The state of nature is a powerful idea at the heart of the fragmented and sometimes conflicting stories the modern West tells about itself. It also makes sense of foundational Western commitments to equality and accumulation, freedom and property, universality and the individual. By exploring the social and cultural imaginaries that emerge from the distinct and often contradictory accounts of the state of nature in the writing of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, The State of Nature and the Shaping of Modernity offers a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing debates of our time, showing how the state of nature idea provides a powerful lens through which to focus the complex forces shaping today’s political and cultural landscape. It also explores how ideas about human nature and origins drive today’s debates about colonialism, secularism, and the environment, and how they can shed new light on some of society’s most heated debates.
In this engaging Handbook, Alice Mattoni brings together an international team of scholars to provide a multifaceted exploration of progressive politics. Contributing authors expertly discuss progressive politics within contemporary global debates, addressing contentious issues and acknowledging the impact of technological advances on the political landscape.
This Handbook identifies issues central to the progressive agenda, such as climate change, migration, and international conflict, while considering progressive politics in relation to digitalization and datafication. Authors illustrate the tensions within progressive politics, examining the roles of different political and non-political actors, such as social movement organizations. It demonstrates how the interactions and disagreements of these actors reshape the idea of what progressive politics has been, is, and will become in the near future.
This is a compelling resource for scholars of political science, political sociology, social movements and civil society. This Handbook”s interdisciplinary approach also makes it valuable to scholars across media and communication studies, gender politics, and environmental studies who are interested in how their disciplines intersect with progressive politics.
Andy Merrifield, Roses for Gramsci – Monthly Review Press, April 2025
A remarkable personal journey through the life and writings of the great Sardinian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci
In June 2023, author Andy Merrifield and his partner and their daughter moved from the UK to Rome, she to take a new job, he to get his creative juices flowing again, and both to begin a new life. A short time later, he visited Gramsci’s grave at the Non-Catholic Cemetery, home as well to the great Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Soon he took a volunteer position helping to maintain the cemetery and as it turned out, to keep a watchful eye on Gramsci’s tombstone, admiring the roses and notes that visitors left, talking to some of them and communing with the sentinel cat that kept watch near the gravesite. Thus began Merrifield’s deep dive into Gramsci’s life.
The result is a stunning portrait that offers fresh insights into nearly every aspect of Gramsci’s often tortured existence: a childhood scarred by severe health problems; his growing understanding of political economy; his generosity and kindness; his grasp of the culture of workers and peasants; his friendship with the economist Piero Sraffa; and his frustration trying to communicate with and be father to the son he never saw. Above all, Merrifield illuminates how Gramsci kept his humanity, suffering horribly in prison while writing a revolutionary classic, The Prison Notebooks.
Personal, compassionate, moving—and illustrated with the author’s photographs —Merrifield revives both the legacy and meaning of Gramsci’s work and the dying art of belles lettres. Roses for Gramsci is an evocative and indelible book.
This was written for an event on ‘Troubling Classical Bodies‘ at the Remarque Institute at New York University on 11 April 2025. My thanks to Stefanos Geroulanos and Brooke Holmes for the invitation to give this short talk, and to them, Anurima Banerji and the audience for the discussion.
In 1907, the British-Hungarian explorer Aurel Stein negotiated with a Buddhist monk to access the library cave of a temple complex in Dunhuang, in Chinese Turkestan, now part of Gansu province and relatively close to the border with Xinjiang. The library cave had been sealed sometime around the 11th-13th century of the modern era, and it contained a wealth of material in a range of languages. Stein paid the monk a small sum to be used for temple renovation, and in return was able to remove manuscripts and bring them back to London. The French scholar Paul Pelliot arrived at Dunhuang in 1908, and made a rapid survey of the material there. He too was able to bring back a huge range of documents to Paris.
