The Lake Kivu region, which borders Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has often been defined by scholars in terms of conflict, violence, and separation. In contrast, this innovative study explores histories of continuities and connections across the borderland. Gillian Mathys utilises an integrated historical perspective to trace long-term processes in the region, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century and reaching to the present day. Fractured Pasts in Lake Kivu’s Borderlands powerfully reshapes historical understandings of mobility, conflict, identity formation and historical narration in and across state and ecological borders. In doing so, Mathys deconstructs reductive historical myths that have continued to underpin justifications for violence in the region. Drawing on cross-border oral history research and a wealth of archival material, Fractured Pasts embraces a new and powerful perspective of the region’s history.
Provides a longue-durée perspective of socio-political processes in the Lake Kivu region
Offers an integrated analysis of processes that have shaped current relations between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Rejects a focus on separations and violence in the region, instead exploring histories of continuities and connections
Renews our understanding of Shakespeare through an interdisciplinary focus on hospitality
Offers innovative literary analysis of canonical plays including The Merchant of Venice, providing a fresh interpretation of the stranger question
Engages with different theoretical approaches to hospitality in order to read Shakespeare as a dramatist of ethical encounter
Reconsiders the early modern interest in limits, thresholds, and boundaries, showing the significance to guest and host relationships in the drama
Assembles a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary methodology by drawing on major thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Anne Dufourmantelle, Gaston Bachelard and Michel Serres
In this critical analysis, Sophie E. Battell examines hospitality in Shakespeare’s plays. By drawing on literary theory, modern philosophy, and anthropology as well as early modern scientific and religious texts, the book advances our understanding of Shakespeare as a dramatist concerned with the ethical questions at stake in encounters between guests and hosts of various kinds.
The close readings and scholarly interventions presented here reconceive the plays in terms of a poetics of hospitality while arguing for an expansive, far-reaching vision of what it means to be open to the world and welcoming of others. Moving from the levels of subjectivity, the body, and the senses to architecture, economics, legal discourse, and the natural environment, On the Threshold not only makes important contributions to Shakespeare studies but forges new connections between Renaissance literary scholarship and contemporary debates on the politics of migrants and refugees.
Philippe Chevallier, Henri-Paul Fruchaud and colleagues have catalogued much of Foucault and Defert’s personal library, which will soon become available online at the Foucault fiches de lecture site. Thanks to Niki Kasumi Clements, who helped with the cataloguing, for the link. Some other parts of Foucault’s collection – books with dedications from their authors – are at Yale’s Beinecke library, which I visited in 2018.
Foucault and his cat, apparently called ‘Insanity’
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 moi-même avons été aidés dans notre 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 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, UMS 2267)…
The shelves in different rooms of the apartment are in lots of photos of Foucault at home (i.e. here or here), and were still there when I visited Defert in 2015. He’s signing a copy of Un Vie Politique for me.
A photograph of Daniel Defert signing a book in Foucault’s old apartment
The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism explores how counter-radicalization policies have come to dominate European counterterrorism and security. Using interviews with practitioners across seven European nations, it documents how national security policies have been repurposed to identify individuals deemed ‘vulnerable’ to extremism and radicalization, and to provide targeted preventative interventions from welfare state agencies. Crucially, however, the methods (and limits) of preventing violent extremism (PVE) policies vary between nations. The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism explores how political culture, the welfare state, and the conception of civil society in each nation shapes the type of counter-radicalization employed. While some European states have designed extensive pre-crime surveillance networks to identify those ‘radicalizing’ others, other states in Europe are bound by constitutional commitments to liberty of thought and speech which restrain them from using any type of pre-crime intervention. Accordingly, while PVE policies have been heralded as a novel solution to the problem of radicalization, they remain rooted in, and limited by, the political and social traditions of European democracies.
The 18-21 October 1966 Baltimore conference on structuralism has long been recognised as important for the reception of French theory in the United States. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Lucien Goldmann, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan and Jean-Pierre Vernant were some of the French theorists brought to Johns Hopkins University for the event. Fernand Braudel and Claude Lévi-Strauss were involved in the planning but did not attend. Peter Caws, Paul de Man, Tzvetan Todorov, and Edward Said attended. Roman Jakobson was in Europe at the time, so could not be there. Michel Foucault was apparently invited, but didn’t attend. Derrida’s closing paper, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, is the most famous talk, not least for being a fundamental disruption of structuralism, almost as soon as it had arrived. He was a late addition to the lineup.
