Reassesses Henri Lefebvre’s enduring relevance to sociology, examining themes from Marxism to urban life and proposing new directions for Lefebvrian research on rhythm, embodiment and utopian thought
Henri Lefebvre’s work, particularly his theory of the production of space, has been remarkably influential historically within geographical research. While this extensive research has shown the continuing relevance of Lefebvre’s oeuvre for urban geographical research, Lefebvre’s contributions to sociology have been less explored. This is surprising and a missed opportunity, not least because Lefebvre’s writings on the urban, space and everyday life were fundamentally informed by and connected to his sociology. This volume responds to this lacuna in sociological engagements with Lefebvre’s work, bringing together leading scholars on Lefebvre’s sociological work who discuss elements from across his sociological oeuvre. This includes topics for which Lefebvre is well known such as space, rhythm-analysis and Marxism, through to lesser-known topics such as the rural, autogestion, the state and violence and finally to studies which push Lefebvre into new areas such as time, phenomenology and the environment. Therefore, this volume not only achieves a breadth of coverage but also provides fresh insights for those familiar with Lefebvre and new points of interest for those encountering his sociology for the first time. Our volume makes a critical addition to the long list of established and influential Anthem Companions to Sociology by adding a new volume on one of the most influential Marxist sociologists and philosophers of the twentieth century. An engagement with the work of Henri Lefebvre remains indispensable for sociology as this volume shows.
Le thermomètre de Foucault, 9 Jan 2026, Journée d’étude organisée par Grégoire Chamayou (CNRS-ENS Paris), Frédéric Keck (CNRS-EHESS Paris) et Jean-Claude Monod (CNRS-ENS Paris).
Dans sa généalogie des savoirs biopolitiques, Michel Foucault a beaucoup parlé des milieux mais peu du climat. Pourtant, les notions de milieu et de climat sont souvent confondues au 19e siècle pour décrire les conditions d’existence d’un vivant qui rendent possible l’intervention d’un pouvoir. Mais si la notion de milieu conduit à contrôler les flux, comme le font les sciences de la population, celle de climat conduit à contrôler les températures, comme le font les sciences de l’acclimatation. Peut-on relire Michel Foucault à partir de la notion de climat, qui a pris un sens nouveau avec les mesures du réchauffement climatique ? En quoi la mesure de la température par des outils technologiques conduit-elle à interroger le moteur de la temporalité historique ?
Une telle question permet de revenir sur les relations entre Michel Foucault et Claude Lévi-Strauss. La distinction entre « sociétés froides » et « sociétés chaudes » renvoyait pour celui-ci à des modèles thermodynamiques différents d’insertion de l’évènement dans une structure qui lui préexiste. Foucault s’y réfère via Furet et ́la distinction entre une « histoire chaude », où l’observateur investit les mêmes discours que les acteurs, et une « histoire froide », que l’on peut approcher avec la même distance que l’ethnologue aborde les mythes des sociétés qu’il étudie. Il n’est pas question ici non plus de réchauffement climatique, mais d’usages de la métaphore du chaud et du froid et du modèle de la thermodynamique pour penser les modalités par lesquelles les sociétés contiennent ou opèrent leur transformation et son rythme. Peut-on dire alors que Foucault, en faisant une ethnologie des sociétés européennes, a refroidi notre histoire pour mieux diagnostiquer notre présent ? Quels seraient les objets et les terrains pour lesquels il serait urgent aujourd’hui de refroidir l’histoire ?
Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar, Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape.
A list of academic books I liked published in 2025, or late 2024, or in paperback this year.
Many of the books I read this year were published years ago; some of the 2025 ones I’ve bought or have been sent remain unread. Some listed are books I reviewed or endorsed, and others are by friends and colleagues. It’s of course biased by my interests and prejudices. So while there are doubtless many other good books this year, I can at least say I think these ones are worth reading.
I’ve posted this before, but always worth a read – Antonio Gramsci on New Year’s Day, translated by Alberto Toscano for Viewpoint.
This text was first published in Avanti!, Turin edition, from his column “Sotto la Mole,” January 1, 1916.
Every morning, when I wake again under the pall of the sky, I feel that for me it is New Year’s day.
That’s why I hate these New Year’s that fall like fixed maturities, which turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with its neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management. They make us lose the continuity of life and spirit. You end up seriously thinking that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new history is beginning; you make resolutions, and you regret your irresolution, and so on, and so forth. This is generally what’s wrong with dates. (continues…)
My dear friend Eduardo Mendieta died earlier this month. He taught in the philosophy departments of the University of San Francisco, Stony Brook University and Penn State. There is an announcement from Penn State here, and the news is also reported at Daily Nous. There are some tributes at the funeral home site.
Eduardo was an early supporter of my work, writing reviews of some of my books and inviting me to speak at Stony Brook University. While I was visiting Stony Brook, we talked about Kant and geography, and came up with the plan to do a collection on that topic. With the help of a British Academy conference grant, a Leverhulme fellowship, and some funding from our institutions we were able to run two events, one in New York in 2007 and one in Durham in 2008, which became the book Reading Kant’s Geography(SUNY Press, 2011). Putting David Harvey in conversation with Onora O’Neill and Ed Casey, or Robert Bernasconi with Michael Church and Charlie Withers, is a fond memory, and would not have been possible without Eduardo. (I write a bit about the book here.)
