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.
Examines how four intellectuals with ties to the French social sciences articulated a new primitivist sensibility between 1945 and 1975.
We tend to associate primitivism with the nostalgic idealization of origins, often aimed at parts of the world that are viewed as closer to that idealized past than modern post-industrial society. Primitivist impulses still exist in popular culture, whether in paleo diets or returns to foraging, and they can also be seen in intellectual and political circles in debates around the possibility of degrowth. In this book, historian Ryan L. Allen examines primitivism anew through four fascinating figures: Georges Bataille, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Devereux, and Mircea Eliade.
In the postwar period, Allen shows, the French social sciences reappraised the primitive and archaic from anthropological, sociological, psychiatric, or religious angles. These thinkers sought past alternatives to midcentury hyper-modernization and capitalist excess. They put forth trenchant critiques of contemporary society and sought in the archaic past a way to imagine a more sustainable future. Adventures in the Archaic rehabilitates these thinkers, showing how their critique of growth and consumerism was nourished by an engagement with primitive cultures as potential sources of cultural and ecological wisdom. As we confront ecological crisis, Allen suggests that there is still something to learn from these iconoclastic approaches.
“Models of Ideological Analysis” by Fredric Jameson, Opening Lecture of 1977 Institute on Culture & Society (audio recording)
Remastered audio of Fredric Jamesons opening lecture at the 1977 Institute On Culture & Society sponsored by the Marxist Literary Group and hosted by St. Cloud State University.
The second lecture is “Ideology: Marx and Lukacs“ and is contextualised in “The Jameson Tapes, Side B”. The contributors to the Jameson Tapes include Anna Kornbluh, Isabel Bartholomew, Caleb Smith and Robert T. Tally, Jr.
Wolff will be the subject of one of my ‘Sunday Histories’ posts – he was administrator of the Collège de France and a biologist with interesting links to philosophy. The Bataille essays translated in this volume have been added to my list of translations of his work.
Very expensive hardback only, unfortunately, but e-book also available.
This multidisciplinary book provides a diverse overview of social science approaches to geopolitical borders, social boundaries and cultural frontiers. It discusses the multiplicity of borders with a view to addressing the question: how far have we come?
Chapters present narratives on statecraft, law and violence relating to geopolitical borders, adopting cultural and historical perspectives. An array of esteemed specialists examine political imaginaries of border security and identify methodological innovations that will enhance future scholarly work in the field. They highlight regional and global problems tied to borders, looking at issues such as sovereignty, citizenship, security, migration and social justice. Ultimately, it illustrates that metaphorical borders delineating identity and culture are as real as any political, economic or social boundary.
Border Studies: A Multidisciplinary Approach draws on perspectives from geography, political science, international relations, history, social anthropology, law and economics, making this an invigorating read for scholars in these fields. Practitioners in politics, government, international relations and law will also greatly benefit from its unique insights.
In the 1949-50 academic year, Claude Lévi-Strauss gave the Fondation Loubat lectures at the Collège de France. He was hoping to get elected to a chair there at this time, and behind the scenes various people were lobbying for this to happen. Giving a guest series of lectures could be a prelude to election, but these attempts were unsuccessful. Émile Benveniste and the psychologist Henri Piéron were among those trying to get Lévi-Strauss elected, and the idea of a chair in Comparative Sociology with him in mind was discussed at the Assemblée des Professeurs on 27 November 1949. The decision was to go for a chair in the history of Paris and the Seine département instead. No formal proposal for a chair in Comparative Sociology, much less an application by Lévi-Strauss to fill it, seems to have been produced.
Lévi-Strauss’s Loubat lectures are generally given the title of “L’expression mythique de la structure sociale”, “The Mythic Expression of Social Structure”. This is how a notice in the Annuaire de Collège de France describes them. Lévi-Strauss had given the Collège administrator Édmond Faral the slightly longer title “L’expression mythique de la structure sociale chez les populations indigènes de l’Amérique [… among the Indigeneous Populations of America]”. Oliver Jacquot‘s brief history of the Loubat lectures gives that title too. Lévi-Strauss’s EPHE page gives a more specific focus in a description: “Analyse structurale du thème du Glouton dans la mythologie de l’Amérique du Nord [Structural Analysis of the theme of the Wolverine in North American mythology]”.
The focus on North America makes sense given the remit of the Fondation, with a concentration on a specific myth as Lévi-Strauss developed the work. However, the retrospective Annuaire de Collège de France notice reverts to the original title. The lectures were held on 5, 12, 19, and 26 January, and 2 and 9 February 1950. André Breton, the painter Max Ernst, Georges Dumézil, and Merleau-Ponty were among the audience, and it’s likely Benveniste and Piéron also attended. Lévi-Strauss was paid 30,000 francs for the course.
The more specific focus of the lectures is supported by the fullest published discussion of the lectures of which I am aware – a letter to Roman Jakobson dated 27 January 1950. The letter has only been published in French, but is part-quoted and translated in Emmanuelle Loyer’s excellent biography of Lévi-Strauss. The longer relevant passage reads:
For I am deep into mythology as well! I am currently giving the lectures of the Loubat Foundation for American Antiquities at the Collège de France, and I have chosen to focus on the theme of the wolverine [glouton] in North America, of which I am trying to provide a structural analysis. This entails studying the connections between 1) the traits of the figure (gluttony [gloutonnerie], clownishness, obscenity, scatology, cannibalism, beggary, etc.); 2) the sociological level at which it is expressed in each culture (collective behaviour, individual vocation, ritual personification, folkloric theme, mythical theme, etc.), 3) the relation between the ‘territory’ defined by these two axes and the rest of the social structure. This has yielded rather striking results, which were totally unexpected and caught me off-guard; for I am almost brought back to Engels, the Origins of the Family, etc. […] Anyway, this will be the next book I write next summer.The Arthurian cycle is part of this affair, for I am almost sure that the character of Percival developed from a figure analogous to that of the wolverine found in American rituals.
