Yoann Malinge, L’Action dans la philosophie de Jean-Paul Sartre – Classiques Garnier, October 2025
Jean-Paul Sartre développe une philosophie de l’action dans laquelle l’existence humaine et le monde sont liés. Exister, c’est agir. Cependant, l’action peut se heurter à des obstacles et à une aliénation intériorisée. Cette philosophie révèle comment notre existence s’inscrit et prend sens dans le monde.
Announcing the official launch of the
Inventory of the Library of Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert
La bibliothèque de Michel Foucault et de Daniel Defert du 285 rue de Vaugirard
Announcement in French and English – thanks to Foucault News for the information
Description
Michel Foucault moved in with Daniel Defert at 285 rue de Vaugirard (Paris 15th arrondissement) at the beginning of 1971, and he remained there until his death in 1984.The inventory of the library preserved in this apartment is the result of a collective effort carried out from May to July 2024, made possible through the kind hospitality of Antoine Jabre, Daniel Defert’s husband. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Philippe Chevallier were assisted in their work by two interns from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cecilia Drago and Annabelle de Traversay, as well as by François Ewald, Laurence Le Bras, and Niki Kasumi Clements. The project received support from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Centre Michel Foucault.
The file produced in 2024 was then fully revised and edited as a Heurist database by Carolina Verlengia (Triangle – UMR 5206) in June and July 2025, with the support of the Centre Michel Foucault and the Centre d’archives en philosophie, histoire et édition des sciences (CAPHÉS, UAR 3610).
This inventory should not be regarded as complete. First, because approximately 1,430 books dedicated to Michel Foucault had already left 285 rue de Vaugirard in the 2010s to join the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. Second, because certain choices had to be made due to time constraints. Thus, the following were not included in the inventory:
- works published after Michel Foucault’s death;
- a few minor reference or ephemeral items (dictionaries, travel guides, advertising brochures, etc.);
- the numerous offprints, except for those directly related to Michel Foucault’s work and circle of friends;
- books kept outside the living room and the former study (fewer in number than those described here and mostly paperbacks).
Finally, even though the core of this collection is clearly Michel Foucault’s working and “scholarly sociability” library, as reflected in the range of disciplines and themes it covers, as well as in the many reading marks and inscriptions, it is impossible to separate Michel Foucault’s use of the library from Daniel Defert’s. This is partly due to their shared life together (the presence of duplicates, particularly of certain classics of ancient thought, reminds us that Daniel Defert followed an academic path that was relatively similar to Michel Foucault’s), but also because Daniel Defert continued to live in the apartment from 1984 until his death in 2023 and frequently made use of this working library (especially for his editorial projects, from Dits et Écrits to Leçons sur la volonté de savoir). We have therefore attributed certain volumes, with due caution, to an owner who can at most be regarded as their first.
La bibliothèque de Michel Foucault et de Daniel Defert du 285 rue de Vaugirard
Michel Foucault s’est installé avec Daniel Defert au 285 rue de Vaugirard (Paris 15e) début 1971 ; il y resta jusqu’à sa mort en 1984.
L’inventaire de la bibliothèque conservée dans cet appartement est le fruit d’un travail collectif réalisé de mai à juillet 2024 grâce à l’accueil bienveillant d’Antoine Jabre, mari de Daniel Defert. Henri-Paul Fruchaud et Philippe Chevallier ont été aidés dans leur tâche par deux stagiaires de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cecilia Drago et Annabelle de Traversay, ainsi que par François Ewald, Laurence Le Bras et Niki Kasumi Clements. L’opération a reçu le soutien de la Bibliothèque nationale de France et du Centre Michel Foucault.
Le fichier produit en 2024 a ensuite été intégralement corrigé et édité sous la forme d’une base de données Heurist par Carolina Verlengia (Triangle – UMR 5206), en juin et juillet 2025, avec le soutien du Centre Michel Foucault et du Centre d’archives en philosophie, histoire et édition des sciences (CAPHÉS, UAR 3610).
