Women of the Mafia dives into the Neapolitan criminal underworld of the Camorra as seen and lived by the women who inhabit it. It tells their life stories and unpacks the gender dynamics by examining their participation as active agents in the organization as leaders, managers, foot soldiers, and enablers. Felia Allum shows that these women are true partners in crime.
The author offers an innovative interdisciplinary analysis that demystifies the notion that the Camorra is a sexist, male-centric organization. She links her analysis of Camorra culture within the wider Neapolitan context to show how mothers and women act and are treated in the private sphere of the household and how the family helps explain the power women have found in the Neapolitan Camorra.
It is civil society and law enforcement agencies that continue to see the Camorra using traditional gender assumptions which render women irrelevant and lacking independent agency in the criminal underworld. In Women of the Mafia, Allum debunks these assumptions by revealing the power and influence of women in the Camorra.
How should the Arctic be viewed in the 21st century? In this book, a leading commentator assesses the competing players for the Arctic, looking at broad questions of governance and security.
The author challenges the view that the Arctic is a passive space which is the focus of competitive advances from superpowers, arguing that it is more correctly understood as a dynamic pluriverse. Drawing on international law, international relations and diplomacy, this is an important re-assessment of the Arctic and its position in geo-politics.
I’ve been back in the UK for a few months, though I continue to work through the archival material I saw in the United States, some of which is in the form of notes, some photos of things, and a few scans requested from archives. I’ve also had a steady stream of things I ordered for duplication from archives, all of which are feeding into different parts of this project.
A pile of books related to the project, and the new Ernst Kantorowicz collection on which I’m writing a review – and, yes, the big Dumézil book does really misspell ‘mythe’ on the spine…
But I really needed to get back to working on the Benveniste part of Chapter 9, before moving to the Dumézil discussion. Roger Woodard asked me to write a chapter on “Benveniste, Dumézil and Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France”, for the Cambridge History of Mythology and Mythography, which he is editing. This was a useful exercise in trying to distil some of the overall claims I am making in my book manuscript. While Dumézil’s status as a mythologist is of course well established, this isn’t a conventional way of reading Benveniste. Silvia Fregeni has done the most extensive work in this register, and reading Benveniste as making contributions to sociology and anthropology alongside linguistics runs through my manuscript.
The most thorough work on this comes in Benveniste’s Vocabulaire – the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society. It’s a book I keep returning to, and have a discussion I’m now fairly happy with in place. I thought that with the discussion of the Vocabulaire it made sense not to use the same examples across the Cambridge chapter and the manuscript – there are so many interesting analyses that it is impossible to discuss them all. I’ve already posted here about how the book has things to say about territory, and in the book chapter I discuss the way Benveniste analyses “Hellenic Kingship” through a discussion of the words basileús and wánaks. Although basileus is the later word for king, Benveniste argues that earlier Mycenaean sources indicate that “the basileús was merely a local chieftain, a man of rank but far from a king”, without “political authority”, whereas the wánaks was “the holder of royal power” (Vocabulaire, Vol II, p. 24; Dictionary, p. 320). That changes in later Greek. I develop that reading a bit more here.
I had been debating what analyses to use in the book manuscript. I discuss hospitality, partly because I want to return to it as an example of how Derrida engages with the reading in a concluding chapter. I also want to say something about marriage and kinship, gift and exchange, and economic values, since these are themes he discussed in separate publications, and I think help with questions about the dating and composition of the text. I think this is sufficient to give a sense of the richness of the book.
I then moved to discuss Dumézil’s works of his bilan period – a programme begun around the time of his retirement, where he produced consolidated, updated and extended analyses of the major themes of his career. There are various indications of what he had in mind, in a series of prefaces and other places. The series includes his massive Archaic Roman Religion, the first of his books to be translated into English, and the three volumes of Mythe et épopée, which is only partially available in English. (For a list of the parts available, see here, recently updated.) The bilan sequence also includes his updated versions on books on the warrior and Saxo Grammaticus, and some other works. I still have work to do on this, but I’m aiming to complete the draft this summer. This will leave Dumézil’s 1980s books, particularly the Esquisses series, and his later works on Caucasian linguistics, for separate discussions.
I had a week in Paris in early July, in which I worked through a series of boxes of the Émile Benveniste papers at the Bibliothèque nationale, mainly relating to the Vocabulaire book. I’ve seen all these boxes at least once before, but will need some time going back over things – the numerical order is neither chronological nor thematic, so now I know better where materials are I can go back in a more logical order. I also looked at a few folders at the Collège de France, mainly in relation to Benveniste. I’ll next be back in September.
