A few weeks ago I interviewed Katherine Hayles about writing, reading, using theory, being interdisciplinary and about various aspects of her books and ideas. The interview is now available as a video on the Media Theory journal website (as well as the full video, they’ve also included short versions based on different themes covered, and a transcript too). Or you can watch it [here]…
It begins with an interesting discussion of writing practices and book planning.
A wide-ranging history of the term “fascism,” what it has meant, and what it means today.
The rise and popular support for authoritarianism around the world and within traditional democracies have spurred debates over the meaning of the term “fascist” and when and whether it is appropriate to use it. The landmark study Fascism: The History of a Word takes this debate further by tackling its most fundamental questions: How did the terms “fascism” and “fascist” come to be in the first place? How and in what circumstances have they been used? How can they be understood today? And what are the advantages (or disadvantages) of using “fascism” to make sense of interwar authoritarianism as well as contemporary politics?
Exploring the writings and deeds of political leaders, activists, artists, authors, and philosophers, Federico Marcon traces the history of the term’s use (and usefulness) in relation to Mussolini’s political regime, antifascist resistance, and the quest of postwar historians to develop a definition of a “fascist minimum.” This investigation of the semiotics of “fascism” also aims to inquire about people’s voluntary renunciation of the modern emancipatory ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity.
Examines the meaning of five theopolitical figures – scripture, prophecy, oath, charisma and hospitality – in contemporary philosophical-political discourse
Re-inscribes contemporary political concepts and experiences in the ‘theological locus’ from which they supposedly come and at the same time looks for new semantic derivations for the political arena
Engages with various 20th century continental philosophers, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, John Caputo, Jean Luc Marion among others
Brings into dialogue discussions of theological literature and history
Combines philosophical reflection with case studies of the political interpretation of the Bible; the Lisbon earthquake of 1755; the transferences between oath and sacrament in early Christianity; and acclamations from the imperial cult to modern autocracies
Considers different theological traditions of thought, mainly, Christian and Jewish
This book explores the extent to which theological discourse has been, and continues to be, relevant in shaping the meanings, symbols and realities of certain instituted political practices. This relevance has historically manifested itself in the hybridisation of theological and political concepts, images, gestures, and rituals.
Focuses on key aspects of Robert Esposito’s thought and explores the ways in which some major contemporary thinkers have been crucial interlocutors in their elaboration.
Political Ontology, Community, and Institutions offers a broad view of the current philosophical dialogue in Italy, both in relation to Robert Esposito’s own thought and with respect to major issues and authors of crucial philosophical relevance. From his earliest works, Esposito questions the crisis of politics and why thought is unable to convincingly respond to it. He does so by distancing himself not only from political theology but also from those paradigms-destituent and constituent-that have lost nowadays much of their analytical and propositional capacity. However, his proposal is not only critical. Esposito’s thought relates to our present through the creation of new categories-among the most recent, those of “instituting thought” and “common immunity”-capable of opening a breach in an apparently increasingly closed horizon. Therefore, dealing with his thought means, first of all, dealing with our present. This is the main goal of this volume, which focuses on Esposito’s dialogue with major contemporary thinkers. Also included is an unpublished interview with Esposito conducted by the editors.
Exiled in the United States during the Second World War, linguist Roman Jakobson gave a series of lectures at the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York. These classes – attended among others by Claude Lévi-Strauss – had a major impact on contemporary human sciences. This book reconstructs and analyzes this momentous corpus. It also contains a critical edition of four previously unpublished lectures given by Jakobson in 1942–1943.
The “Liste Otto” was named after Otto Abetz, German ambassador to France under the Occupation, from August 1940 until the Liberation. The list indicated which books had to be removed from sale, with existing copies destroyed, after the German invasion of France. The September 1940 version replaced an earlier “Liste Bernhard”, and it was followed by a supplement, and two later versions in 1942 and 1943. The original version had the title “Ouvrages retirés de la vente par les éditeurs ou interdits par les autorités allemandes [Works withdrawn from sale by publishers or banned by the German authorities]”. One of the reasons some French presses pre-emptively removed books from their lists was in the hope they would be allowed to continue selling other works. In 1942 the list had the bilingual title “Unerwuenschte Franzoesische Literatur/Ouvrages Littéraires Français non désirables”, in 1943 “Unerwuenschte Literatur in Frankreich/Ouvrages Littéraires non désirables en France”.
The September 1940 list includes, unsurprisingly, Henri Lefebvre’s book Hitler au pouvoir, published in 1938. The Hitler book was a critical, Marxist assessment of five years of fascism in Germany. Its inclusion in a prohibited list was hardly surprising, but is only one aspect of the censorship of Lefebvre’s work. The list also includes Cahiers de Lénine sur la dialectique de Hegel (1938) and Karl Marx’s Morceaux choisis (1934), both of which Lefebvre had edited with Norbert Guterman.