Back in Europe, various academics were set to work on the material. Stein was an Indologist, Pelliot a Sinologist, but others were brought on board. The French linguist Antoine Meillet did some work on the language known as Tocharian B, but on the largely unknown Sogdian, an East Iranian language, he got one of his students, and at the time his designated successor, Robert Gauthiot, to do the work. In parallel, German scholars led by Friedrich Carl Andreas were working with other Sogdian texts brought back by the Turfan expeditions. Gauthiot died from wounds received in the First World War, and progress on deciphering and publishing the texts slowed. Gauthiot’s grammar was left incomplete until the very young Emile Benveniste, a student of Meillet and now being prepared as Meillet’s successor – and Gauthiot’s replacement – took up the work.
Emile Benveniste, “Un emploi du nom du «genou» en vieil-irlandais et en sogdian”, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, 1926Gauthiot’s edition and translation of the Vessantara Jātaka
One of Benveniste’s very earliest publications, in 1926, when he was in his early 20s, is on a question of Sogdian vocabulary. It was his second short article in the Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris; a journal in which he would publish much of his work and later edit. It is on the word for ‘knee [genou]’, z’nwk- *zānūk, and he says its sense in Sogdian texts is usually clear from context, or in relation to Indo-European languages generally, and to Indo-Iranian in particular.
But there are two instances in Robert Gauthiot’s translation of the Vessantara Jātaka where the meaning is unclear. The Vessantara Jātaka is a Buddhist tale, about one of the Buddha’s past lives, in which the prince Vessantara gives away all that he owns, including his wife and children, as an exemplar of generosity. There are versions of the tale in many languages, including Pali, Sanskrit and Chinese. The story was known in these other languages, and the discovery of the story in Sogdian helped with that language’s interpretation. Gauthiot published “Une version sogdienne du Vessantara Jātaka” in two parts in the Journal Asiatique in 1912, comprising a transcription and translation. It was also reprinted as a book.
In his article, Benveniste gives the Sogdian text and Gauthiot’s translation. VJ = line number of the transliteration.
VJ 64 – “the king on his knees (?) ordered his son to be brought forward so he could be named [le roi à genoux (?), ordonna d’amener son fils pour qu’il fût nommé]”.`
VJ 1386 – “I forgive my son on my knees; come with your wife Mandri [Je pardonne à genoux à mon fils; viens avec ton épouse Mandri]”.
Benveniste questions both of these choices. It is not normal to order or to forgive on your knees, rather you would beg forgiveness that way. The figure in the position of power is not the one making the supplication. In the second case there is another complication: it is addressed to the “son on knees” or the “son of the knee [fils du genou]” (p. 51).
Benveniste draws on an article by Joseph Loth in the Revue Celtique in 1923, about an Old Irish use of ‘knee’ that invokes a generation, in the sense of “infant of the knee”, and there is a parallel in Anglo-Saxon (i.e. Old English), of the sense of a direct parent. Loth makes a link between sitting in the lap, of a father recognising a child by lifting them up and placing them on their knee. Benveniste thinks this more plausible than the ‘knee’ being a euphemism for a penis, or childbirth from a kneeling woman (p. 52). He argues that even if that was the child birthing practice, the lineage argument is a challenge:
But there’s a long way to go from the purely physiological notion of ‘giving birth’ to the entirely legal one of ‘filiation’, for in primitive societies there is no necessary relationship between consanguinity and kinship. Kinship is only sanctioned by legitimation, which, among Indo-Europeans, is the exclusive prerogative of the father. By taking the child on his lap, after lifting him from the ground, the head of the family exercises one of his essential prerogatives, attesting to the authenticity of his descent, and maintaining the continuity of his lineage (p. 53).
Benveniste therefore suggests that the Irish sense maps onto the Sogdian one, and helps to unlock a puzzle of meaning. (It’s worth noting that the limited surviving materials in Sogdian make for many such challenges in its interpretation.) If “son of the knee” in the earlier examples from the Vessantara Jātaka actually mean ‘son as heir’ or ‘heir-son’, then the difficulties of sense disappear:
VJ 64 – “and the king ordered his heir-son to be brought forward, etc. [Et le roi ordonna d’amener son fils héritier, etc.]”.