The conference was organised by René Girard, Richard Macksey, and Eugenio Donato. The story of the event is well told in Chapter 8 of Cynthia L. Haven’s biography of Girard, Evolution of Desire, based on conversations with Macksey and Girard. That’s worth a read just for a sense of Lacan’s prima-donna behaviour – his laundry demands, his underprepared paper, and his huge hotel phone bill.The editors of the proceedings remark that Lacan “chose to deliver his communication alternately in English and French (and at points in a composite of the two languages), this text represents an edited transcription and paraphrase of his address” (The Structuralist Controversy,p. 186 n. 1). Macksey recalls that Anthony Wilden had “the challenging role of serving night and day as Dr. Lacan’s cicerone, valet, and amanuensis” (“Anniversary Reflections”, p. xiv). Presumably because of jetlag, Lacan was awake at dawn, and incorporated this into his paper:
When I prepared this little talk for you, it was early in the morning. I could see Baltimore through the window and it was a very interesting moment because it was not quite daylight and a neon sign indicated to me every minute the change of time, and naturally there was heavy traffic and I remarked to myself that exactly all that I could see, except for some trees in the distance, was the result of thoughts actively thinking thoughts, where the function played by the subjects was not completely obvious. In any case the so-called Dasein as a definition of the subject, was there in this rather intermittent or fading spectator. The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning (The Structuralist Controversy,p. 189).
The event was generously funded by the Ford Foundation – “just enough gunpowder to make the cannon go off” (Macksey, quoted by Haven, Evolution of Desire,p. 123) – and led to seminars over a two-year period. After the event, Girard left the editing work to his younger colleagues: only Donato and Macksey appear as editors of 1970 book The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, though Girard’s paper and concluding remarks to the conference are included. The book was dedicated to “the memory of Jean Hyppolite—scholar, teacher and friend of scholars” (p. v), who died in 1968. The paperback edition of 1972 has its better-known title of The Structuralist Controversy, the original book’s subtitle. (That edition has a brief new preface, and a bibliographical note, but removes the French texts of Goldman, Hyppolite and Vernant in the appendix.) A fortieth-anniversary edition appeared in 2017, which is quite funny, because it shows how academics always miss deadlines: a fortieth anniversary of the book would have been 2010. Perhaps they should have commemorated fifty years of the event, and only been late by a year. The editors thank Sally Donato and Catherine Macksey, and Nancy Gallienne of The Johns Hopkins University Press, but they are the only women who seem to have been involved in the event or book (p. xix).
Girard is well-known, and Macksay had a profile in Literary Hub, while images of his crammed personal library regularly circulate online (see here and here). The third name has not had the same attention. Haven describes him as “that brilliant figure who has been somewhat overlooked in American intellectual history—the restless, quicksilver Eugenio Donato” (p. 122). Donato had received his doctorate in 1965 from Johns Hopkins University, where he was advised by Girard. He taught at Cornell University (1963-64), Johns Hopkins (1964-68), State University of New York at Buffalo (1968-76) and ended his career at the University of California, Irvine (1976-83). He was Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Buffalo when Foucault visited in 1970 and 1972, a visit mediated by Girard. Donato had followed Girard to Buffalo, part of what Haven calls a “long and tempestuous relationship” (p. 144).
Richard Macksey’s personal library
Donato died at the age of just 46 in 1983. Macksey wrote a short tribute for MLN, a journal in which Donato had published much of his work. The following year, Donato’s former PhD researcher, Josué Harari, on whom I’ve written before in relation to Foucault and Sade, led a tribute issue of MLN for him. It appeared as the French Issue, Vol 99 No 4. As well as Harari’s brief tribute and a longer essay by him, it included pieces by Derrida, Girard, Macksey and Said. The issue was bookended by two essays by Donato, “Who Signs Flaubert?” and “The Writ of the Eye”. The first was an English version of a text he had published in the journal in French shortly before he died; the second an unpublished text discovered after Donato’s death.
