Schelling came of age during the pivotal and exciting years at the end of the eighteenth century, as Kant’s philosophy was being incorporated into the German academic world. At this time, in addition to delving into the new Kantian philosophy, Schelling engaged in an intense study of Plato’s dialogues and was immersed in a Neoplatonic intellectual culture. Attention to these aspects of Schelling’s early philosophical development illuminates his fundamental commitments. Throughout the first decade of his adult life, from 1792-1802, Schelling was a mystical Platonist. Naomi Fisher argues that Schelling is committed to two overarching theses, which together comprise his mystical Platonism. First, Schelling considers the absolute to be ineffable: It cannot be described in conceptual terms. For this reason, it remains inferentially external to any given philosophical system and is only intimated to us in certain analogical formulations, in works of art, or in nature as a whole. Second, Schelling is committed to a kind of priority monism: All things are grounded in the absolute, but finite things possess an integral unity all their own, and so have a distinct and relatively independent existence. Highlighting these commitments resolves an interpretive dispute, according to which Schelling is a Fichtean idealist or a Spinozist, or he vacillates between these positions. Interpreting Schelling as advancing a mystical Platonism provides an alternative way of interpreting these early texts, such that they are by and large consistent. Fisher presents Schelling’s early philosophy as a unique and compelling fusion of the old and new: Schelling fulfills the characteristic aims of post-Kantian philosophy in a way distinctive among his contemporaries, by drawing on and appropriating various strands of Platonism.
For the past century, our roadways have been engineered as pipes for cars, but they offer vast potential as public spaces. From New York and Boston to Portland and Los Angeles, cities are rethinking their streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the asphalt roadway. Reclaiming the Road traces the historical evolution of America’s streets and explores contemporary movements to retake them from cars—temporarily and permanently—for diverse forms of mobility and community life. To share the street raises important questions of equity, in transportation and beyond. David L. Prytherch proposes a bold, intersectional vision of a more just street.
Reclaiming the Road connects cutting-edge theory, policy analysis, and firsthand accounts from those leading the charge in transforming our streets to advocate for changing how we think about and design roads. Prytherch features case studies of nine major cities in the United States to show how experiments in reclaiming streets accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic to become lasting changes. Through in-depth interviews, he shares stories of how planners, transportation advocates, and community leaders have implemented innovative programs for slowing neighborhood streets, opening roads for walking and biking, and reconstructing roadways with public parklets and street plazas as social spaces for curbside conversation.
Examining movements to transform streets through the lenses of equity and justice, Reclaiming the Road tackles the conceptual challenge of defining mobility justice and the practicalities of planning a more just public street, offering a compelling vision for the future of America’s public spaces.
This book examines how the Covid-19 pandemic can be described as a biopolitical crisis, taking into account a fact often overlooked by commentators: Covid-19 is a zoonosis, a disease transmissible between animal species. The Sars-Cov2 virus causing this respiratory disease circulated in bats before passing to humans under as-yet mysterious conditions, and it was transmitted from humans to other species, notably mink and deer.
Building on Michel Foucault’s revival of the term “biopolitics” and related notions (disciplinary power, pastoral power, cynegetic power), this book traces a set of public health measures taken over the last two centuries to control epidemics. It underlines how the need to conserve virus strains in order to identify and anticipate their mutations has given rise to cryopolitics, a set of techniques aimed at suspending the living in order to defer death. The book then questions the emancipatory scope of this cryopolitics by examining interspecies solidarity built by the warning signals sent by animals to humans about coming threats, be they pandemics, natural disasters, or climate change. By blurring the boundaries between the wild and the domestic resulting from the process of domestication, the politics of zoonoses relies on sentinels who preserve the memory of signs from the past to prepare living beings for future threats by involving them in a common ideal.
A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath.
In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals.
In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization.
Who translated Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things? The original English edition, published by Pantheon in 1970 (and Tavistock in the UK) has the title The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, and under the author name says “A translation of Les Mots et les choses”. No translator is named. The “Publisher’s Note” explains the change of title from the literal Words and Things to The Order of Things, because of a potential confusion with other books titled Words and Things. But it is a publisher note, rather than a translator note, and yet it says things that ordinarily a translator would say, closing with:
In view of the range of literature referred to in the text, it has not proved feasible in every case to undertake the bibliographical task of tracing English translations of works originating in other languages and locating the passages quoted by M. Foucault. The publisher has accordingly retained the author’s references to French works and to French translations of Latin and German works, for example, but has, as far as possible, cited English editions of works originally written in that language (p. viii of original edition).