Outside this project, I’ve been trying to keep commitments to a minimum. In late May I was part of a discussion of Chris Philo’s important new book Adorno and the Antifascist Geographical Imagination for the London Group of Historical Geographers. My piece should be published along with some other commentaries and a response from Chris. I have also written a short review of Juliet Fall’s remarkable book Along the Line: Writing with Comics and Graphic Narrative in Geography for a session at the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers conference in Birmingham in late August, and revisited a lecture on Shakespeare for a book chapter. I have one more book review to write, on the new collection of Ernst Kantorowicz essays, but other than that, the two priorities for the foreseeable future are the Indo-European book manuscript and the work for the new translation and edition of Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic. I’ve been doing a little work on that.
Roman Jakobson is an important figure in the careers of many of the people I’m discussing in this project, and I wrote a short piece about his work for Franz Boas on the Paleo-Siberian and Aleutian material at the New York Public Library, based on the archival sources. I gave a short talk on Jakobson to my department in late June, and hope to develop that into something more substantial, and have another piece on Jakobson’s 1972 Collège de France courses nearly ready.
Future ‘Sunday Histories’ will look at some more themes relating to the Indo-European project, though the intention is not to share draft material from the developing manuscript, but rather connected discussions. I have also have some pieces in development which are not connected to this work including on the biologist Étienne Wolff, on the Glyph journal, and on Foucault’s early English translations [now available here].
One of Georges Dumézil’s most loyal students was Lucien Gerschel. He seems to have begun attending his classes at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1937-38, but certainly was there for the 1938-39 course which became Dumézil’s 1940 book Mitra-Varuna. Other students in that course included Roger Caillois, who in the middle of the year gave five presentations on the sacred, soon published as L’Homme et le sacré(Man and the Sacred), as well as Marie-Louise Sjoestedt and Élisabeth Raucq, both of whom I’ve written about before in this series. Gerschel also attended many of Émile Benveniste’s classes, and his notes were used in the production of Benveniste’s 1969 book Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européens (translated as the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society), which I’ve discussed before in relation to territory (here and here). Gerschel was Jewish, and Dumézil notes that this meant he was excluded from some debates in the war-years (Mariages indo-européens, 26). In the late 1940s to the early 1950s Dumézil was supervising Gerschel’s research, and he includes parts of Gerschel’s mémoire in his own Jupiter Mars Quirinus IV (pp. 170-76). Gerschel attended Dumézil’s classes until the 1960s, and provided research support including correcting proofs to books.
Dumézil’s most famous idea is the trifunctional analysis, analysing divisions of society and pantheons of gods in three main areas. The first is the sovereign class of kings and priests, the second warriors, and the third producers or farmers. This can be found in the caste system of India, or the groupings of Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus; Odin, Thor, Njördr or Freyr; Mitra-Varuna, Indra, Nasarya or Asvina. He stresses the first function is itself split, with a legal, contractual god often pairing a more terrible, magical one – Mitra alongside Varuna, Tyr with Odin, Dius Fidius with Jupiter. Gerschel’s work generally either extends Dumézil’s work or applies trifunctional analysis to different sources. The mémoire, for example, uses the trifunctional analysis to examine Roman law. Gerschel published a series of articles on mythology from 1950 to 1966. His interests range from ancient Rome to Germanic legend, Norse sagas and Celtic studies. Two of his articles appeared in Revue de l’histoire des religions, two in Annales and others in the Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique, Latomus (a Belgian Latin studies journal), Études Celtiques and an English piece in Midwest Folklore. He also wrote a lot of book reviews, including of Dumézil’s work, but also the Dutch Germanist (and Nazi collaborator) Jan de Vries, most of which were for the Revue de l’histoire des religions.
Dumezil wrote a short introduction, “Sur quelques expressions symboliques de la structure religieuse tripartie à Rome”, to Gerschel’s 1952 essay, “Structures augurales et tripartition fonctionnelle dans la pensée de l’ancienne Rome”. This is another example of how Dumézil was willing to use his status to support Gerschel’s work – he was generally loyal to his former students and allies, often citing their work at length. In Gerschel’s case he particularly makes references to his work in the 1966 book Archaic Roman Religion. In July 1967, in the preface to the first volume of the Mythe et Épopée series, Dumézil mentions the “varied and original contribution… of my longest-standing collaborator” (p. 17). But he mentions his death in the second edition preface of 1973, and C. Scott Littleton refers to him as “the late Lucien Gerschel” in the 1973 introduction to Dumézil’s Gods of the Ancient Northmen (p. xv). This seems relatively young if he was a student in the late 1930s.