In the fortieth anniversary reflections of The Structuralist Controversy, Macksey says:
This is also an opportunity to salute the memory of Eugenio Donato (1937-83). One of the youngest participants in the symposium (two years younger than Edward Said, among the colloquists), the vector of his career was already established by the time of these meetings. He had instituted seminars on Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, and other players in the structuralist drama; had stimulated colleagues; and inspired students. With his too-early death we lost a generous friend, a vital animator of debates, and a pioneer in critical exchange. Here as elsewhere he was instrumental in bringing Continental theory and American critical practice into an active dialogue. The force of his personality played a vital role in teaching many on this side of the Atlantic how to read critically and in showing their European colleagues how to listen sympathetically (p. xiii).
Donato knew Foucault’s 1970 lectures at Buffalo, which included a discussion of Flaubert. The notes for that lecture are included in Madness, Language, Literature. Like Harari and Sade, Donato and Flaubert is another indication of the interest Foucault’s lectures would have had for his audience. Although Donato does not reference Foucault in “Who Signs Flaubert?”, the essay develops two themes from his visit. First, it situates Flaubert’s work between The Temptation of St Antony and the unfinished Bouvard and Pécuchet, the two books Foucault had concentrated on in his Buffalo lecture, rather than the more famous Madame Bovary or Sentimental Education. Second, it has a sustained analysis of the authorial status of ‘Flaubert’ – Foucault had given a version of “What is an Author?” in Buffalo.
A decade after his death, Donato’s work was compiled into The Script of Decadence: Essays on the Fictions of Flaubert and the Poetics of Romanticism, published by Oxford University Press. This text includes “Who Signs Flaubert?” The other essays reference Foucault in several places, both his essay on Flaubert and The Order of Things. The book contains detailed discussions of Bouvard and Pécuchet and The Temptation of St Anthony(Chs. 3 and 4), which he privileges, suggesting they challenge the idea of Flaubert as a realist (pp. 36, 103). He reads Bouvard and Pécuchet in relation to the encyclopaedic aspirations of the protagonists, and Flaubert’s own comments about the way he composed the work. It is a book made from fragments of other books, “the metaphor of the Encyclopedia-Library”.In this reading Donato stresses that Foucault and Hugh Kenner were following Jean Seznec, “but without acknowledging him” (p. 57), and he recognises the limitations of this approach to the novel (pp. 59-60). Donato also criticises the archaeological metaphors of Foucault’s work of the late 1960s (p. 66). Unlike Foucault, he also discusses Salammbô in detail (Ch. 2). This chapter, first published in 1976, predates Edward Said’s discussion of this text in Orientalism, and forms an interesting complement to that reading.
In 2023, recordings of the 1966 Baltimore conference were made available online, with transcriptions of some of the talks, including the ones by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Jacques Derrida. In the preface, the editors had noted that the book had been edited from “some thirty hours of tapes” (p. xvii). The tapes were eventually found in Macksey’s home library. Johns Hopkins librarian Liz Mengel describes the discovery: “They were hidden in a cabinet behind a bookshelf behind a couch” (quoted by Dwyer). Derrida’s lecture differs from the published version, and includes more of the discussion after his lecture. Lacan’s “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever” paper is more amusing as a recording than on the page.
As early as 1973 Donato was suggesting that:
Structuralism as a critical concept has outlived its usefulness. It should not be long before it finds its rightful place in textbooks of philosophy or cultural history. Few will miss its disappearance. If the works of Foucault and Derrida are a sign of things to come, a new problematic remains to be developed with Nietzsche at the center, occupying the place that Hegel occupied when existentialism and structuralism ran their course (p. 25).
This was just a year after the paperback of The Structuralist Controversy, and two years after Josué Harari’s reading guide, Structuralists and Structuralisms: A Selected Bibliography of French Contemporary Thought (1960-1970), dedicated to Donato and Girard. As I’ve noted before, following Jonathan Culler, many of the figures included in this bibliography reappear in Harari’s 1979 collection Textual Strategies, whose subtitle is Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. As has often been suggested, Derrida’s closing lecture to the 1966 conference is one moment in the shift from structuralism to what is sometimes called post-structuralism. Given that this designation is an American label, Harari and Donato are significant figures in its shaping.