Three books that were on the list – Le matérialisme dialectique shown here is a later reprint
Guterman was Jewish, so this alone would have been enough for inclusion on this list. But Lefebvre’s 1939 book on Nietzsche, his Le Nationalisme contre les Nations (1937) and the collection of texts he and Guterman had edited by Hegel (1938) are not on the lists, and neither is their co-authored book La conscience mystifiée (1936). In the third edition of the list in 1943, Lefebvre’s book Le Matérialisme dialectique (1940) was added.
three books that were not included on the lists
There is therefore something of an arbitrary nature of the list – there are obviously reasons why the Nazi occupiers would object to those books they did include, but those reasons would also seem to apply to ones they did not. The Nietzsche book, for example, is very much written as a challenge to the fascist appropriation.
After Le Matérialisme dialectique in 1940, Lefebvre did not publish another book until L’Existentialisme in 1946. For someone who usually published a book or two a year, this was quite a long break – the only comparable disruption to his regular publishing rhythm came when he was having difficulties with Communist Party censors in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was clearly storing up ideas during the war, as in 1947 he published five books – two on Marx, the first volume of his Critique de la vie quotidienne(Critique of Everyday Life), a study of Descartes and Logique formelle, logique dialectique.
During the war, Lefebvre moved back to the Pyrenees, working with the resistance – although the exact nature of his role is debated – and doing the research for what turned into his doctoral thesis in 1954. The primary thesis was on peasant communities and was published posthumously (Les Communautés paysannes Pyrénéennes); the second thesis was a historical and geographical study of one small area, La vallée du Campan, part of which is included in the On the Ruralcollection I co-edited with Adam David Morton in 2022.
One indication of the censorship Lefebvre experienced in the war comes in the original 1947 edition of Critique de la vie quotidienne. On the page ‘Du même auteur’, Lefebvre lists his previous publications. There he distinguishes three ways his books were suppressed:
seized and destroyed in October 1939 by order of the Daladier government
seized and destroyed at the beginning of 1940 by the publisher
seized and destroyed at the end of 1940 by the occupying authority, Liste ‘Otto’
Interestingly, he says Le Nationalismecontre les Nations was in the first category; Hitler and Nietzsche both in the second; Le matérialisme dialectique and the collections on Lenin and Hegel in the third. From the lists discussed above, this isn’t entirely correct, but it explains why the Nietzsche book was indeed removed from sale shortly after publication, and why copies are so hard to find today. The ‘Liste Otto’ did however usually list books withdrawn from sale by publishers, as well as ones the Germans banned.
Getting hold of some of these books can be challenging. They were often printed in limited numbers, and at least some copies were destroyed. While some have been reissued, the Hitler one never has been, and it was the last of Lefebvre’s books I was finally able to buy. The most easily accessible version is the Italian translation from 13 years ago – Hitler al potere. Cinque anni di nazismo in Germania. I first read the French book in the New York Public Library in 2002, since I don’t know of a copy in the UK, before getting the Italian translation and a photocopy of the French. I then later found an original copy in a second-hand bookshop. I say a bit more about the book here.
Le nationalisme contre les nations had a second edition in 1988; the Nietzsche book was reissued in 2003; Le materialisme dialectique has gone through multiple editions and was translated into English by John Sturrock. The Hegel collection is still in print, whereas the Marx collection was superseded by a two-volume collection of Oeuvres chosis edited by Lefebvre and Guterman in the 1960s.
The list of books by Lefebvre ‘En préparation’ in the Critique de la vie quotidienne list is also interesting – only a few of these were ever published. A full account of that is another story, involving censorship from the French Communist Party. Logique formelle, logique dialectique was supposed to be the first of an eight-volume series, under the working title of Traité du Matérialisme dialectique. The second volume, entitled Méthodologie des sciences, was written in the late 1940s but only published in 2002. In Logique formelle, logique dialectique Lefebvre gives an indication of six further volumes (pp. 11-12; see Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, 27-28).
In the Critique de la vie quotidienne list the titles are different:
Théorie de la Connaissance: logique et méthodologie
Matérialisme historique
Dialectique dans l’étude du Capital et de l’Etat
L’humanisme
Psychologie et théorie de l’individualité
Esthétique
Lefebvre published on the state, aesthetics and history at later points in his career, but only his Contribution à l’esthétique, written in the late 40s and published in 1953, comes close to the plan of this series. Lefebvre also mentions as forthcoming a history of rural France with Albert Soboul; La Conscience privée: étude sur l’histoire et la structure sociale de l’individualité; and L’Homme et le Soldat. A fragment of La Conscience privée was included in the third edition of La Conscience mystifiée, but neither of the others appeared. Adam David Morton and I briefly mention the planned project with Soboul in the Introduction to On the Rural (p. xiii).