Some of Gerschel’s early work is in danger of being too much of an acolyte, with an extension of Dumézil’s work into different areas. Later in his career he began to write more distinctive pieces on numbers and their relation to alphabets, especially in Roman, Irish and Greek thought – “Comment comptaient les anciens Romains?” “L’Ogam et le nombre” and “Le conquête du nombre”. Another late piece, possibly his last, is a discussion of colours and dyes. Many of Gerschel’s articles are fairly substantial, but he seems never to have written a book-length study. In 1979, Dumézil indicates that a collection of Gerschel’s essays will be published, edited by another of his students, Georges Charachidzé, but this seems not to have been completed (Mariages indo-européens, 22 n. 1). Gerschel also wrote an introductory essay on Dumézil’s work, translated into English in 1957, which was surely one of the first, and certainly one of the most enthusiastic, anglophone presentations of the work. Littleton provides the fullest discussion of his contributions in his book on Dumézil, The New Comparative Mythology (especially pp. 161-67); Udo Strutynski situates his work on one theme in “The Survival of Indo-European Mythology in Germanic Legendry”.
My interest here is in Gerschel’s 1953 discussion of the Roman warrior Coriolanus. Coriolanus is a figure from early Roman history, Gaius Martius, who took on the honorific name of Coriolanus following a battle with the Volscians at the city of Corioli. The classic sources are primarily Plutarch’s Lives, Livy’s Ab Urbe condita and Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Roman Antiquities.It is questionable how much the Coriolanus presented in these sources is a genuinely historical person, or is either a legendary figure or a real person embellished with mythical elements.
Gerschel presented his reading in a Festschrift for the Annales historian, Lucien Febvre, Éventail de l’histoire vivante. His essay is simply titled “Coriolan” (Vol II, pp. 33-40). Gerschel recognises that Coriolanus is a warrior above all, but he sees elements of all three functions on Dumézil’s model in the story. After his military triumphs Coriolanus attempts a political career, but comes into conflict both with the plebians who are petitioning for grain, and elements within the patrician class. He is expelled from the city, or goes into voluntary exile, and eventually allies with the Volscians to lead an attack on Rome. Rome tries to dissuade him, sending representations of the priesthood and the political hierarchy, but with no success. Only through the petition of Roman women, including his wife, children and mother, does he relent. The classical accounts of his fate differ, but suggest either that the Volscians kill Coriolanus, that he dies by suicide, or goes into exile. His crimes against the Roman state are threefold – refusal to grant sustenance to the people, a clash with the sovereign, political class, and a military assault on the city. Gerschel indicates that the struggles in the story go beyond a simple patrician-plebian divide, but exemplify “a truly ideological-functional conflict [un véritable conflit idéologique fonctionnel]” (p. 38). The petitions to Coriolanus when he is leading the assault on Rome also represent elements of the three functions – the two aspects of the first function, priests and politicians, challenging the second function of the warrior, and the warrior ultimately limited by the third function of fertility.
Dumézil wrote the previous essay in Volume II of the Febvre tribute, on the three functions in Greece. In 1958, he discussed the story of Coriolanus in relation to Gerschel’s reading in an article in the Latomus journal, “L’idéologie des trois fonctions dans quelques crises de l’histoire romaine”. Indeed, much of this piece is about Gerschel. He praises Gerschel as his “learned and ingenious collaborator” (p. 432) and discusses his 1952 article “Structures augurales et tripartition fonctionelle dans la pensée de l’ancienne Rome” (pp. 432-34). He then quotes quite a long passage from Gerschel’s essay on Coriolanus (pp. 435-36), but does not substantially develop the analysis. He gives Gerschel credit for discovering the trifunctional elements of the Coriolanus story, which he sees as embodying elements of the “very archaic ideal of the warrior class” and recognising that this may be “incompatible with the morality of the citizen” (p. 435).
