Progressive Geographies

Cristina A. Bejan, Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association – Palgrave, 2019 and discussion at New Books Network with Steven Seegel

In 1930s Bucharest, some of the country’s most brilliant young intellectuals converged to form the Criterion Association. Bound by friendship and the dream of a new, modern Romania, their members included historian Mircea Eliade, critic Petru Comarnescu, Jewish playwright Mihail Sebastian and a host of other philosophers and artists. Together, they built a vibrant cultural scene that flourished for a few short years, before fascism and scandal splintered their ranks. Cristina A. Bejan asks how the far-right Iron Guard came to eclipse the appeal of liberalism for so many of Romania’s intellectual elite, drawing on diaries, memoirs and other writings to examine the collision of culture and extremism in the interwar years. The first English-language study of Criterion and the most thorough to date in any language, this book grapples with the complexities of Romanian intellectual life in the moments before collapse.

Ann Heberlein, On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt – Anansi, translated by Alice Menzies, January 2021

In an utterly unique approach to biography, On Love and Tyranny traces the life and work of the iconic German Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, whose political philosophy and understandings of evil, totalitarianism, love, and exile prove essential amid the rise of the refugee crisis and authoritarian regimes around the world. 

What can we learn from the iconic political thinker Hannah Arendt? Well, the short answer may be: to love the world so much that we think change is possible.

The life of Hannah Arendt spans a crucial chapter in the history of the Western world, a period that witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime and the crises of the Cold War, a time when our ideas about humanity and its value, its guilt and responsibility, were formulated. Arendt’s thinking is intimately entwined with her life and the concrete experiences she drew from her encounters with evil, but also from love, exile, statelessness, and longing. This strikingly original work moves from political themes that wholly consume us today, such as the ways in which democracies can so easily become totalitarian states; to the deeply personal, in intimate recollections of Arendt’s famous lovers and friends, including Heidegger, Benjamin, de Beauvoir, and Sartre; and to wider moral deconstructions of what it means to be human and what it means to be humane.

On Love and Tyranny brings to life a Hannah Arendt for our days, a timeless intellectual whose investigations into the nature of evil and of love are eerily and urgently relevant half a century later.

A strange year of reading. For long periods I found it very hard to concentrate on reading that wasn’t immediately useful for a writing project or other work task (and even then…). Novels were a particular struggle. I found reading diaries, memoirs and autobiographies a bit easier, and so there are quite a few of those in here. Perhaps this was in part to see how creative work had been done in the past in difficult circumstances.

• John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies
• Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta
• Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (memoir)
• Michael Joyce, Foucault in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden
• Stephen Fry, Mythos
• Susan Cain, Quiet (non-fiction)
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
• Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of all Things
• Sven-Erik Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx
• Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography
• Christine Leunens, Caging Skies
• Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil
• Alice Jardine, At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva
• Amy Sackville, Painter to the King
• Michael Scammell, Arthur Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual
• Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies
• Mircea Eliade, Journal I: 1945-1955
• Mircea Eliade, No Souvenirs: Journal 1957-69
• Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology
• Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda (again)
• Sally Rooney, Normal People
• Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
• Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet 
• Mircea Eliade, The Portugal Journal
• Howard Eiland and Michael W Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
• Hilary Mantel, Fludd
• Philip K Dick, The Man in the High Castle
• Sue Prideaux, Strindberg – A Life
• Alastair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography
• Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet
• Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World
• Sid Smith, In the Court of King Crimson: An Observation over 50 Years
• Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt (biography)
• Jeff Love, The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève
• David Lagercrantz, The Girl who Takes an Eye for an Eye
• Ahmed Othmani, Beyond Prison (memoir/non-fiction)
• Peter Salmon, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
• Claude Lévi-Strauss, Conversations with Didier Eribon
• Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs
• Patrick Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (biography)
• Michael Palin, North Korea Journal
• John Schad, The Late Walter Benjamin

When I’ve posted these lists before, I often get questions. Here’s what I’ve said in reply before.

Geographers, sociologists, philosophers, etc. on covid-19

Where to start with reading Henri Lefebvre?

Stuart Hall’s documentary on Marx and Marxism

Georges Bataille – Oeuvres complètes and other French collections; English translations

My favourite academic books of 2019 [other years here]

Foucault audio and video recordings (other Foucault resources here)

Where to start with reading Peter Sloterdijk?

The Deleuze Seminars, Website Launch

Etienne Balibar – Being Communist, Becoming Other (audio)

Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980), edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, University of Minnesota Press, December 2020

Foucault – uncollected notes, lectures and interviews

The Early Foucault – research updates

Quite a lot of these are pages, rather than posts, and some are quite old. Not many posts this year seemed to get much attention, which is probably due to social media as much as anything else. I’ve been using Twitter more, and Facebook much less. But there are some things which don’t really work on those, so I imagine I’ll keep going with this site for a while longer. Thanks for reading this year.