Cet inventaire ne saurait être considéré comme complet. Tout d’abord, parce qu’environ 1 430 ouvrages dédicacés à Michel Foucault avaient déjà quitté le 285 rue de Vaugirard dans les années 2010 pour rejoindre la Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library de l’université de Yale. Ensuite, parce qu’il nous fallut faire des choix, en raison de contraintes de temps. Ainsi, n’ont pas été inventoriés :
- les ouvrages publiés après le décès de Michel Foucault ;
- quelques usuels ou éphémères peu significatifs (dictionnaires, guides touristiques, brochures publicitaires, etc.) ;
- les très nombreux tirés à part, à l’exception de ceux directement reliés au travail et aux cercles d’amitié de Michel Foucault ;
- les ouvrages conservés en dehors du salon et de l’ancien bureau (moins nombreux que l’ensemble ici décrit, dont une majorité de livres de poche)
Enfin, même si le cœur de cet ensemble est de toute évidence la bibliothèque de travail et de « sociabilité savante » de Michel Foucault, comme le montrent les disciplines et les thèmes couverts, mais aussi les nombreuses marques de lecture et d’envoi, il est désormais impossible d’isoler son usage de celui qu’en fit Daniel Defert : à la fois du fait de leur vie commune (la présence de doublons, en particulier pour certains classiques de la pensée antique, nous rappellent que Daniel Defert a suivi un parcours de formation relativement similaire à celui de Michel Foucault), mais aussi parce que Daniel Defert demeura dans l’appartement de 1984 à son décès en 2023 et eut fréquemment recours à cette bibliothèque de travail (en particulier pour ses travaux d’édition, des Dits et Écrits aux Leçons sur la volonté de savoir). C’est donc avec prudence que nous avons attribué certains ouvrages à un propriétaire qui n’est tout au plus que le premier.
Morten Høi Jensen, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain” – Yale University Press, October 2025
The arresting story of how Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain as a defeated Germany descended into political chaos
Like many writers of his generation, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) welcomed the outbreak of the First World War. He viewed it as a spiritual necessity, a chance to reassert German cultural dominance over Western ideas of democracy and enlightenment. Then, in 1924, he published The Magic Mountain, a massive novel that culminates in the slaughter of war and foreshadows the Nazi terror to come. One of the central achievements of modernism, The Magic Mountain bears testimony to its author’s dramatic political reorientation as a defender of democracy.
This poignant book is a biography of Mann’s great novel—its evolution from a short story into a two-volume masterpiece and one of the bestselling novels of the Weimar era. Deftly weaving together elements of biography, history, and literary criticism, Morten Høi Jensen reveals how writing The Magic Mountain against a backdrop of world war, revolution, hyperinflation, and rising right-wing terror moved Mann to embrace the democratic and humanistic ideas he once scorned.
One hundred years after The Magic Mountain was first published, at a time when democratic ideas are again under threat, Jensen reveals the universality and timeliness of Mann’s great novel—its still-resonant debates over democracy and tyranny, time and place, illness and death.
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la vérité – Cours à l’Université d’État de New York à Buffalo, mars et avril 1972 – eds. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Orazio Irrera, Vrin, October 2025
Now published
Comment s’est constituée, à travers le temps, la conception de la vérité qui est aujourd’hui celle de la civilisation occidentale? Tel est le thème de ce cours inédit prononcé par Foucault au printemps 1972 à l’Université d’État de New York à Buffalo. En prolongeant ses deux premiers cours au Collège de France, il étudie dans deux périodes, l’Antiquité grecque et le Moyen Âge occidental, l’histoire de la façon dont s’est opéré, à travers l’évolution des pratiques judiciaires et des relations de pouvoir qui les sous-tendent, le partage du vrai et du faux qui est à l’origine du discours scientifique occidental.