Fifteen years later he returned to Gerschel’s reading. This came in the third volume of Mythe et Épopée in 1973, of which a large part has been translated as the English book Camillus. (For a list of what is, and what isn’t translated in this series, see here.) In the third chapter of the third part of that book, not translated into English, Dumézil discusses the story of Coriolanus at length and builds on Gerschel’s account (pp. 239-62). Part of the point of Dumézil’s discussion is to systematise Gerschel’s insights, but also to provide a comparison with Camillus. Gerschel’s death around this time was, it seems, a significant factor in his paying tribute to him through this detailed reading. Indeed, in a note, Dumézil indicates that on one point Gerschel’s original manuscript had a different interpretation, but that he advised him to make a change (pp. 257-58, n. 1). Regretting that now, he presents the original analysis, giving Gerschel credit.
As Littleton outlines the argument of the piece:
In the case of Coriolanus, Dumézil seems finally to have accepted the basic interpretation offered many years ago by Gerschel (1954), to the effect that Coriolanus acts as a thoroughly disturbing element in the body politique and that he, like Camillus, commits a series of offenses against ‘the system’. These include, again in chronological order, refusing to sell grain to the poor at a reasonable price (third function), a sacrilegious attack on a Tribune, who was considered inviolable (first function), and raising a private army and paying it with illgotten gains (i.e. the praeda, which he had usurped; second function) (Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology, p. 239).
Littleton adds that the account Dumézil offers is another indication of Indo-European ideology being replicated in the histories of early Rome.
Thus, although they are ostensibly historical figures, the accounts of the crimes of Camillus and Coriolanus demonstrate once again how deeply the inherited Indo-European had penetrated Roman historical thought. Not, of course, at the conscious level; but Livy, Plutarch, et. al., were indeed unconsciously drawing upon an ideological model already over three millennia old at the time they wrote (Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology, pp. 239-40).
Neither Gerschel nor Dumézil mention Shakespeare’s dramatic retelling of the story. The literature on Coriolanus more generally is, of course, huge, but I know of only a few pieces that discuss Gerschel or Dumézil’s work in relation to Shakespeare. Richard Wilson mentions Dumézil in relation to Julius Caesar in Shakespeare in French Theory, while for this playRoger Woodard’s article “Coriolanus and Fortuna Muliebris” acknowledges the importance of Gerschel and Dumézil’s accounts. Woodard uses a quote from Shakespeare’s play as the epigraph to his article, but does not otherwise mention Shakespeare. His essay is primarily concerned with the different sources of the classical figure, and the way Coriolanus exhibits elements of an archetype. It is an extension of the arguments in his book Myth, Ritual, and the Warrior in Roman and Indo-European Antiquity, where he looks at the returning warrior who, because of their experience of combat, becomes a threat to their own community. Coriolanus certainly fits that role. In an earlier piece Tim Cornell discusses the Coriolanus story, in terms of the historical sources, Shakespeare’s dramatization, and the readings of Gerschel and Dumézil. He suggests that
As so often in the work of Dumézil and his pupils, this analysis is brilliantly argued and expressed with great lucidity. The insights are often acute but their utility is limited by the procrustean framework of the three functions, and the idea that the historical tradition of early Rome was constructed by a person or persons possessing a genetically inherited ‘Indo-European’ mental outlook—a pseudo-scientific notion that is as implausible as it is potentially dangerous (“Coriolanus: Myth, History and Performance”, p. 82).
These pieces are interesting and useful sources for a wider discussion. I wonder if it might be worthwhile to explore Shakespeare’s play further in the light of these readings.
References
Roger Caillois, L’Homme et le sacré, Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1939, second edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1950; Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1959.
Tim Cornell, “Coriolanus: Myth, History and Performance”, in David Braund and Christopher Gill (eds.), Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome: Studies in Honor of T. P. Wiseman, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003, 73-97.
Georges Dumézil, Jupiter Mars Quirinus IV: Explication de textes indiens et latins, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948.
Georges Dumézil, “Sur quelques expressions symboliques de la structure religieuse tripartie à Rome”, Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique XLV, 1952, 43-46.
Georges Dumézil, “Les Trois fonctions dans quelques traditions grecques”, Éventail de l’histoire vivante: Hommage à Lucien Febvre, Paris: Armand Colin, two volumes, 1953, Vol II, 25-32.
Georges Dumézil, “L’idéologie des trois fonctions dans quelques crises de l’histoire romaine”, Latomus 17 (3), 1958, 429-46.
Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée I: L’idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuples indo-européens, Paris: Gallimard, fifth edition, 1986 [1968].
Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée III: Histoires romaines, Paris: Gallimard, 1973.
Georges Dumézil, Mariages indo-européens, suivi de Quinze questions romaines, Paris: Payot, 1979.
Georges Dumézil, Camillus: A Study of Indo-European Religion as Roman History, trans. Annette Aronowicz and Josette Bryson, ed. Udo Strutynski, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.
Stuart Elden, “Bellies, Wounds, Infections, Animals, Territories: The Political Bodies of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus”, in Jenny Edkins and Adrian Kear (eds.), International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice, London: Routledge, 2013, 179-200.
Stuart Elden, Shakespearean Territories, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Lucien Gerschel, “Saliens de Mars et Saliens de Quirinus”, Revue de l’histoire des religions 138 (2), 1950, 145-51.
Lucien Gerschel, “Structures augurales et tripartition fonctionelle dans la pensée de l’ancienne Rome”, Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique XLV, 1952, 47-77.
Lucien Gerschel, “Coriolan”, Éventail de l’histoire vivante: Hommage à Lucien Febvre, Paris: Armand Colin, two volumes, 1953, Vol II, 33-40.
Lucien Gerschel, “Sur un schème trifonctionnel dans une famille de légendes germaniques”, Revue de l’histoire des religions 150 (1), 1956, 55-92.
Lucien Gerschel, “Georges Dumezil’s Comparative Studies in Tales and Traditions”, trans. Archer Taylor, Midwest Folklore 7 (3), 1957, 141-48.
Lucien Gerschel, “Un episode trifonctionnel dans la saga de Hrólfr Kraki”, Hommages à Georges Dumézil, Bruxelles: Latomus, 1960, 104-16.
Lucien Gerschel, “Comment comptaient les anciens Romains?” Hommages à Léon Herrmann, Bruxelles: Latomus, 1960, 386-97.
Lucien Gerschel, “L’Ogam et le nombre: Préhistoire des caractères ogamiques”, Études Celtiques 10 (1), 1962, 127-66.
Lucien Gerschel, “La conquête du nombre: des modalités du compte aux structures de la pensée”, Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales 17 (4), 1962, 691-714.
Lucien Gerschel, “L’Ogam et le nom”, Études Celtiques 10 (2), 1963, 516-57.
Lucien Gerschel, “Couleur et teinture chez divers peuples indo-européens”, Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales 21 (3), 1966, 608-31.
C. Scott Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil, Berkeley: University of California Press, third edition, 1982 [1966].
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland, London: Arden Shakespeare, 2013.
Udo Strutynski, “The Survival of Indo-European Mythology in Germanic Legendry: Toward an Interdisciplinary Nexus”, The Journal of American Folklore 97 (383), 1984, 43-56.
Richard Wilson, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows, London: Routledge, 2007.
Roger D. Woodard, Myth, Ritual, and the Warrior in Roman and Indo-European Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Roger D. Woodard, “Coriolanus and Fortuna Muliebris”, JASCA 4 (2), 2020, 1-32.
Archives
Fonds Georges Dumézil, Collège de France
It is the 33rd post of a weekly series, where I post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few shorter pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week.
Stealing from the Gods investigates how authors writing between the first century BCE and second century CE addressed the issue of temple robbery or sacrilegium. As a self-proclaimed empire of pious people, the Romans viewed temple robbery as deeply un-Roman and among the worst of offenses. On the other hand, given the constant financial pressures of warfare and administration, it was inevitable that the Romans would make use of the riches stored in sanctuaries. In order to resolve this dilemma, the Romans distinguished sharply between acceptable and unacceptable removals of sacred property. When those who conducted themselves as proper Romans plundered the property of the gods, their actions were for the good of the state. In contrast, the temple robber was viewed as a stranger to the norms of Roman society and an enemy of the state.
Roman authors including Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Appian, and Pausanias present isolated, grotesque individuals whose actions have no bearing on the conduct of Romans as a whole, rendering temple robbery not a matter of collective responsibility, but of individual moral failure. By revealing how narratives of temple robbery are constructed from a literary perspective and how they inform discourses about military conquest and imperial rule, Isabel K. Köster shines a new light on how the Romans coped with the more pernicious aspects of their empire.