At least one reviewer picked up on the lack of a named translator. George Steiner had this to say in a review entitled “The Mandarin of the Hour“:
The translator (whom, with maddening disregard for human effort and responsibility, the publisher leaves anonymous) has striven hard. Nevertheless, an honest first reading produces an almost intolerable sense of verbosity, arrogance and obscure platitude. Page after page could be the rhetoric of a somewhat weary sybil indulging in free association. Recourse to the French text shows that this is not a matter of awkward translation (The New York Times, 28 February 1971).
Foucault responded to that review in the first issue of Diacritics, a piece entitled “Monstrosities in Criticism“. But though he engages with several of Steiner’s criticisms, he does not reveal the translator.
Bibliographies of Foucault sometimes credit Alan Sheridan. Sheridan also translated The Birth of the Clinic and The Archaeology of Knowledge in the early 1970s, and went on to translate Discipline and Punish. He translated several other books, some for Tavistock and/or Pantheon. In Sheridan’s 1980 book Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, the bibliography says “The Order of Things, trans. A.S., London, Tavistock and New York, Pantheon, 1970 (with Foreword by M.F.)” (p. 227). That would seem to indicate he was the translator and is the same way he credits himself for the books which we know he translated. But in the “Author’s Note” to The Will to Truth he thanks publishers of translations that have allowed him to quote from them, and does not mention The Order of Things. At the end of his note he says: “I have taken the liberty, on occasion, of rewording the extracts quoted. In the case of two books, I have preferred to use my own renderings” (p. ix). But this doesn’t seem to apply to The Order of Things. A check of some of his translations from The Order of Things in The Will to Truth suggests he followed the published translation. It is also listed on Sheridan’s own website under his translations. So, until now, I’d been content to think Sheridan was the translator, just strangely uncredited.
In the Columbia University archives are the records of Zone books, who published the first English translation of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna in 1988. I looked at their records relating to this book last month. I have edited a new edition of this text, based on the existing translation, but comparing the first and second French editions, and doing more work with the notes. Among other things in the archive, I was looking for any clues about the translator of that book, Derek Coltman. I had wanted to contact him when the book was going through the re-editing process. I couldn’t find any contact details, and in the end I had assumed he wasn’t still alive, but had not been able to find out for sure. But there is some correspondence with him in the Zone books archive, sent from an old farmhouse in rural Norfolk, England, and he is asked at one point for a cv. He sends what is a rather rambling letter instead, narrating his career to date, from a degree in 1952 to working as a waiter in a cabaret theatre in New York, to his early translations. A 1952 degree suggests he would be very elderly if he were still alive today (Update June 2025: he apparently died in 2012). But I was struck by this astonishing passage about his previous translation experience:
It was in the mid to late sixties also that I did Foucault’s Words and Things for a New York imprint called Pantheon, a fact that I mention partly because Foucault figures on your list of authors and partly because there is a mystery about it that still niggles at me occasionally. It was a project I was rather dubious about tackling in those days; but Richard Howard and Susan Sontag ganged up on me one day in the 8th Street Delicatessen, and what could I do but succumb? An hour with Ms. Sontag and not only do you start suffering from a strange intellectual elation, you even start to suspect yourself of being perhaps rather cleverer than you previously dared hope, So what was the mystery? Well, the translation was approved, accepted, and paid for; but was it ever published? I never received a copy; I didn’t get an answer when I wrote to enquire after the book’s fate; and I’ve never seen it listed in a library catalogue. Never mind, it was a fascinating book to do. The first chapter in particular: a long, amazingly detailed, continually surprising analysis of Velazquez’s Las Meninas.
I like the idea that Richard Howard – who had translated the abridged version of the History of Madness as Madness and Civilisation – and Susan Sontag persuaded Coltman. Some parts of this seem plausible, but I don’t think he can have looked very hard in libraries. That said, if he was only looking for a book entitled Words and Things, then perhaps that would explain why he couldn’t locate it. Could he really have missed that the book had appeared as The Order of Things? By the late 80s, when this CV was written, Foucault was well-known, and his 1984 death was widely noted. But why did Pantheon not acknowledge Coltman’s role in the published version, nor according to him, respond to their correspondence?