The other side of the books that were banned is the story of those that were published during the war. That probably deserves another post, but in my project on Indo-European Thought in France, there are some authors who continued to publish under the Occupation, working with presses who were submitting their titles to censorship. Some intellectuals refused those constraints; others continued. Some presses worked closely with the authorities, a murky history well told in, for example, accounts of Abetz by Martin Mauthner and Barbara Lambauer. There was also the question of paper shortages, which continued for some time after the war, introducing another limit, since not all presses had access to supplies, and those that did had to be even more selective in what they published. There is therefore a politics and political economy of publishing in this period, of which the story has, I think, best been told by Pascal Fouché, in L’Édition française sous l’Occupation 1940-1944 and Gisèle Sapiro, The French Writers’ War, 1940-1953.
Jean-François Dubos, “La « liste Otto » : guerre aux livres”, Revue historique des armées 307, 2022, 123-28.
Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible, London: Continuum, 2004.
Stuart Elden, “Some Are Born Posthumously: The French Afterlife of Henri Lefebvre”, Historical Materialism14 (4), 2006, 185-202 (originally published as “Certains naissent de façon posthume: La survie d’Henri Lefebvre”, trans. Élise Charron and Vincent Charbonnier, Actuel Marx 36, 2004, 181-98).
Pascal Fouché, L’Édition française sous l’Occupation 1940-1944, Paris: Bibliothèque de Littérature française contemporaine, two volumes, 1987.
G.W.F. Hegel, Morceaux choisis, trans. and ed. Henri Lefebvre and N. Guterman, Paris: Gallimard, 1939.
Henri Lefebvre, Le Nationalisme contre les Nations, Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales, 1937; second edition, Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1988.
Henri Lefebvre, Hitler au pouvoir: Les enseignements de cinq années de fascisme, Paris: Bureau d’Éditions, 1938; trans. Cristiano Casalini, Hitler al potere. Cinque anni di nazismo in Germania, Milano: Medusa, 2012.
Henri Lefebvre, Nietzsche, Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales, 1939; second edition, Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2003.
Henri Lefebvre, Le Matérialisme dialectique, Paris: PUF, 1940; Dialectical Materialism, trans. John Sturrock, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 [1968].
Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne (Introduction), Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1947; reedition in 1958 with new introduction; Critique of Everyday Life,trans. John Moore, London: Verso, 1991.
Henri Lefebvre, Logique formelle, logique dialectique, Paris: Anthropos, second edition, 1969 [1947].
Henri Lefebvre, La vallée du Campan: Étude de sociologie rurale, Paris: PUF, 1963.
Henri Lefebvre, L’Existentialisme, second edition, Paris: Anthropos, 2001 [1946].
Henri Lefebvre, Contribution à l’esthétique, Paris: Anthropos, second edition, 2001 [1953].
Henri Lefebvre, Méthodologie des sciences: Un inédit, Paris: Anthropos, 2002 [c. 1947].
Henri Lefebvre, Les Communautés paysannes Pyrénéennes: Thèse soutenue en Sorbonne en 1954, Navarrenx: Cercle Historique de l’Arribère, 2014.
Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman, La Conscience mystifiée, third edition, Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 1999 [1936].
Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography, eds. Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, trans. Robert Bononno et. al., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
Barbara Lambauer, Otto Abetz, ou l’envers de la collaboration, Paris: Fayard, 2001.
V.I. Lenin, Cahiers de Lénine sur la dialectique de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard, 1938, revised edition Paris: Gallimard, 1967.
Karl Marx, Morceaux choisis, ed. Henri Lefebvre and N. Guterman, Paris: Gallimard, 1934.
Martin Mauthner, Otto Abetz and his Paris Acolytes: French Writers who Flirted with Fascism, 1930-1945, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2017.
Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains 1940-1953, Paris: Fayard, 1999; The French Writers’ War, 1940-1953, trans. Vanessa Doriott Anderson and Dorrit Cohn, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Liste Bernhard and Liste Otto versions
All reproduced in Fouché, L’Édition française sous l’Occupation 1940-1944, Vol I, 287-340.
As an earlier version of this story from July 2023 indicated, I am correcting a mistake I’d made twenty years ago. I had said Lefebvre’s 1939 book Nietzsche was one of the books prohibited under the German Occupation (Understanding Henri Lefebvre, p. 8; “Some Are Born Posthumously”, p. 190), but as the account above shows, it is not one of the books on the “Liste Otto”. Understanding Henri Lefebvre has long been available as print-on-demand only, and keeps going up in price. Someone has uploaded a version here though. I hope what I’ve reported in this post is now accurate, but happy to receive additions or corrections.
This is the twenty-fifth 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.
I’ve shared news of the book before, but there is now a New Books discussion with Second Cold War Observatory (Jessica DiCarlo and Seth Schindler). Thanks to dmf for this link.