Another important moment would be the 1978 boundary 2 conference published in 1982 as The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism, edited by William V. Spanos, Daniel O’Hara and Paul Bové. Several key figures from this set of debates presented, including Said and Donato, who also had an exchange after their papers, as well as David Allison, Jonathan Arac, Joseph Buttigieg, David Couzens Hoy, Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, Murray Krieger, Marie-Rose Logan and Mark Poster. Again, it’s a very male line-up, with the exception of Logan. Perhaps that collection deserves a separate post.
References
Jonathan Culler, “1980: Structuralism and Poststructuralism”, Ex-position 40, 2018, 79-94.
Jacques Derrida, “An Idea of Flaubert: ‘Plato’s Letter’”, trans. Peter Starr, MLN 99 (4), 1984, 748-68.
Eugenio Donato, “Structuralism: The Aftermath”, SubStance 3 (7), 1973, 9-26.
Eugenio Donato, “Flaubert and the Question of History: Notes for a Critical Anthology”, MLN 91 (5), 1976, 850-70; reprinted in The Script of Decadence: Essays on the Fictions of Flaubert and the Poetics of Romanticism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, Ch. 2.
Eugenio Donato, “Qui Signe ‘Flaubert’?”, MLN 98 (4), 1983, 579-93; “Who Signs Flaubert?” MLN 99 (4), 1984, 711-26; English reprinted in The Script of Decadence: Essays on the Fictions of Flaubert and the Poetics of Romanticism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, Ch. 5.
Eugenio Donato, “The Writ of the Eye: Notes on the Relationship of Language to Vision in Critical Theory”, MLN 99 (4), 1984, 959-78.
Eugenio Donato, The Script of Decadence: Essays on the Fictions of Flaubert and the Poetics of Romanticism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Stuart Elden, The Archaeology of Foucault, Cambridge: Polity, 2023.
Michel Foucault, “Postface à Flaubert (G.) Die Versuchung des Heiligen Antonius (La Tentation de saint Antoine)”, Dits et écrits 1954-1988, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris: Gallimard, four volumes, 1994, Vol I,293-325 (comparative edition of the 1967 and 1970 French texts); “Afterword to The Temptation of Saint Anthony”, Essential Works Volume Two: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, New York: The New Press, 1998, 103-22 (translation of the 1967 text).
Michel Foucault, Folie, langage, littérature, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini and Judith Revel, Paris: Vrin, 2019; Madness, Language, Literature, trans. Robert Bononno, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
René Girard, “Dionysus versus the Crucified”, MLN 99 (4), 1984, 816-35.
Josué V. Harari, Structuralists and Structuralisms: A Selected Bibliography of French Contemporary Thought (1960-1970), Ithaca: Diacritics, 1971.
J.V. Harari ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.
Richard Macksey, “In Memorium: Eugenio Donato (1937-1983)”, MLN 98 (5), 1983, 1381-82.
Richard Macksey, “Keats and the Poetics of Extremity”, MLN 99 (4), 1984, 845-84.
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (eds.), The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970.
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (eds.), The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972; 40th anniversary edition 2017.
Richard Macksey, “Anniversary Reflections”, in Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (eds.), The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017, ix-xiv.
Edward W. Said, “The Future of Criticism”, MLN 99 (4), 1984, 951-58; reprinted in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, London: Granta, 2000, Ch. 16.
William V. Spanos, Paul A. Bové and Daniel O’Hara (eds.), The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
This is the twenty-seventh 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.
This book concerns the elemental geographies and lives and deaths of the drowned to confront enduring forms of oppression. Elaine Stratford documents with penetrating compassion and acumen how human and more-than-human bodies lose personhood in acts of violence, exploitation, marginalisation, cultural imperialism, and powerlessness. This work is both a scholarly and deeply personal call to rethink how we live with, remember, and honour the drowned. It offers profound insights to all those interested in human geography and allied disciplines.