Anna Ferrando is a researcher in Contemporary History at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy. Her work explores the relationship between publishing and politics from a transnational perspective, focusing chiefly on twentieth-century cultural mediators. She edited a volume on translations under Fascism, Stranieri all’ombra del Duce.Le traduzioni durante il fascismo [Foreigners in the Shadow of the Duce: Translations During Fascism] (FrancoAngeli, 2019). She recently published a history of the Adelphi publishing house, titled Adelphi. Le origini di una casa editrice (1938–1994) [Adelphi: The Origins of a Publishing House, 1938–1994] (Carocci, 2023). Her interview with Rose Facchini explores all of these themes, centering on Ferrando’s Cacciatori di libri. Gli agenti letterari durante il fascismo [Book Hunters: Literary Agents under Fascism] (FrancoAngeli, 2019), which was awarded the SISSCO Prize for “Best Debut Book” by the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History.
The use of archives of literary agents is really interesting – later this month I’ll share what I found out about Foucault’s early English translations in the archives of the Georges Borchardt literary agency. [Update: now available here.]
For the last 30 years, scholars have treated Enlightenment race theory and nineteenth-century German colonialism as two distinct events. In Colonialism and Enlightenment, editors Bettina Brandt and Daniel L. Purdy present perspectives from scholars across the fields of philosophy, postcolonialism, literature, and German and African American studies, who challenge this view, providing a critical examination of the historical connection between “scientific” racial theory in late-Enlightenment Germany and the forces of colonialism and Nazism over a hundred years later. From its first formulations in the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century, German race theory was implicated in colonialism. Philosophers and biologists drew their arguments about race from information that was generated by the slave trade and plantation economies in the Americas. Their reliance on colonial data was applied to so-called “internal colonization” within Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as to seaborn European competition in South Asia. Most strikingly, some of the sites of German race theorization, such as East Prussia and the Baltic states, were themselves long-established colonies with ethnic separations between ruling and laboring populations. Race theory depended not only on the exploration of distant islands in the Pacific, but on the long-term exploitation and breeding of forcefully transported populations across the Atlantic. Without the involuntary migration of Africans, nineteenth century racial scientists would not have been able to engage in arguments about crossbreeding, skull size, and skin color. The chapters in this volume explore how eighteenth-century German theories about race reinforced discourses on colonial settlements, both within and outside Europe. Given the multiple, often contradictory positions developed in the Enlightenment, Brandt and Purdy explore how later race thinkers responded to earlier concepts. How did Enlightenment-era debates figure into later forms of racism? How did nationalist and Nazi racisms view Enlightenment anthropology? What Enlightenment concepts and configurations persisted into the twentieth century? Taking a broad view, the scholars in this volume offer a variety of positions on these and other questions as they take stock of the debates about race and the Enlightenment held over the last 20 years.
Critical Theory: The Basics brings clarity to a topic that is confusingly bandied about with various meanings today in popular and academic culture.
First defined by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s, “critical theory” now extends far beyond its original German context around the Frankfurt School and the emergence of Nazism. We now often speak of critical theories of race, gender, anti-colonialism, and so forth. This book introduces especially the core program of the first-generation of the Frankfurt School (including Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse), and shows how this program remains crucial to understanding the problems, ideologies, and systems of the modern world, including capitalism, racism, sexism, and the enduring problems of colonialism. It explores basic questions like:
What is critical theory?
What can critical theory be? What should it be?
Why and how does critical theory remain vital to understanding the contemporary world, including notions of self, society, politics, art, religion, culture, race, gender, and class?
With suggestions for further reading, this book is an ideal starting point for anyone seeking an accessible but robust introduction to the richness and complexity of this tradition and to its continuing importance today.
The difficulty of Jacques Lacan’s thought is notorious. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan cuts through this difficulty to provide a clear, jargon-free approach to understanding it. The book describes Lacan’s life, the context from which he emerged, and the reception of his theory. Readers will come away with an understanding of concepts such as jouissance, the objet a, and the big Other. The book frames Lacan’s thought in the history of philosophy and explains it through jokes, films, and popular culture. In this light, Lacan becomes a thinker of philosophical importance in his own right, on a par with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Lacan’s great contribution is the introduction of the unconscious into subjectivity, which results in a challenge to both the psychoanalytic establishment and to philosophers. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan provides readers with a way of understanding the nature of Lacan’s contribution.
Allows the reader to learn about Jacques Lacan’s theory in an enjoyable manner
Presents Lacan in relation to the history of philosophy
Introduces all of Lacan’s key concepts separately in a clear and detailed way
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.