It could be that Coltman’s translation was not used, for an unknown reason, and Pantheon commissioned Sheridan instead. But if Pantheon were unhappy with the quality, why did they accept it and pay Coltman? Or maybe Sheridan was asked to rework Coltman’s draft, and translator credit was unmentioned, perhaps to avoid indicating problems. (There are translations where a committee approach means no one wants their name to appear. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind being one example – its problems begin, but by no means end, with the title.) The Pantheon archives are at Columbia too, but I can find no records relating to Coltman, Foucault, or Sheridan there. The records of Georges Borchardt, Inc. are also at Columbia. This is a literary agency who represented Gallimard and Plon to anglophone publishers, and negotiated the translation rights to this and other works by Foucault. The file on Foucault has some interesting material, but nothing on who translated the text. There is a note that Sontag tried to persuade another publisher to buy the rights, after she had picked up a copy of Les Mots et les choses in Paris in 1966, so she was certainly interested in the idea of its translation. Perhaps there is something in the Tavistock archives. But the question of who translated The Order of Things, which I’d thought settled by Sheridan’s 1980 book, is, for me, open to question again.
Update 17 June 2025: I’ve been told that Derek Coltman died in 2012. I’d written to the address I found in the file but the current owners informed me he had moved away and later died. Sheridan died in 2015, Howard in 2022 and Sontag in 2004. It seems this is only going to be resolved by some other archival trace somewhere.
References
Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, trans. Derek Coltman, ed. Stuart Elden, Chicago: Hau books, 2023.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Pantheon/London: Tavistock, 1970.
Michel Foucault, “Monstrosities in Criticism”, trans. Robert J. Matthews, Diacritics 1 (1), 1971, 57-60, https://www.jstor.org/stable/464562
Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, London: Tavistock, 1980.
This is the fourteenth 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.
A provocative reassessment of Heidegger’s critique of German Idealism from one of the tradition’s foremost interpreters.
Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy ended—failed, even—in the German Idealist tradition. In The Culmination, Robert B. Pippin explores the ramifications of this charge through a masterful survey of Western philosophy, especially Heidegger’s critiques of Hegel and Kant. Pippin argues that Heidegger’s basic concern was to determine sources of meaning for human life, particularly those that had been obscured by Western philosophy’s attention to reason. The Culmination offers a new interpretation of Heidegger, German Idealism, and the fate of Western rationalism.
There is a discussion between Pippin and Xavier Bonilla here. Thanks to dmf for the links.
An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more.
A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. In this engaging philosophical biography, David Bather Woods reevaluates Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher’s relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. Bather Woods weaves together Schopenhauer’s ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. In doing so, this book answers some of life’s most challenging questions about how to deal with pain and loss, and how to live with ourselves and each other.
Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn’t give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer’s life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today.
Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant is the first history of the concept of facticity. G. Anthony Bruno argues that this concept’s coining, transmission, and repurposing by post-Kantian thinkers leaves a lasting divide concerning the question of whether a science of intelligibility can tolerate brute facts. In the phenomenological tradition, ‘facticity’ denotes undeducibly brute conditions of intelligibility such as sociality, mortality, and temporality. This suggests an affirmative answer to the post-Kantian question. However, the term’s original use in the German idealist tradition is associated with a negative answer: a science of intelligibility must eliminate bruteness in order to be systematic, as Fichte says, or presuppositionless, as Hegel says. Moreover, eliminating bruteness requires a new logic for deducing conditions of intelligibility from reason’s self-contradictions, a dialectical logic that Fichte invents and Hegel develops. In response to the German idealists, Heidegger argues that dialectic ineluctably presupposes brute facts of lived experience, whose interpretation requires a hermeneutics of facticity. The untold history of the concept of facticity thus contains the deepest parting of the ways after Kant, one in which reason is fated to transform from the hand that holds the world to the thrown activity of being-in-the-world. Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant explores this transformation while confronting our inheritance of the still-pressing post-Kantian question.