Lévi-Strauss did not develop the lectures into the book he mentions. In the 1950s, he published his long introduction to Marcel Mauss, Tristes Tropiques, and the first volume of Structural Anthropology, as well as shorter pieces and lectures. But these particular lectures were not published. There is a discussion of the animal called the wolverine in La pensée sauvage in 1962, but nothing like as developed an argument as suggested here. That book was first translated as The Savage Mind and more recently retranslated as Wild Thought. The analysis there is in just two passages, noting that there is an uncertainty about which animal is referred to in a particular myth, indicating some aspects of its character and its regional distribution (La pensée sauvage, 67-68, 70-71; Wild Thought, 56-59, 61-62). There are also mentions of the wolverine in the Mythologiques series.
The online inventory of the fonds Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Bibliothèque nationale de France does not indicate a place where the lectures might be – the listing of Collège de France courses begins with the commencement of his chair there, while other teaching records or conferences seem to be dated and placed elsewhere. I’ve asked a couple of people who work on Lévi-Strauss and know these archives, and they have said there is no trace of the lectures. As this is almost a decade before he was elected to a chair at the Collège de France, there is also no record in the otherwise very useful Paroles données/Anthropology and Myth collection of his course summaries from the Collège and the École Pratique des Hautes Études.
There is however a file of correspondence relating to the lectures, and a brief summary, a typewritten text of about 1000 words by Lévi-Strauss, in the Collège de France archives. It expands on the points in the letter to Jakobson, and is the fullest description of the lectures that seems to exist. Two aspects of the summary are especially interesting.
One is the geographical dimension of the analysis, ranging from the Pueblo people of the south-west United States to the north-west Pacific coast, and the Plains. The particular forms the wolverine takes in the mythologies he analyses are characterised as the Fool, Clown and Cannibal, with intermediate forms between the three types. Another interesting aspect is the importance of situating mythical thought in relation to other aspects of social life, including ritual, law, customs and psychological behaviour, stressing that myth is not an autonomous category and that different mythical tales cannot be compared without taking sociological context into account. Here the geographical aspects become significant again, as minute variations in a relatively limited area allow a more systematic comparison.
Lévi-Strauss indicates that 110-125 people attended the lectures, beyond the normal capacity of the lecture hall. It seems this summary was written for the Collège de France Annuaire, but it was not used. Instead, the Annuaire published just this very brief notice – which even manages to misspell Lévi-Strauss’s name.
excerpt from the Annuaire du Collège de France, 50, p. 246 – (with misspelling of Lévi-Strauss’s name)
The summary Lévi-Strauss wrote was never published. At the end of 1950 Lévi-Strauss was again discussed for a possible chair in Comparative Sociology, with Benveniste taking the lead, but this too was unsuccessful. These failed bids for a chair perhaps helps to explain why he never wrote up the lectures and – at least as far as we can tell – did not even keep the manuscripts. In 1959, Lévi-Strauss was finally elected to a chair in Social Anthropology at the Collège, when Maurice Merleau-Ponty led the process for his election. He taught there for over twenty years.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss”, in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris: PUF, 2013 [1950], ix-lii; Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker, London: Routledge, 1987.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Paris: Plon, 1955; Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, London: Penguin, 1992.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, Paris: Plon, 1958; Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Broke Grundfest Schoepf, New York: Basic Books, 1963.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage, Paris: Plon, 1962; The Savage Mind, London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1966; Wild Thought,trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paroles données, Paris: Plon, 1984; Anthropology and Myth: Lectures 1951-1982, trans. Roy Willis, Oxford: 1987.
Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, De près et de loin suivi de «Deux ans après», Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990; Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. Paula Wissing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Correspondance 1942-1982, eds. Emmanuelle Loyer and Patrice Maniglier, Paris: Seuil, 2018.
Emmanuelle Loyer, Lévi-Strauss, Paris: Flammarion, 2015; Lévi-Strauss: A Biography, trans. Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff, Cambridge: Polity, 2018.
Patrick Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Archives
Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 28150, Fonds Claude Lévi-Strauss
Collège de France, 24 CDF 2/3-b, 1949-50 Fondation Loubat
Collège de France, CDF 2 AP 14, Assemblée des Professeurs
This is a revised and expanded version of a post from May 2023. It is the 32nd 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.
Independence for Children presents an alternative conception of parenting to those that have dominated our thinking about children and the family to date. It offers an elaboration and defence of anti-perfectionist parenting. The central argument of this book is that, as they develop, children become entitled to adopt and pursue their own conceptions of religion and human well-being. As young children, they are entitled to an upbringing that is informed by ideals and reasons they can later accept in the light of the religious or ethical values they go on to hold as adults. In short, parents and others owe children an upbringing from which they are not alienated later in life.
Parental anti-perfectionism suggests that parents should introduce their children to the various and sometimes competing views concerning our place in the universe and human flourishing and raise them to be respectful of the diversity of lifestyles within society. But Matthew Clayton argues that parents have no right to steer their children towards particular religious doctrines or conceptions of human flourishing, and that religious schools ought to be phased out.
This book addresses several questions in the philosophy of upbringing, such as how we ought to understand the interests of children, the moral claims of parents, and what constitutes a valuable family life. Clayton finishes by briefly exploring the implications of anti-perfectionist morality for how parents ought to approach issues concerning work, consumption, gender, and food.