Ainsi, l’Histoire de la vérité est l’un des tout premiers travaux où Foucault met en oeuvre l’approche généalogique qui caractérise sa pensée à partir du début des années 1970.
Ce cours est aussi l’occasion, pour Foucault, de préciser sa propre démarche, dans laquelle la relation entre pouvoir et savoir occupe une place centrale, en la distinguant soigneusement de celle d’un certain marxisme, notamment par la critique des notions d’idéologie et de conception du monde.
The next issue of Foucault Studies has an essay on this course by Leonhard Riep, alongside my discussion of what else the Buffalo archives reveal about Foucault’s two visiting posts there in 1970 and 1972. A much shorter version of my piece is here.
Update November 2025: my article in Foucault Studies is now available here, Leonhard’s essay here – both open access.
J. Michael Cole, The Taiwan Tinderbox: The Island-Nation at the Centre of the New Cold War – Polity, October 2025
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world and overturned assumptions that large-scale conventional war was inconceivable in the 21st century. On the other side of the planet, democratic Taiwan faces the rising threat of a military takeover by China – a conflict whose impact on the international community would be catastrophic.
Renowned Taiwan expert and former intelligence officer J. Michael Cole explains how this Pacific nation has become a tinderbox that could ignite a full-scale global conflict. Drawing on unparalleled access to Taiwanese government sources and two decades of on-the-ground observation, he explores the root causes of the conflict between Taiwan and China – from the identity politics that make “peaceful unification” inconceivable, to the rise of Xi Jinping, the most powerful and authoritarian Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. With in-depth analysis of how the war in Europe is influencing preparations by Beijing, Taipei, and Washington for a potential cross-strait confrontation, The Taiwan Tinderbox is an impassioned plea for the defense of Taiwan as a priority for the international community and the future of democracy.
Madeleine Chalmers, French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn – Edinburgh University Press, December 2024 – hardback and open access available now; paperback in June 2026
Uncovers the nonhuman turn’s unexpected roots in the avant-gardes and mysticisms of nineteenth-century France
- Builds a new genealogy which highlights the unacknowledged expression of Catholic mysticism and avant-garde French literature in the nonhuman turn
- Brings into play both canonical and non-canonical authors, from Symbolism to Surrealism and beyond
- Mines unexplored elements of major thinkers, including Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze
- Tackles the porous boundaries between literature, philosophy, science, politics, and theology in French thought
French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary ‘nonhuman turn’ in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.
Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality, and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality, and affect, this book explores technology as a source of subject matter and conceptual metaphors, but also probes how ideas and words are modes of technicity through which we shape and reshape the world. Fusing literature, philosophy, and theology, it offers readers new contexts – and questions – for the egalitarian ontological commitments of contemporary post- and nonhuman thinking.
New Books discussion with Gina Stamm – thanks to dmf for this link
Interview with Christopher Watkin
Patricia Chiantera‐Stutte and Ulrike Jureit eds., Geo‐Political Spaces: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Carl Schmitt – Routledge, November 2025
Sorry to report that the price is prohibitively expensive.
This book focuses on the geographical and geopolitical sources for Carl Schmitt’s multilayered political thinking in order to uncover the relation between the political and the geographical aspects of his concept of space from 1939 to 1950. The aim is therefore to open up a field of enquiry, specifically to investigate Schmitt’s sources in the geographical and geopolitical literature inside and outside Germany in order to reconstruct the genealogy of his idea of space, territory and international order. In doing so, the contributors aim both to distinguish concepts that have generally been only vaguely defined in the literature on Schmitt, namely his idea of space, political territory and land, and to define more precisely the relationship between Schmitt’s Großraum and the National Socialist Lebensraum.