In Judicial Territory, Shaina Potts reveals how the American empire has benefited from the post-World War II expansion of United States judicial authority over the economic decisions of postcolonial governments. Introducing the term “judicial territory” to refer to the increasingly transnational space over which US courts wield authority, Potts argues that law is an essential tool for US geopolitical and economic interests. Through close examination of cases involving private US companies, on the one hand, and foreign state-owned enterprises, nationalizations, and sovereign debt, on the other, she shows that technical changes relating to the treatment of foreign sovereigns in domestic US law allowed the United States to extend its purview over global financial and economic relations, including many economic decisions of foreign governments. Throughout, Potts argues, US law has not become divorced from territoriality but instead actively remapped it; it has not merely responded to globalization, but actively produced it—making the whole world part of US economic space in the process.
This book provides interdisciplinary perspectives on the work of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, with a particular focus on the conceptual material of his work. It seeks to answer the following questions: Is there any philosophic material or concepts in the work of Haruki Murakami? If so, why are they important? Does philosophic engagement add anything to the Murakami research field? Equally, does Murakami’s fiction present us with anything valuable for the field of philosophy?
The volume uniquely develops the field of Murakami studies through acting as a forum for interdisciplinary researchers to share their perspective on his work. Importantly, it furthers the conversation on Murakami’s philosophic value and through doing so, is a must-read not only for those interested in Japanese literature or culture, but also for those interested in the productive space existing at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis.
A decisive analytic critique of US foreign policy by one of America’s greatest historians
America’s Fatal Leap deconstructs US geopolitics after the end of the Cold War, informed by its author’s unsurpassed command of modern history. Paul W. Schroeder, an acclaimed historian of international diplomacy, was a conservative and a natural supporter of American leadership in the world. But he wrote scathing op-eds for the National Interest and the American Conservative about the hubris and moral failings of the War on Terror, warning of damaging long-range effects on the international system. Schroeder compared 9/11 to the assassination in Sarajevo that sparked the First World War, insisting that a great power should never give terrorists a war they wanted. He wrote with extraordinary prescience – months before the US launched its attack on the Taliban – of the ‘risks of victory’ in Afghanistan, characterised the war in Iraq as a failed bid for informal empire, and called for ‘disimperialism’ in the Middle East.
America’s Fatal Leap collects Schroeder’s remarkable interventions on America’s adventurism in the Middle East, from the 1991 Gulf War to the Surge of 2007. It includes an Introduction by Perry Anderson, author of US Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers and Ever Closer Union?
Stand-out theoretical and empirical explanation of the origins of the First World War by one of the great historians of international diplomacy
Stealing Horses presents arguably the finest considerations yet of the origins of the First World War. Breaking with accounts which focus on the actions of a single state or the final countdown to hostilities, Paul W. Schroeder describes the systemic crisis engulfing the Great Powers. They were more interested in colonial plunder overseas (‘stealing horses to great applause’, in the old Spanish adage) than the traditional statecraft of European peace-making. Preserving the balance of power required preserving all the essential actors in it, including a tottering Austria-Hungary. This the British in particular failed to recognise. The Central Powers may have started the War but that does not mean they in any real sense caused it. In the end Schroeder recalls the verdict of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: ‘All are punished’.
Stealing Horses includes appraisals of Niall Ferguson and A. J. P. Taylor, and an extensive unpublished final paper re-thinking the First World War as ‘the last 18th-century war’.
From Lucretius’s horror loci and Buddhist drowsiness to the religious boredom of acedia and the philosophical explorations of Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, boredom has long been a subject of philosophical fascination. Its story, unfolding through millennia, encompasses apathy, weariness, disaffection, melancholy, ennui, tedium, and monotony. Today, boredom assumes new forms: the drudgery of precarious work, the alienation of neoliberalism, the emptiness of leisure, and the overstimulation of our hyperconnected, technologically saturated lives.
The History and Philosophy of Boredom is an outstanding collection, exploring boredom’s intellectual history from its early origins in classical thought to its contemporary manifestations. Containing eighteen specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is organized into four thematic parts:
Ancient Philosophical Perspectives
Religious and Medieval Explorations
Modern Philosophical Investigations
Critical and Interdisciplinary Approaches
Topics include boredom in Socratic dialogue, Daoist and Buddhist traditions, Stoicism, and Cynicism; the religious significance of boredom in Judaism and early Christianity; boredom’s role in the works of Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Mill, and Nietzsche; philosophical pessimism; phenomenological approaches; boredom as a political phenomenon; and boredom’s intersections with capitalism, socialism, racial identity, and transhumanism.
The History and Philosophy of Boredom is indispensable for students and researchers in the history of philosophy, emotion studies, phenomenology, and moral psychology. It will also interest scholars in religion, classics, sociology, and the history of psychology.
