Russia’s war on Ukraine has not only destroyed millions of human lives, it has also been catastrophic for the environment. Forests and fields have been burned to the ground, animal and plant species pushed to the brink of extinction, soil and water contaminated with oil products, debris, and mines. On a single day in June 2023, the breached Kakhovka Dam flooded thousands of kilometres of protected natural habitat, as well as villages, towns, and agricultural land. The devastation of biodiversity and ecosystems across Ukraine has been immeasurable, long-lasting and its consequences stretch beyond national borders.
In this poignant book, Ukrainian researcher Darya Tsymbalyuk offers an intimate portrait of her beloved homeland against the backdrop of Russia’s war and ecocide. In elegant and moving prose, she describes the damage to the country’s rivers, the grasslands of the steppes, animals, insects, and colonies of birds, as a result of Russia’s ground and air operations. Alongside the everyday experiences of people in Ukraine living with the environmental consequences of the war, we share Tsymbalyuk’s own reckoning with the changing nature of cherished places and the loss of familiar worlds caused by the ongoing Russian invasion.
This year’s event takes place on 14 June 2025, back in Garrick’s Temple on the banks of the Thames
Saturday, June 14, 2025 from 10:00-19:00 BST Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, Hampton, UK
For the Slovenian School of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, a loose association of thinkers which grew out of dissident movements in socialist Yugoslavia, Shakespeare has always been a reference point – especially Hamlet and its reception by Hegel, Marx, Freud and Lacan. The title of one of Slavoj Žižek’s early books, Looking Awry, is taken from Richard II, and other members of the School have also used Shakespeare to think through the role of representation in politics and culture. Furthermore, the Slovenian School has always been in close dialogue with the artists, musicians and stage practitioners of the group Neue Slowenische Kunst who have been involved in diverse Shakespearean projects. Laibach’s involvement in the Macbeth production of Wilfried Minks and Peter Zadek is to be mentioned in this context, as well as several works of the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre (SNST). As SNST co-founder Eda Čufer writes, “Shakespeare exposed the theatrical aspects of establishing and transgressing the law, and made transparent the structural similarities between the ‘deeds’ of legal authorities, criminals (terrorists) and artists (activists).” This symposium will explore the complex history of this statement and its relevance for the relation between theatre, psychoanalysis, politics and philosophy in the present.
£20 ticket (+Eventbrite fee) includes admission, sandwich lunch at the Bell Inn as well as tea and coffee during breaks. NOTE: due to catering demands the sale of ticket ends a week before the event.
£10 ticket includes admission, tea and coffee during breaks
Online ticket, free, possibility to donate to the Temple
Community ticket: a limited number of tickets is available for those unable to pay. Please note this does not include lunch.
The event will be partially hybrid (one session) and as a whole will be streamed via Zoom.
All proceeds go to the Temple.
10:00-11:00 (Chair: Björn Quiring) Short intro Gregor Moder: Caesar’s Wounds
11:00-11:30: Coffee/tea
11:30-13:15 (Chair: Julia Ng) 11:30-12:15 Dominik Finkelde: The Remains of Richard II: Santner and Žižek on Political Flesh
12:15-13:15 Jure Simoniti: What Remains of Hamlet After Death?
13:15-15:00: Lunch
15:00-15:45 (Chair: Jennifer Rust) Todd McGowan: Hegel as Philosophy’s Shakespeare: Drama and the Unconscious (Zoom)
15:45-16:45 (Chair: John Gillies) Eda Cufer and Miran Mohar: NSK Theater: Play Within a Play (hybrid)
16:45-17:15: Coffee/Tea
17:15-18:00 (Chair: Stuart Elden) Richard Ashby: Face-Off: Defacement, Ethics and the ‘Neighbour’ in “The Comedy of Errors”
Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?
Graham Harman with a tribute to Alphonso Lingis, who died a few days ago. Thanks also to dmf for a comment on a post with a link to a book about Lingis.
