Offers an original analysis of the pivotal relationship between Althusser and Spinoza
Reappraises in a thematic and chronological way the interactions of both philosophies
Presents the reader with a new perspective on Spinoza as a materialist philosopher and on materialism itself
Comprehensively sets out Althusser’s contribution to the contemporary philosophical debate on materialism, aleatory materialism and transindividuality
Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop argues that Spinoza’s influence fundamentally shaped Althusser’s philosophical project, providing key concepts and methods that Althusser used to radically rethink Marxism. The book traces five key ‘detours and returns’ between Althusser and Spinoza, showing how Spinoza’s anti-humanism, theory of reading, immanent causality, politics of the conjuncture, and rejection of determinism were mobilised at critical junctures in Althusser’s development. In the process, Estop uncovers a new ‘Althusserian Spinoza’, a thinker of practice and politics whose revolutionary potential remains to be explored.
Bringing together published works, correspondences, and unpublished writings, this groundbreaking study sheds new light on Althusser’s theoretical trajectory and reveals the hidden Spinozist foundations of one of the 20th century’s most important Marxist thinkers.
Explores the intricate theme of constituent power, a pivotal yet often elusive concept in political philosophy
Provides detailed examinations of La Boétie, Bodin, Lipsius, Campanella, Suárez, and Hobbes, offering nuanced insights into their unique contributions to the theory of constituent power
Places each philosopher’s ideas within the broader socio-political and intellectual contexts of the 16th and 17th centuries, enhancing understanding of how their thoughts on constituent power responded to and shaped their environments
Lays a comprehensive historical and philosophical groundwork that equips readers to bridge early modern theories of constituent power with contemporary political and constitutional debates
Revisits the works of well-studied philosophers to offer new perspectives and critical insights that challenge established interpretations and highlight underexplored aspects of their political thought
This book offers an in-depth examination of constituent power through the writings of six major philosophers from the 16th and 17th centuries, highlighting how their ideas have shaped the foundation and transformation of political philosophy.
Filippo Del Lucchese delves into how La Boétie, Bodin, Lipsius, Campanella, Suárez and Hobbes conceptualized and influenced the evolution of this fundamental political idea. By examining their writings, he illuminates the diverse interpretations and the profound impact these thinkers had on the formation of political authority and constitutional frameworks. He also bridges this historical analysis with contemporary debates on democracy, sovereignty and the enduring tension between political foundation and institutional stability in modern legal and political theory.
United States and Chinese foreign assistance and diplomacy addresses the analytic weaknesses of mainstream analysis of foreign aid, which often focuses on its material dimensions. The book underscores the constitutive relationship between foreign aid as a material resource and the diplomatic discourses and practices that constitute complex bilateral relations between donor and recipient states. Written by two leading scholars of contemporary United States and Chinese foreign policies in the Global South, Aid for Dominance offers a pioneering, theoretically conscious, and empirically rich account of the two great powers’ grand strategies in the global development sector. By deploying a multidisciplinary and comparative analysis, this book draws from a wide range of evidentiary materials from primary sources, including data from fieldwork interviews, government documents, local and international newspapers, speeches by high-ranking government officials and diplomats, and secondary data from scholarly publications and policy papers.
In Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage, Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims’ remains for public display. Rwanda’s genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms trauma heritage, wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is spatialized—made visible in public space—to demand justice and recognition. She argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by “writing” them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. Among those sites, Rwanda’s genocide heritage comprises exceptionally visceral sites of truth-telling that highlight the politics of a past made present. Wendel demonstrates that such sites of memory require reckoning with the ethical and political dilemmas that arise from viewing violence as forms of repair and control.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), commonly called the New Silk Road, is a huge infrastructure project currently revitalising or creating new trading routes and large developments across the globe. It is estimated to cost up to US$8 trillion and impact more than 65% of the world’s population.
This book explores the unequal ways this controversial project is altering livelihoods, places and the environment. From road building projects in Nairobi to grassroots environmental activism in Thailand, researchers from the Global North and South analyse the real-world impacts of this unprecedented project, bringing together critical geography and political ecology approaches.
Jürgen Habermas is Germany’s most important postwar philosopher, the leading figure of the Frankfurt School in this period. He is best known for the concept of the public sphere, which forms the basis of his communicative understanding of democratic politics. Habermas has not only theorized the public sphere—he has also taken part in it through frequent commentary on current social, political, and cultural issues. Yet since Habermas’s extensive public-facing writings have been overlooked, his philosophy has often been criticized as apolitical.