This book refers to, complements and goes beyond three different approaches – International Relations, geography and philology: First, in that it explores the genealogy of Schmitt’s concept of space by adopting a twofold methodology of intellectual history and philology; second, in that it considers the relevance of language in Schmitt’s discourse on power and space; third, in that it relates Schmitt’s thinking to the transnational literature on geopolitics and political geography.
Geo – Political Spaces will appeal to academics and the well-informed public at large. It is also suitable for academic teaching, especially when it comes to historical theory, the concept of space or the history of political thought.
Timothy Middleton, Witnessing a Wounded World: A Theology of Ecological Trauma – Fordham University Press, November 2025
A crucial intervention at the intersection of ecotheology and trauma theology
We are in the midst of a global ecological crisis. At times, the scale of the suffering involved can be hard to fully comprehend. The whole planetary ecosystem feels out of kilter. Meanwhile, trauma theorists, and society at large, have become increasingly aware of the incidence of trauma in a growing variety of contexts. In Witnessing a Wounded World, Timothy Middleton asks what might be gained by viewing ecological suffering through the lens of trauma.
By bringing concepts and methodologies from trauma theology to bear on questions that arise within ecotheology, Middleton engages a series of pressing questions. What kind of traumas are being precipitated by anthropogenic climate change and accelerating biodiversity loss? What would it mean to envisage the Earth itself as traumatized? And how might a Christian theologian respond?
From large-scale deforestation and opencast mining to rampaging wildfires and fracturing ice sheets, the Earth itself is subject to intense devastation. Witnessing a Wounded World analyzes such phenomena in terms of three traumatic ruptures—to communication, to flesh, and to time. Drawing on practices of witnessing and the insights of deep incarnation Christologies, Middleton proceeds to offer a theological account of this ecological trauma. For Christians, a model of Christic witnessing can bring the Earth’s suffering to light.
As the first sustained treatment of ecological trauma to address the trauma of the Earth itself, Witnessing a Wounded World makes a profound contribution to discussions of suffering, faith, and the present ecological emergency.
David Harvey, The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works – Verso, February 2026
The world’s leading Marxist geographer and economist takes us by the hand to guide us through Marx’s masterwork
For decades, David Harvey has been teaching Marx’s work, particularly Capital, to great acclaim. He has analysed chapter by chapter – sometimes line-by-line – Marx’s three volumes and the Grundrisse. This new book opens up the mental universe of that work for a general reader.
In The Story of Capital, Harvey takes a synoptic approach to the conceptual architecture as a whole and guides us through the key moments, from labour and technology to the state and geopolitics, via the profit rate, social reproduction, the relationship to nature, fictitious capital and the return of the rentiers. In doing so, Harvey has produced a work which will become a key reference for all those trying to grasp the nature of contemporary capitalism.
Verso’s series Harvey at 90 continues with recently posted pieces by Trevor J. Barnes, Helga Leitner and Richard A. Walker.
Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza and Tomás Espino Barrera, eds. Space, Affect, Memory: Literary geographies in transnational and transdisciplinary comparison – UCL Press, October 2025
Available in print and open access.
Space, Affect, Memory highlights the centrality of space in modern and contemporary culture, both as an object of study and as a concept that underpins research and creative practice. In so doing, this book argues for the necessity of a new approach to space which integrates its affective and memorial dimension.
Contributors from different fields explore and advance debates in literary geography from diverse transnational perspectives through close readings of canonical and less familiar cultural and literary productions in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Japanese, in locales spanning Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. In this way, Space, Affect, Memory decentres the anglophone bias of established scholarly approaches in literary geography, probing terminologies and methodologies from different national traditions.
Finally, Space, Affect, Memory interweaves the visual arts by engaging with photography, performance and architecture. As a result, the volume offers a fresh, comparative perspective on the intermingling of space, affect and memory that lies at the heart of literary geography and comparative literature. These efforts converge in a shared attempt to pluralize the field (geographies) and to showcase the numerous possibilities of creative, transdisciplinary interaction between media, performance and representation, across cultures.