VJ 1386 – “I forgive my heir-son; come with your wife Mandri [J’accorde mon pardon, ô mon fils héritier; reviens ici avec ta femme Mandri]”.
He notes that there are no other Iranian dialects that have a similar expression, nor is it found in modern Indian languages.
So we can’t decide whether we’re dealing here with a creation or a calque [i.e. a literal word-for-word translation], a noble or popular expression, a chance conservation or a living locution. But the concordance of a designation and no doubt of an identical usage at the two most distant ends of the Indo-European world seems to us worthy of note, and deserves to be joined to the similar correspondences grouped by M. [Joseph] Vendryes.
What is interesting about this short, three-page article, it seems to me, is that Benveniste is already working in a related manner to his much more renowned later work. A small issue in a text, what might appear to be a textual crux, a corrupted or problematic passage, which might need to be corrected in the source text before being open to translation and interpretation, can be examined from another angle. But the reading of the text can also indicate something about the practices of the people – the idea of kinship, lineage, and patriarchy. Benveniste published a new edition of Vessantara Jātaka in 1946, indicating that though Gauthiot’s work was pioneering, aspects of it were outdated by the 1940s. It was a transliteration, translation and commentary on the text. In the two instances at stake, Benveniste now translates the term as “dear son” or “loving or sweet son”.
Benveniste’s edition and translation of the Vessantara Jātaka
VJ 64 “the king ordered his dear son to be brought in for the proclamation (of the name?) [le roi ordonna d’amener son cher fils pour la proclamation (du nom?)]”.
VJ 1386 “I grant my forgiveness, my loving son. Come back with your wife Mandri! [J’accorde mon pardon, ô mon tendre fils. Reviens ici avec ta femme Mandri!]”
Benveniste describes his edition of the Vessantara Jātaka as completing the work of his Textes sogdiens – a transliteration, translation, commentary and glossary of available material, completed shortly before he was called up for his military service and published in 1940. A reproduction of all the previously-unpublished Sogdian manuscripts in Paris, Codices Sogdiani, was sent to the printer shortly before war broke out, and the texts were moved from Paris for safe-keeping. Benveniste wrote its introduction.
Benveniste would continue to work on the Sogdian language throughout his career. The text on the knee was also reprinted as the first text in the posthumous collection of his Études sogdiennes in 1979, edited by his former student Georges Redard after Benveniste’s death.
While Benveniste worked on many other topics, and languages, his career was fundamentally shaped by the findings of expeditions to the Silk Road which happened when he was a young child. The haul of Stein and, especially, Pelliot provided a wealth of material for scholars. And in his first publications on the Sogdian language, Benveniste is one of the major figures in this interpretative and reconstructive work.
This is therefore a twentieth-century reading, of a medieval manuscript, of a classical text – in which a body, or at least a body part, is in question.
References
Emile Benveniste, “Un emploi du nom du «genou» en vieil-irlandais et en sogdian”, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 27 (1), 1926, 51-53.
E. Benveniste, Textes Sogdiens: Édités, traduits et commentés, Paris: Librarie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1940.
E. Benveniste, Vessantara Jātaka: Texte sogdienédité, traduit et commenté, Paris: Librarie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1946.
Émile Benveniste, Études Sogdiennes, ed. Georges Redard, Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1979.
Robert Gauthiot, “Une version sogdienne du Vessantara Jātaka: Publiée en transcription et avec traduction”, Journal Asiatique 19, 1912, 163-93 and 429-510; reprinted as Une version sogdienne du Vessantara Jātaka, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1912.
K. Grønbech (ed.), Codices sogdiani: Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale (Mission Pelliot) reproduits en fac-similé, introduction Emile Benveniste, Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1940.