We also worked together for many years as editors of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space – Eduardo, Emily Brady, and Peter Gratton were crucial in bringing philosophers and other theorists into its pages. In particular, I remember Eduardo’s help in persuading Judith Butler to accept my invitation to give the journal’s 25th anniversary lecture, delivered to a packed room at the AAG in San Francisco, and later published as “Torture and the Ethics of Photography“. Together with Nigel Thrift, we also put together a special issue on Peter Sloterdijk. Eduardo was a fellow at Durham’s IAS in 2009. I remember a New York lunch with Eduardo, Neil Brenner and Stephen Graham clearly, a dinner in Atlanta with him, and many other meetings.
His books include Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY Press, 2007), and most recently The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism (SUNY Press, 2024 – open access). The last chapter of The Philosophical Animal is an extraordinary story of some of his formative experiences. He translated work by Enrique Dussel and Karl-Otto Apel, published interviews with Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty and Angela Davis, and so much more. His contributions to a wider knowledge of Latin American philosophy and his support of students received due recognition in his lifetime, and in the tributes now.
My condolences to his family and colleagues, and other friends.
Most of this year was spent working on my very long manuscript Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France, which is coming together but has been hard work to reach this point. I have shared a few updates on the research and writing here. There has been slow progress from my side on the new edition of Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic, though Marie Satya McDonagh has produced a complete translation of the second edition, and editorial work should pick up pace next year.
Some of the pieces published this year were written a while ago, some even before the heart problems which have changed so much for me.
I’ve noted the pieces open access below, but if you can’t access something, let me know. The articles out this year are:
Henri Lefebvre and Patrick Tort, “The Lukács Question”, translated by Federico Testa, edited and introduced by Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, Historical Materialism, online first (open access).
Title pages of two articles and the cover of Foucault Studies
I also began a series of posts, which I managed to keep to a weekly posting schedule. Some of these relate directly to the work I’ve been doing for the Mapping Indo-European Thought manuscript (on Benveniste, Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss), others connect in some way (Jakobson, Koyré, Sjoestedt, Raucq, Wasson), others are on older or potential future interests (Arendt, Foucault, territory, monsters, prisoners of war). The ‘Sunday Histories’ are listed chronologically here and thematically here – I say more about the year of posts here.
I spent the beginning of the year at the Remarque Institute at New York University, which was a wonderful experience. I made the most of the time to visit lots of archives in New York and nearby, and took side trips to Harvard and MIT, Princeton and Chicago. I gave talks at Buffalo and Brown, and at NYU. A couple of other talks were given online, and I also spoke at a workshop in Oxford. You can listen to some of these talks on this site:
(There is quite a lot of overlap between these two talks – the Nottingham one is an edited version of the St Andrews talk, with fewer examples, but some additional material on ideology.)
“Émile Benveniste and the Sogdian Word for ‘Knee'”, Troubling Classical Bodies, Remarque Institute, New York University, 11 April 2025 (video with Brooke Holmes and Anurima Banerji; text of my talk)
Further ahead, I also have a couple of book chapters in production:
“Foucault and Structuralism” in Daniele Lorenzini (ed.), The Foucauldian Mind, London: Routledge, forthcoming 2026.
“Benveniste, Dumézil and Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France”, in Roger Woodard (ed.), Cambridge History of Mythology and Mythography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
And a piece on “Shakespeare and Landscape” which is with editors.
I’ll share the academic books I liked this year tomorrow.
Every Sunday through 2025 I’ve posted a short essay to Progressive Geographies. They are tangential to my main research focus, a home for odd pieces which would not find a more formal place in print, but stories or ideas I thought were interesting enough to develop into these little pieces. They come with references and indications of further reading, and most of them will likely remain just as these fragments, rather than being developed into something else. A few though have had a life beyond this – one was extended into an article, a couple of others became the basis for a grant proposal for a future project. A handful of usually shorter pieces were posted mid-week.
So, if you want to know how Ernst Kantorowicz helped to buy a dog for Erwin Panofsky, why a linguist was asked to help with the disposal of nuclear waste, why Vladimir Nabokov and Roman Jakobson fell out, something about Hannah Arendt’s intellectual friendships, the murder of Ioan Culianu in the bathroom of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, a Soviet historian with an interest in cryptozoology, or why Edward Said never wrote his planned book on Jonathan Swift, then some of these might be of interest.