How today’s dominant political forms—right-wing populism, progressivism, and liberalism—offer differentiated responses to shared conditions of uncertainty.
The Politics of Feeling argues that politics has become a matter of political feelings in an age of uncertainty. If the second half of the 20th century saw the defeat and exhaustion of fascism and socialism, what remained of ideological certainty in neoliberal democracies such as the UK and the US ran aground in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The Politics of Feeling is diagnostic of how the uncertainties of the post-2008 period have transformed the political arena and made the question of how people feel central to the formation of political affiliations and divisions. We identify three competing political forms in the US and the UK today: right-wing populism, progressivism, and contemporary liberalism. We argue that rather than naming coherent programs of political thought, these popular political forms are operating as arrangements or modes of attachment and political intensity. Each one suggests a different way of remembering the past, imagining the future, and making the present politically meaningful. Each one elevates some affective orientations over others and thereby etches differences of race, class, and gender within its structure. Tracing contemporary articulations of populism, progressivism and liberalism across US and UK contexts, we at once draw out commonalities and underline the way these forms diverge both between and within these societies. The Politics of Feeling is a critique of the living edge of politics: the emergent and shifting clusters of orientations and affects that continually work to differentiate political subjects, to intensify or alienate attachments and allegiances.
On 21 November 2024, in Rome, the historian of science Lorraine Daston was awarded the Balzan Prize for History of Modern and Contemporary Science, one of the world’s most prestigious academic awards. Administered by the International Balzan Prize Foundation, this award honours the work of scholars with internationally outstanding achievements. The General Prize Committee recognized Professor Daston ‘for the extent, originality and variety of her work, which has drawn on a wide range of scientific fields to highlight the mental representations and values underlying research activity’.
Daston has mainly explored concepts – such as probability, evidence, rationality, objectivity and many others – which shape our practices of knowledge, structure our thought and constitute the conditions of the possibility of our experience. For Daston, these organizing concepts – as we may call them – come into being through specific historical and social processes, and change and get their meaning from the uses we make of them in a certain period of history. Through tracing the trajectory of scientific objects and concepts in this way, Daston has expanded the field of historical epistemology. She attributes a special role to rationality, which could be described as a sort of meta-organizing concept that gets its meaning from the interaction of different organizing concepts and other epistemic elements in a given historical and social context. One of her best-known books, Objectivity (2007), co-authored with Peter Galison, charts the history of the conceptions of objectivity that emerged in the last three centuries and shows how each of these conceptions is rooted in an epistemic virtue, as the two scholars call the scientific ideal to which scientists are committed in a particular period or circumstance….
Explores how grief can help to negotiate our loss of affect for liberal democracy
Develops a timely diagnosis of the sources of contemporary discontent with democracy
Rereads the literature on mourning to develop a novel account of grief – as an experience and a response to affective loss, rather than an ontological condition
Brings together scholarship from a range of disciplinary areas – democratic theory, philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis
Critically engages with feminist discussions of vulnerability and care to show their importance for democratic thinking
Draws on examples from art and culture to illustrate how grief can be relevant to democratic politics
The book proposes that loss of affect for liberal democracy is a key problem today, in need of closer analysis. Manifested in an unprecedent suspicion of democratic governments, a readiness to elect authoritarian rulers, and a rise in reactionary politics, loss of affect pertains to the way that citizens experience democracy – their growing disinvestment from the democratic form of rule. It raises worrying questions, about the survival of democratic values into the twenty-first century, that democratic theorists often tend to either ignore or exaggerate. To navigate these questions, the book argues that grief can be a useful political resource. Understood as a response to loss, grief engages the imagination, opening the way to another, perhaps more caring, experience of democracy. To illuminate the nature of this experience, the book draws on feminist scholarship and work on contemporary culture, where grief and affect intersect.
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare in Bloomsbury, now in paperback; Michel Serres, Hermes II: Interference; the older collection The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism; Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s correspondence with Roman Jakobson in French translation; and Pierre Boulez’s lectures at the Collège de France. University of Minnesota Press sent the translation of Serres, and the others were bought new or second-hand.