Joseph Loth, “Le mot désignant le genou au sens de génération chez les Celtes, les Germains, les Slaves, les Assyriens”, Revue Celtique 40, 1923, 143- 52.
Joseph Vendryes, “Les correspondances de vocabulaire entre l’indo-iranien et l’italo-celtique”, Mémoires de la société linguistique de Paris XX, 1917, 265-85.
This is the seventeenth post of an occasional series, where I try to 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.
Academic debate tends to create conflicts among straw figures. That is certainly what has often happened in the many debates over Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. But we need to get beyond straw figures and reductionist readings to understand how to read together Marx and Foucault—the one with the other, the other with the one.
Matteo Polleri does that in his work. Polleri is one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between the work of Marx and Foucault.
So I reached out to him to interview him about his work and to have a deep conversation about how we can enrich our own thinking today through a productive confrontation between the texts of Marx and the texts of Foucault.
This interview was conducted at the EHESS in Paris on March 29, 2025. Enjoy the conversation!
This is part of the Marx 13/13 series of lectures and discussions. There are lots more recordings and readings at that site.
Radiances gathers previously unpublished essays by one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century. Although best known for The King’s Two Bodies (1957), Ernst Kantorowicz’s scholarly expertise ranged from classical antiquity to early modernity and from political pageantry to numismatics. These essays traverse the breadth of his expertise, exploring “radiations” of the themes that were central to his published work: sovereignty, theology, law, and iconography.
The radiations in these engaging essays include the imagery of throne-sharing from the Hellenistic era and Pharaonic Egypt to early Christianity, coronation ceremonies in Byzantium and the West, the Carolingian and Burgundian Renaissances, the relationship between Rome and Christianity, the importance of history as a humanistic pursuit, and the significance of postage stamps in political myth-building. Robert E. Lerner discusses each essay’s composition, themes, and place in Kantorowicz’s oeuvre. Combining vast knowledge with intellectual delight, Radiances teems with the profound historical insights that distinguished Kantorowicz’s scholarship.
Thanks to Florian Louis for the link.
Update May 2025: I’ve been asked to review the book so will post a link to that when it’s available.
Durant l’année universitaire 1969-1970, Jacques Derrida consacre un séminaire au problème des rapports entre la psychanalyse et la critique littéraire. Ce séminaire, l’un des rares à traiter de l’esthétique freudienne, est l’occasion pour Derrida d’analyser ce qu’il appelle la « première doctrine » de Freud, à savoir sa théorie marquée par la toute-puissance du plaisir.
Or, avec l’introduction par Freud de la catégorie du double et ses spéculations sur la pulsion de mort, tout change ou aurait dû changer, d’après Derrida. La remise en question de la toute-puissance du principe de plaisir dans Au-delà du principe de plaisir (1920) aurait dû conduire à une refonte, à une réorganisation, à un déplacement de la « poétique » psychanalytique. Pourtant il n’en est rien : d’où, selon Derrida, un certain boitement de la théorie freudienne de l’art et de la littérature et de tout ce qui en dépend ou y fait retour.
Ce boitement va se répéter dans la critique littéraire d’inspiration psychanalytique. Qu’il s’agisse de la psychanalyse de l’imagination matérielle de Bachelard, la psychanalyse existentielle de Sartre ou la méthode psychocritique de Mauron, Derrida constate que rien n’a changé. C’est seulement avec Lacan, à la toute fin du séminaire, que se produit un tournant décisif, la psychanalyse reconnaissant l’instance proprement signifiante du texte littéraire, qu’elle avait largement négligée jusqu’ici.
Psychanalyse et critique littéraire propose ainsi un contexte (littéraire) fascinant et déterminant pour le travail ultérieur de Derrida sur la psychanalyse.
There is a small historical error in Foucault’s History of Madness, which endures through the different French versions with the exception of Oeuvres, but which is corrected in one of the English versions. Yes, there are other errors, but I’m focused on this one, because Foucault tried to correct it.