I also explore Claude Lévi-Strauss’s visiting lectures at the Collège de France about the wolverine, and why he and Georges Dumézil opposed French reforms about feminine names for professions; what we know about Michel Foucault’s early visits to North America, and his early English translations; or whether Émile Benveniste really did read Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. I discuss a planned co-translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology by Henri Lefebvre and Alexandre Kojève, why Jacques Lacan thought the best image of the unconsciousness was Baltimore in the early morning, and why American Slavic Studies during the Cold War was partly funded by an investment banker who told the world about hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Along the way I say something about what Hegel’s great-grandson wrote about the Aryans, and his translation of Saussure; different aspects of Foucault’s project on sexuality, including his abandoned book on hermaphrodites; what Alexandre Koyré taught in New York and Cairo; how analysis of vocabulary can be helpful in understanding the history of territory; why David Harvey considered his book on Paris to be one of his two most important; and discuss the books written and lectures given by French professors while they were German prisoners of war.
I’m well aware that there are a lot more posts about men than women – this is partly because of the relatively few women in academic posts, especially in France, in the periods I’m working on. But as well as two pieces on Hannah Arendt, I have written about Marie-Louise Sjoestedt’s work on Celtic language and myth, Elisabeth Raucq’s examination of Indo-European animal names, Elizabeth Palmer’s translations, Gillian Rose’s limited connection to the Indo-Europeanists, Huguette Fugier’s research on Latin words for the sacred, and I have ones planned on Clémence Ramnoux’s writings on the pre-Socratics and Marie-Madeleine Davy on mysticism.
There are lots more things discussed in these. There is a chronological listing here, and a thematic one here.
I began the year thinking I had ideas for a few of these, and said I’d try to keep to a regular schedule in February, when I felt reasonably confident I’d be able to do this for a few more months. In June, after six months, I said I was somewhat surprised that I’d managed one every week, but I’ve kept this up throughout the year. I’ve usually had a few in development at the same time, since most require a bit of library work to complete, and that can’t always be done immediately. I’ve returned to a few topics with a bit more detail – sometimes provided an update to an earlier piece, sometimes written a sequel.
These pieces are also a bit of a reaction against academic publishing – its slow processes, its costs, and its metrics. These pieces are posted when I’ve finished them, though they might be revised later; they are free to access (I have no plans to turn these into subscription-only); and they are not intended as ‘outputs’ in the tradition sense.
Those things all still apply – I’ve resisted the idea of turning these into a separate newsletter, so they appear interspersed with the more usual posts about interesting books, conferences and other links. I’ve long known that most people come to this blog because I provide what I hope is a useful service of sharing other people’s work, rather than because of an interest in mine. But hopefully these posts this year have given something else in addition.
It’s hard to know how these are being received, since the comments are relatively few. I don’t trust WordPress stats, since that obviously doesn’t distinguish between someone just landing on a page and actually reading it. I have definitely lost readers since I quit Twitter/X this year. There have been few comments or other indications of how they are being read. But occasionally I’ll get a message out of the blue of how someone chanced on a piece and it made a connection. And one time at a conference I was talking to someone who told me they’d read an interesting piece on a topic which… and I had to point out that I was its author.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep up this weekly frequency in 2026, but there will be at least a few more through the year. Thank you to anyone who has read one or more of these pieces.
As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. This book brings together previously unpublished transcripts of oral presentations in which Foucault speaks at length about literature and its links to some of his principal themes: madness, language and criticism, and truth and desire.
The associations between madness and language — and madness and silence — preoccupy Foucault in two 1963 radio broadcasts, presented here, in which he ranges among literary examples from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Diderot, before taking up questions about Artaud’s literary correspondence, ‘lettres de cachet’, and the materiality of language. In his lectures on the relations among language, the literary work, and literature, he discusses Joyce, Proust, Chateaubriand, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the linguist Roman Jakobson. What we know as literature, Foucault contends, begins with the Marquis de Sade, to whose writing — particularly La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette — he devotes a full two-part lecture series focusing on notions of literary self-consciousness.
This volume makes clear the importance of literature to Foucault’s thought and it is an indispensable text for anyone interested in his work and intellectual development.
In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is published here. In this brief and lively exchange, Foucault reflects on how he approached the written word throughout his life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing.
Wide ranging, characteristically insightful, and unexpectedly autobiographical, the discussion sheds light on Foucault’s intellectual development, his aims as a writer, his clinical methodology (“let’s say I’m a diagnostician”), and his interest in other authors, including Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. Foucault discloses, in ways he never had previously, details about his home life, his family history, and the profound sense of obligation he feels to the act of writing.
Speech Begins after Death shows Foucault adopting a new language, an innovative autobiographical communication that is neither conversation nor monologue, and is one of his most personal statements about his life and writing.
Some of the largest architecture firms have effectively become war corporations. At the same time as designing Olympic parks and world-famous buildings, they have constructed military bases, maintained weaponry, and trained personnel for wars in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. In some conflicts, the same firms have been contracted from invasion to reconstruction, including facilitating military attacks, rebuilding war-damaged infrastructure, and establishing new governments. Architecture for Warfare tells the story of a form of multidisciplinary corporation that employs architects skilled in designing structures alongside former military personnel with experience handling live-fire weapons. It highlights the tensions and contradictions within these architecture-led firms that claim to make the world a better place. The book combines personal narrative with detailed research to reveal unsettling relations between design, planning, and armed conflict.
Describes the emergence of architectural “war corporations”
Combines firsthand accounts with research supported by the Graham Foundation
