiss Literary Archives, to look at letters from Georges Dumézil to Georges Redard, and some from Dumézil and Benveniste to Jean Bollack. (Benveniste’s letters to Redard are at the Collège de France.) The Dumézil-Redard correspondence is quite extensive, over thirty years, and helped with some details I was trying to track down. I also went to the Bern University library, which has Benveniste’s personal collection of books in the linguistic collection. Unlike some of the other book collections I’ve looked at, these books have been subsumed into the main library collection, and are on open shelves. There isn’t a list of the books currently available, so it was a bit trial and error through the catalogue and on the shelves to find books which once belonged to him. They have a sticker (or less often, writing) to say “Ex Libris Emile Benveniste”. Not worth a trip on its own, but combined with the Literary Archives it was interesting. I write about one of the dedications I found, from Jean de Menasce, here.
In October, I was pleased to have an invitation to Brown University, to give the 2025 Andrea Rosenthal Memorial Lecture in the Department of Comparative Literature. I gave a talk with the title “Émile Benveniste, the Second World War and the Making of the Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions”, drawing on substantial parts of this book manuscript. It was a very nice event for me, and I’m grateful to Kenneth Haynes and his colleagues for the invitation and hospitality. I combined it with a few days in Cambridge to visit the Jakobson archives at MIT again, and the Gordon and Tina Wasson papers at the Harvard University Herbaria.
The archival work for this project is coming to an end. I am running out of funding and time, and am also getting very close to the limit of days I can be in the Schengen area (another reason to curse ‘Brexit’…). I’ll be back in Paris for a few days, trying to finish up the archival work I can. In early 2026 I will be spending two months at the European University Institute in Florence as a Fernand Braudel fellow, based in the History department. I’m hoping to take a complete draft of this book manuscript with me, and to return with a better one.
Wolff wrote two of his books which he was a prisoner of war in a camp in Austria, and I wrote about some of the other books written by French professors under these conditions, and the informal universities set up in some of the camps. There are a lot of stories to tell, and this might be the focus of some future pieces too.
There are a few other pieces I’m developing for this series, including ones on Huguette Fugier and Clémence Ramnoux, and on Gordon and Tina Wasson [now here], which I expect will be out this year. I’m now confident I will hit the goal of an essay every week through 2025. The series has been fun for me, perhaps especially when writing this book manuscript has been challenging.
Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications. The re-edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna is available open access. 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, and is partly available free to access. My recent articles include “Foucault, Dynastics and Power Relations” in Philosophy, Politics and Critique and “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” in Journal of the History of Ideas (both require subscription, so ask if you’d like a copy); and “Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France” in History of European Ideas (open access). The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
The Swiss-French geographer Claude Raffestin died earlier this year.
Juliet Fall has a tribute to him here, and Sage have made some articles by or about him available open access until the end of 2025.
These articles are mainly from a special section of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space from 2012, put together by Francisco Klauser from a workshop we organised at the University of Durham. That section included pieces by Klauser, Fall, Alexander B. Murphy, Claudio Minca, and a piece commissioned by Raffestin, translated by Samuel Butler.
In addition, an earlier piece by Fall and another piece by Raffestin from other Sage journals are included in this virtual theme issue, also made open access.
Juliet and her Geneva colleagues have a tribute in French here. Not much else of Raffestin’s important work has been translated into English, but I know these other pieces – they require subscription, unfortunately:
Update: more of his work in French is here, much open access. Thanks to Ed Draper at Sage, Kate Derickson at Environment and Planning D: Society and Space for agreeing to do this virtual theme issue and Juliet for the tribute.
I wrote an endorsement of Elaine’s book, and this copy was sent by the publisher. Duke University Press kindly send a copy of Hage’s book on Bourdieu. The others were bought, with the Duby ones second-hand. Foucault’s 1972 course is reviewed by Leonhard Riep in the next issue of Foucault Studies, alongside a piece by me on what else is revealed by the University at Buffalo archives about his two visits there. There is a shorter summary here. I’m working on a short piece about Ramnoux for the Sunday Histories series; an earlier piece looked at one aspect of Bourdieu’s career.
A fascinating and moving history of the British and German war dead buried on enemy soil in the two world wars
Why do societies only remember their own national war dead? Today, the enemy dead might be largely hidden from view, but this wasn’t always the case. During both world wars, Germans and Britons died in their thousands in enemy territory. From Berlin to Bath, London to Leipzig, civilian communities buried the enemy in the closest parish churchyard. Perhaps surprisingly, local people embraced these graves, often caring for them with considerable tenderness.
Tim Grady explores the history of this curious aspect of postwar community. He reveals how, as the two states moved bodies to new military cemeteries, local people protested at the disturbance of the dead, and ties between the bereaved families and those who cared for the graves were severed forever. With the enemy out of sight and mind, the British and Germans concentrated solely on commemorating their own war dead, and their own sacrifices. Today’s insular public memory of the world wars was only made possible by clearing away signs of the enemy—allowing people to tell themselves much simpler narratives of the recent past as a result.