The story sounds like a detective novel or a spy thriller. A professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago is shot at close range in the third-floor bathroom of Swift Hall in 1991. The killing is seemingly professional, and the assassin is never found.
Ioan Culianu (sometimes Couliano) was 41, at the early stage of what seemed to be a brilliant career. Born in Romania, he had written an Italian thesis on Hans Jonas, worked on Gnosticism and mysticism, wrote fiction, and is best known in English for his 1987 book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. He had come to Chicago initially as a visitor to work with the Romanian-born historian of religion Mircea Eliade, who taught at Chicago for thirty years. Eliade wrote a preface to Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. After Eliade died in 1986, Culianu was appointed to a position in Chicago, initially temporarily, then made permanent. Eliade’s will, which is in Culianu’s archive (box 2, folder 6), made Culianu and his nephew Sorin Alexandrescu his literary executors, giving them the right to publish materials from his archive and complete unfinished projects. The extent to which that was allowed if Eliade’s widow objected is much debated. Both Culianu and Eliade’s papers are held by the University of Chicago, in the Hanna Holborn Gray special collections research center. Culianu did publish some of Eliade’s work, but while once a disciple and uncritical defender of his reputation, over time became critical of his political affiliations before and during the Second World War. At the time of his death Culianu was investigating far-right politics in Romania more generally, shortly after the violent overthrow of the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime.
Swift HallFormer Meadville-Lombard seminary building
After a shorter article in 1992, the investigative reporter Ted Anton wrote a book in 1996 about the story, Eros, Magic and the Murder of Professor Culianu. It’s a biography of Culianu, using the murder as a framing device around the story of his move to the West and his career. It draws out the much-discussed links Eliade had to the fascist Iron Guard in Romania. It was founded initially as the Legion of the Archangel Michael, and Eliade wrote in the pre-war period in support of their policies. He also held diplomatic posts in London and Lisbon during the Second World War.
In Culianu’s case, some fellow exiles conjectured, the Iron Guard would have feared Culianu because he had been named executor of Eliade’s unpublished scholarly papers. They might have feared he would use his position to undermine his mentor’s reputation by publishing the wrong documents. But by 1991 the Eliade papers had long since been dispersed, mostly under the care of Regenstein Library. Eliade’s uncompleted volumes had either been edited and published or shelved. There were no secret Iron Guard papers.
Concerning the whispered rumors, Paris dissident Monica Lovinescu put it best: “Whenever they say it’s the Iron Guard,” she observed, “you can be sure it’s Securitate” (p. 263).
Anton’s book was reviewed in The New York Review of Books by none other than Umberto Eco. (This is the second time recently I’ve written about a story that sounds like it is from one of his novels. For the other, on Thomas Sebeok’s ideas about the semiotics of nuclear waste, and the idea of an atomic priesthood, see here.) Eco, who knew Culianu a little, offers some mild criticisms of Anton, in particular of his use of reconstructed dialogue in what is supposed to be a historical account, not a “fictionalized biography”. As he suggests, “Anton does not adopt the deductive method of Sherlock Holmes and his story suggests Lovecraft more than Conan Doyle”. But he too focuses on the possible security involvement in Culianu’s murder:
Though he harbors no monarchist notions, Culianu meets former King Michael of Romania and becomes convinced that the return of the monarchy can perhaps restore a constitutional stability to the country. He receives many warnings: phone calls, letters, threatening incidents such as a break-in at his house. Some of them he dismisses; others worry him; perhaps at a certain point, he thinks, he can no longer avoid some sort of political role. He is killed in a manner typical of the methods of Eastern European security services.
Eco also notes that the story of Culianu, only a few years after his death, has already become a myth, “that could have been convincingly conceived (and studied) only by the victim himself if he had remained with us. But he would have told it, no doubt, with tongue in cheek”. Eco is also intrigued though slightly irritated by a recent Italian novel that blends “true events and fiction” in telling Culianu’s story.