This book transforms our understanding of Habermas by focusing on his work as a public intellectual, showing how he has shaped debates far beyond the ivory tower. Peter J. Verovšek argues that while Habermas maintains a strict separation between his academic and his public-facing writings, he has also ensured that these two aspects of his work are part of a consistent whole. The book highlights the development of Habermas’s views over time and the changing nature of his public interventions. His early political writings focused on questions tied to the particular situation of postwar West Germany, but since 1989 he has increasingly turned his attention to the future of Europe and global politics more broadly. Verovšek sheds light on the interrelationship between Habermas’s participation in the public sphere and his theoretical work, demonstrating that his political engagement is crucial to understanding his philosophy. In a moment when public debate is under threat, this book offers timely new insight into Habermas’s lifelong project of defending the public sphere—both in theory and in practice.
An earlier piece discussed the recently published Les Hermaphrodites, a manuscript by Foucault from the mid-late 1970s, at one point destined for a volume of the History of Sexuality. I also outlined the different plans Foucault discussed for the structure of the History of Sexuality series – the (at least) three interim versions between the initially announced one in 1976 and the final plan at the time of his 1984 death. In both of these posts, I mentioned Foucault’s 1979 paper to the Arcadie conference, in which he presented on the topic of hermaphrodites.
I made the claim that an unpublished text quoted by Arianna Sforzini in her editorial introduction to Les Hermaphrodites, also in the Foucault archives, was Foucault’s presentation to this conference. Having now seen the archival material myself, I am more confident in that claim. Here’s what I think we know about this event and Foucault’s talk.
The conference took place between 24-27 May 1979, organised to celebrate 25 years of the Arcadie journal. Arcadie described itself as a homophile journal. The editor André Baudry opened proceedings, and the first two speakers were Paul Veyne and Michel Foucault. In issue 307-308 of the journal, Christian Gury wrote a brief report on the event. After discussing Veyne’s paper, Gury summarises and in places quotes Foucault.
Michel Foucault, taking up the baton, asks: how did we move from one model to another, and how is it today that the separation is between masculine and feminine? The holder of the Chair of the History of Ideas [History of Systems of Thought] at the Collège de France approaches the issue of sexual identity by studying the marginal case of hermaphroditism, a phenomenon in which the Church, medicine and Parliament raised the question of the true sex. From anatomy, we came to consider sensibility, the nature of desire. The notion of homosexuality, defined by extension from the old form of hermaphroditism as a disturbance of “the law of identification of the individual with their sex” made it possible to place those who deviated from the law outside of society. “The problem”, concludes Michel Foucault, “is to free pleasure from this law. It is important to understand that no legal systematisation can confine sex. Pleasure is something which passes from one individual to another, it is not a secretion of identity. Because pleasure has no passport, no identity card” (“Le congrès au fils des jours”, pp. 505-6).
The report in the conference proceedings, in place of Foucault’s paper: André Baudry, Le Regard des autres: Actes du congrès international, Paris: Arcadie, 1979, p. 25.
The conference proceedings were published later in 1979 as Le Regard des autres. Foucault’s paper is not included, for which the editor apologises. He adds that he “is currently working on an important book about the ideas he presented to the Congress in his speech” (p. 25). In place of his paper, the proceedings reproduces Gury’s earlier summary. The editor adds that Foucault’s text would appear in a subsequent issue of the journal, and that owners of the proceedings would be given an offprint of the text.
Foucault’s conference paper was developed into the introduction to the English translation of the Herculine Barbin memoir, where it is dated to January 1980 (p. xvii). A slightly expanded version of this text was then published in French in the Arcadie journal in November that year. This text was reprinted in Dits et écrits in 1994, with the differences between the Introduction and the Arcadie versions indicated. The longer Arcadie version has not been translated into English.
The text which Sforzini quotes in her editorial introduction to Les Hermaphrodites is in the Foucault archives. Folder 7 of box 82 of the main Foucault fonds, NAF 28730, includes six handwritten pages, which include the passages partially quoted by Sforzini.
In its form it is similar to other lectures by Foucault – some phrases, some words, a structure around which he could improvise at the event itself. If you compare the notes in the published versions of Foucault’s first two courses at the Collège de France to the later volumes, which transcribe recordings, you can see the difference. There are places where the manuscript matches very closely to Gury’s report from the conference. As the basis for an oral presentation, it is not surprising that an audience member’s recollection of what Foucault said differs slightly from what was written.