In 1961, in Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, it says:
Pour un million et demi d’habitants au XIIe siècle, Angleterre et Écosse avaient ouvert à elles seules 220 léproseries. Mais au XIVe siècle déjà̀ le vide commence à se creuser ; au moment où Richard III ordonne une enquête sur l’hôpital de Ripon – c’est en 1342 – il n’y a plus de lépreux, il attribue aux pauvres les biens de la fondation.
Richard III was King of England from 1483 until 1485. So, either Foucault’s date is incorrect or it was another King.
The passage appears on p. 5 of the original 1961 Plon edition and its 1964 reprint, and p. 15 of the abridged 1964 edition. In the 1965 English translation of the abridged edition, Madness and Civilization, this King is changed to Edward III, who ruled 1327-1377. In Richard Howard’s translation:
England and Scotland alone had opened 220 lazar houses for a million and a half inhabitants in the twelfth century. But as early as the fourteenth century they began to empty out; by the time Edward III ordered an inquiry into the hospital of Ripon -in 1342- there were no more lepers; he assigned the institution’s effects to the poor (p. 5).
The change was made by Howard as translator, but on Foucault’s direction: there is a letter from the Georges Borchardt literary agency to Pantheon books on 28 May 1964, conveying Foucault’s wish that the correction is made. Foucault hadn’t spotted the mistake when abridging the text, but presumably soon afterwards.
But the 1972 version of the French, as Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (p. 15), and the 1976 Tel reprint (p. 15 in some printings; p. 17 in others), both have Richard III. In resetting the text for this edition Gallimard simply carried over the error from the earlier French editions, and Foucault didn’t spot it on the proofs.
Histoire de la folieMadness and Civilisation
The 2005 English translation of the unabridged text, History of Madness, has this:
For their million-and-a-half inhabitants in the twelfth century, England and Scotland had opened 220 leper houses. But even by the fourteenth century they were beginning to empty: when Richard III ordered an inquiry into the state of Ripon hospital in 1342, it emerged that there were no more lepers, and the foundation was charged with the care of the poor instead.
In this case, the translator is working from a defective French text – either the 1961 or 1972/1976 edition – not realising the earlier English translation had a correction of an original French error. The reprinted text in Oeuvres has “… au moment où [Eduoard] III ordonne une enquête” (Vol I, p. 11), where the editor of this text, Jean-François Bert, has corrected the mistake. But it’s not clear whether he did this because he spotted the error, or realised Foucault once had, or both.
We are left with the curious situation that the one accurate version of this passage in a standalone version of the text is the much-criticised Madness and Civilization. There it is both historically correct and amended to Foucault’s wish.
On the different French and English editions, and persistent confusions over dating and status, see here.
This note is in the same register as the ‘Sunday histories‘ posts, though its minor status means I’ve posted it mid-week. I should have posted it yesterday for Shakespeare’s birthday given he wrote plays on Richard III and – disputed – on Edward III.
The music industry is being reshaped by a fresh round of platform intermediation – one based on MusicTech, social media platforms and user-generated content, live streaming, crowdfunding and gamification. Leyshon and Watson critically examine this latest wave of new platform music industries and consider how they are influencing music creation, distribution and consumption as well as their wider economic and cultural impact.
Drawing on contemporary case studies and examples from throughout the industry, the authors situate this latest wave of innovation within the historical context of earlier rounds of platform reintermediation, which saw the music industry lurch from a file-sharing crisis to the emergence of the major streaming platforms that first halted and then reversed the decline in revenues derived from recorded music. While debates about the moral economy of streaming dominate both media and academic accounts of the music industries, they show that a focus on streaming alone obscures much of the complexity resulting from related and concurrent platform innovations.
The book provides an up to date and comprehensive study of the latest developments in one of the fastest-moving and innovative sectors of the cultural economy.