In 2023, Bruce Lincoln, professor emeritus of the History of Religion at the University of Chicago, whose PhD was supervised by Eliade, wrote another book on the case. Lincoln has been very critical of Georges Dumézil and his politics, so his work was already important to my project. But before this book he had been, I thought, uncritical of Eliade, who has an even more troubled political past than Dumézil. Indeed, one of the criticisms of Dumézil is the company he kept, and his support for Eliade after the Second World War is one of the charges made against him. Eliade was unable to return to Communist Romania after the war because of his fascist past and Dumézil provided a lot of support – giving him teaching opportunities, introducing Eliade to publishers, and helping with the French translations of his work. Eliade’s politics was known in France at that time through other Romanian émigrés (Lincoln, p. 47).
Shortly before his death, Culianu had entrusted some English translations of some politically compromising articles by Eliade to a colleague (Lincoln, p. 1). That colleague had, in time, passed them to Lincoln. Lincoln admits that when he retired and cleaned out his office, he threw out the Eliade papers by mistake. His book is an attempt to make good on this blunder. He plans to publish the articles in some form once they are free from copyright restrictions (pp. 5-7). His book is a detailed and careful exposure of the intertwined Eliade and Culianu cases. His explanation of Eliade seems plausible:
Over the years he laboured, never with more than partial success, to persuade himself and others of two propositions: first, he had done nothing wrong, since he was not really a Nazi or an anti-Semite; second, that those who said otherwise did so out of envy, malice, and unprincipled ideological commitments. Beyond that, he was caught in a bind. Were he to acknowledge his past support for the Legion, strong condemnation would follow from many quarters, regardless of what mitigating explanations he might offer. And were he to express any regrets, make any apologies, or distance himself in any way, legionaries would likely see him as a traitor and could well take vengeance on him (p. 72).
At times it is the kind of forensic history of ideas approach that Eco seemed to want – more Conan Doyle than eldritch horror. It tracks the changing positions Eliade took about his politics; those which Culianu took in coming to terms with what he discovered about Eliade; and carefully sifts the different interpretations of Culianu’s murder. Lincoln assesses the Iron Guard, Securitate and other possibilities, and while he rules none out, is unconvinced by any. Towards the end he offers this statement:
It has never been my intention to play detective and solve the murder of Ioan Petru Culianu. By a circuitous route, a set of documents made its way from his hands to mine. For many years I ignored them, and in a moment of carelessness, I lost them. What I have done since and what I present here is an attempt to atone for my lapses (p. 132).
Some correspondence Lincoln collected for his book was not included in it, but is available as a download on his academia.edu page. It’s a useful supplement to the book. The planned publication in English of the Eliade articles will complete the dossier of the book and these letters.
I was recently at the University of Chicago to work in the archives, mainly with parts of the Eliade papers. Dumézil’s correspondence with Eliade is quite extensive, even though the letters all date from after Eliade’s years in Paris. This makes sense, they would have seen each other regularly at that time, but it is also undoubtedly because of what material was, and was not, kept. I had seen a few of Eliade’s letters to Dumézil in Paris at the Collège de France, though letters are in different boxes and folders, filed with teaching records and by year, rather than by correspondent. Some of the Dumézil-Eliade letters have been published, but not, I think, all. So, it was a worthwhile trip for that alone.
The Regenstein Library was not far from Swift Hall, so I went there on one of the lunchbreaks. This was where Eliade taught, where Dumézil was a visitor in the 1969-70 academic year, and which had an extensive divinity library. There is a plaque commemorating Culianu outside the bathroom. (I’m curious, but not as much as the Toilet Guru, who has documented the murder story with photographs and much more on his site.) Eliade’s office was nearby, at the Meadville-Lombard seminary – the building has since been sold and is no longer used by the University. This is where, shortly before his death, there was a fire which destroyed some of his papers and much of his library. There are quite a lot of fire-damaged documents in his archives – some with just burnt edges, but a few more badly-damaged scraps are in plastic wallets. It seems likely this fire was a result of an ashtray on his desk, rather than anything more sinister, although Eliade apparently took it as an omen.