I do think it’s a shame the full text wasn’t transcribed in full for Les Hermaphrodites, which is where it would have found its most natural home. Although in parts it is very abbreviated, it is not dissimilar to other texts which have been transcribed in this form.
Didier Eribon’s report of the Arcadie conference (Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, pp. 271-72), sent me first to the conference proceedings and from there to the initial report by Gury. Without those indications, I would not have known what I was looking at. Sforzini’s partial transcription helped me to join up these different bits of evidence. Neither, though, make the claim that this manuscript was the text used by Foucault for the Arcadie conference.
References
André Baudry, Le Regard des autres: Actes du congrès international [24 au 27 mai 1979], Paris: Arcadie, 1979.
Christian Gury, “Le congrès au fils des jours”, Arcadie: Movement homophile de France 307-308, 1979, 505-10.
Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, Paris: Fayard, 1994.
Michel Foucault, “Introduction”, in Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall, Brighton: Harvester, 1980.
Michel Foucault, “Le vrai sexe”, Arcadie 323, 1980, 617-25; reprinted in Dits et écrits, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris: Gallimard, four volumes, 1994, Vol IV, 115-23.
Michel Foucault, Les Hermaphrodites, eds. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Ariana Sforzini, Paris: Gallimard, 2025.
Arianna Sforzini, “Préface: Le chantier « hermaphrodite »”, in Michel Foucault, Les Hermaphrodites, eds. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Ariana Sforzini, Paris: Gallimard, 2025, 7-39.
Archives
Fonds Michel Foucault, NAF 28730, Bibliothèque nationale de France
This note is in the same style as the ‘Sunday histories‘ posts, though its more minor status means I’ve posted it mid-week.
Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these “diaries of the night” in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one.
Available again for the first time since its publication in the 1960s, this sensational book brings together this uniquely powerful dream record, offering a visceral understanding of how terror is internalized and how propaganda colonizes the imagination. After Beradt herself fled Germany for New York, she collected these dream accounts and began to trace the common symbols and themes that appeared in the collective unconscious of a traumatized nation. The fear of dictatorship was ever-present. Dreams of thought control, even the prohibition of dreaming itself, bore witness to the collapse of outer and inner worlds.
Now in a haunting new translation by Damion Searls and with an incisive foreword by Dunya Mikhail, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a raw, unfiltered, and prophetic look inside the experience of living through Hitler’s terror.
The Essential Einstein: Scientific Writings presents Einstein’s most important physics papers, spanning his groundbreaking contributions to statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity as well as his ambitious yet ultimately unrealized attempts at a general unified field theory. This incisive collection contains works that profoundly influenced the trajectory of modern science. Each piece serves not only as a reflection of his intellectual rigor and creativity but also as a cornerstone of contemporary scientific thought.
The Essential Einstein: Public Writings presents a rich selection of Einstein’s humanistic writings drawn from a diverse array of materials he sanctioned for publication during his lifetime. Distinct from previous collections, this incisive book presents previously excerpted works in their entirety, including key articles, lectures, and speeches. These writings delve into significant topics such as philosophy, religion, and art, but also specific important and often contentious issues in education, politics, disarmament, pacifism, international cooperation, the atomic bomb, and Zionism. Among these works, readers will find the brilliant “Notes for an Autobiography” alongside selected popular science articles, which offer a profound understanding of Einstein’s ethical and political worldview.
The Essential Einstein is a two-volume compendium offering general readers and specialists alike a comprehensive resource on the pivotal writings of Albert Einstein. Organized chronologically by leading authorities on Einstein and his work, this collection illuminates the evolution of Einstein’s scientific and humanistic ideas throughout his life. Each selection is accompanied by explanatory notes that detail the work’s background and significance.
Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty-First Century examines whether the liberalism of fear – the negative and cautionary vein of liberal thinking, most famously articulated by Judith Shklar, which urges us to prioritize the avoidance of public cruelty – can effectively orient our political thinking in the twenty first century.
Hall systematically engages with Shklar’s writings to offer a defence of liberalism in these terms, and also methodically works through a variety of practical political issues – torture, policing, immigration control, and hate speech. In so doing, Hall upends the suggestion that the liberalism of fear is an outdated species of Cold War Liberalism, arguing that as long as some people are invested with coercive power to exercise over others, there is a likelihood for public cruelty to emerge. Moreover, by examining some central features of politics in the twenty-first century, the book offers a series of vital and original recommendations about how we can respond to public cruelty, here and now.