Plaque commemorating Ioan CulianuA box of files from the Culianu archives
For those wanting to follow in Anton and Lincoln’s footsteps, the FBI files on Culianu are partly available online. The FBI vault website lists three files, of 489, 324 and 227 pages, although the second and third appear to be entirely blank if you download them, though can be read online. As with other FBI files I’ve seen, there is a lot of repetition, several coversheets and pro forma, newsclippings, and much is redacted.
A page from the FBI file, heavily redacted
Eco’s irritation with the Italian novel was in part, he recognised, because the story was so recent. It has since been the subject of at least one other fictionalisation in Romania. Andrei Terian discussed the Italian and Romanian versions in a short essay in 2014. Lincoln’s more recent and serious book has brought attention back to the story – it was the initial spur to my thinking about the case again, though I’d heard of it when first reading about Eliade. Almost thirty-five years after the killing, it seems unlikely more evidence will come to light. In a Chicago theme, the hotel I was staying in had a few books left in the room, one of which was Saul Bellow’s last novel Ravelstein, named after Abe Ravelstein, who is based on the story of Allan Bloom. Both Bloom and Bellow taught at Chicago, as part of the Committee on Social Thought. The book has a character, Radu Grielescu, who is a very thinly disguised version of Eliade, and briefly mentions the murder.
Ted Anton, “The Killing of Professor Culianu”, Lingua Franca 2 (6), 1992.
Ted Anton, Eros, Magic and the Murder of Professor Culianu, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, New York: Penguin, 2015 [2000].
Ioan Peter Couliano, Eros et magie à la Renaissance, Paris: Flammarion, 1984; Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Mircea Eliade, “Préface”, in Ioan Culianu, Eros et magie à la Renaissance, Paris: Flammarion, 1984, 5-7; Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987, xi-iii.
Christopher E. Koy, “Travel for the Dying: Ceauşescu’s Romania as Seen by Saul Bellow”, Review of International American Studies RIAS 17 (2), 2024, 161-75.
Bruce Lincoln, Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and his Protégé’s Unsolved Murder, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
“Unpublished Appendices to Bruce Lincoln, Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and his Protégé’s Unsolved Murder (Oxford University Press, 2023)”, academia.edu (includes Correspondence among Mircea Eliade, Ioan Culianu, Mac Linscott Ricketts, Adriana Berger, Ivan Strenski, and others, 1977-91)
This is the nineteenth 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 is the long-overdue publication in English of Aimé Césaire’s account of Toussaint Louverture, the legendary leader of the revolution in Saint-Domingue – a slave revolt against French colonial rule that led to the founding of the independent republic of Haiti. Saint-Domingue was the first country in modern times to confront the colonial question in practice and in all its complexity. When Toussaint Louverture burst onto the historical stage, various political movements already existed for political autonomy, free trade and social equality. But the French Revolution established a compelling understanding of universal liberty: the Declaration of Human Rights opened up the possibility of claims to liberty and equality by wealthy free Black men in the colony, claims which, when they could not be realized, led to the armed uprising of enslaved Blacks. A battle for the liberation of one class in colonial society resulted in a revolution to achieve equal rights for all men. And for universal emancipation to be possible, Saint-Domingue itself had to become independent.
Toussaint Louverture put the Declaration into practice unreservedly, demonstrating that there could be no pariah race. He inherited bands of fighters and united them as an army, turning a peasant revolt into a full-scale revolution, a population into a people and a colony into an independent nation-state.
Aimé Césaire’s historical and analytical gifts are magnificently displayed in this highly original analysis of the context and actions of the famous revolutionary leader. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical and cultural theory and of Latin American history as well as anyone concerned with the nature and impact of colonialism and race.
How did Soviet historians interpret modern Russian history? Focusing on the career of the Soviet historian M.N. Pokrovskii, James D. White examines the evolution of historical writing in the first decade of Soviet rule.
As Deputy People’s Commissar for Education, Pokrovskii was among those who established the academic institutions of the new regime. The study of Pokrovskii’s writings and the political context in which they were conceived helps explain the origin of interpretations of modern Russian history in Soviet times. This book serves as a preliminary guide to the study of the Russian revolutionary era, and as a key text in the critical evaluation of the historical sources of the period.
En verano de 2018, el Bidasoa se cierra para las personas migrantes. Vuelven el control, la vigilancia, la batida; se despliega la violencia. Pero la frontera no acaba en una línea estática que separa estados: se desplaza como línea móvil sobre los cuerpos que huyen, impregnando su piel.
Se activa la ayuda a ambos lados del cierre fronterizo para dignificar la fuga frente al hostigamiento policial. Este libro da cuenta de este entrecruzamiento entre las personas migrantes y las redes de solidaridad, los movimientos que ahí se tejen, una suerte de coreografía política y afectiva que resiste al capitalismo racial y securitario, una danza de luciérnagas que quiere abrir espacios y tiempos humanizados.
Con ambición teórica y literaria, Ignacio Mendiola trenza ese relato de huida, violencia y apoyo, allí donde el poder estatal ha dibujado una línea para apropiarse del espacio y para disciplinar a la fuerza de trabajo.
Peter Sloterdijk is among the most acclaimed and widely read philosophers of the past half-century. Called “Germany’s most controversial thinker” by the New Yorker, he has challenged and provoked readers worldwide with extraordinarily ambitious and wide-ranging works of philosophical and cultural critique. In The Terrible Children of Modernity, Sloterdijk offers a magisterial and profound investigation into the vicissitudes of historical change and the nature of modernity.
For Sloterdijk, modernity is defined by its need to break with the past. Moderns are perpetual rebels who seek to sever the ties of tradition and forms of inheritance that bind generations and eras together. With deep philosophical, historical, and literary range, he traces this antigenealogical experiment from the French Revolution onward, from Madame de Pompadour and Napoleon through Nietzsche, Marx, Wagner, the Dadaists, and Deleuze. Acutely aware of the destructive potential of cultural discontinuities, Sloterdijk is no less critical of the “fathers” who condemn change than the “terrible children” who seek a drastic rupture with their predecessors. Equally concerned with the grand sweep of history and our current predicaments, he instead calls for new ways to live together in the intersubjectivity of the human condition. Incisive and daring, breathtaking in its scope, this account of youthful rebellion against tradition asks us to reimagine the ethics of genealogy.
Kelly Dombroski, Mark Goodwin, Junxi Qian, Andrew Williams, Paul Cloke eds. Human Geography, fourth edition, Routledge, August 2024
Introducing Human Geographies is a ‘travel guide’ into the academic subject of human geography and the things that it studies. The coverage of the new edition has been thoroughly refreshed to reflect and engage with the contemporary nature and direction of human geography.
This updated and much extended fourth edition includes a diverse range of authors and topics from across the globe, with a completely revised set of contributions reflecting contemporary concerns in human geography. Presented in four parts with a streamlined structure, it includes over 70 contributions written by expert international researchers addressing the central ideas through which human geographers understand and shape their subject. It maps out the big, foundational ideas that have shaped the discipline past and present; explores key research themes being pursued in human geography’s various sub-disciplines; and identifies emerging collaborations between human geography and other disciplines in the areas of technology, justice and environment. This comprehensive, stimulating and cutting-edge introduction to the field is richly illustrated throughout with full colour figures, maps and photos.
The book is designed especially for students new to university degree courses in human geography across the world, and is an essential reference for undergraduate students on courses related to society, place, culture and space.
