Ce livre raconte, à partir d’archives inédites, l’histoire de la rencontre entre deux figures emblématiques des sciences humaines du XXe siècle, Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) et Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968). Rien de commun, en apparence, entre le jeune sociologue français, œuvrant au milieu des années 1960 à la refondation de sa discipline dans un monde intellectuel dominé par le structuralisme, et le vieil historien d’art allemand reconnu internationalement, émigré aux États-Unis après avoir fui le nazisme. Et pourtant, c’est dans la collection « Le sens commun », dirigée par Bourdieu aux Éditions de Minuit, que paraît la première traduction française de Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique, au printemps 1967, en même temps que les Essais d’iconologie chez Gallimard.
L’édition d’Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique est minutieusement préparée par Bourdieu qui, fait unique dans sa carrière, réalise lui-même la traduction. Il y joint une longue postface qui deviendra célèbre : c’est là qu’apparaît sous sa plume la première théorisation du concept d’habitus.
En s’appuyant sur des sources multiples – dont la correspondance des deux savants reproduite en annexe –, cette enquête retrace pas à pas une aventure éditoriale et intellectuelle unique, moment clé dans la réception d’Erwin Panofsky, mais aussi dans la carrière d’un Pierre Bourdieu en pleine construction des outils qui lui permettront de s’imposer dans les décennies suivantes comme l’auteur d’une œuvre capitale.
This looks interesting – the story behind the edition of Erwin Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique – translated by Bourdieu, who contributed a postface. Foucault reviewed this book, and Panofsky’s Essais sur l’iconographie (Gallimard, 1967) as “Les mots et les images” in Le Nouvel observateur (reprinted as Dits et écrits, text 51). There is no published translation of the review.
Some years ago, when I was working on Heidegger, I read David Farrell Krell’s “Work Sessions with Martin Heidegger” essay. These were sessions in which Krell discussed some of Heidegger’s vocabulary and worked with him on possible English renderings, as well as questions of interpretation and chronology. Krell was a really important editor and translator of Heidegger, from Early Greek Thinking in 1975 with Frank Capuzzi,to Basic Writings in 1977 (with a second edition from 1993), and the four Nietzsche volumes, with Capuzzi and Joan Stambaugh (between 1979 and 1987, and reprinted in two volumes in 1991.) Krell also discussed with Heidegger which essays to include in Basic Writings. Krell has written a huge amount on Heidegger, and many other themes. Of the Heidegger work, I particularly liked his Daimon Life. All very important for me during the PhD and a few years afterwards. I haven’t been reading the Heidegger literature for a long time now, and have not revisited my own early work on him. But I did review Krell’s book on Derrida’s Geschlecht series of essays on Heidegger, Phantoms of the Other,for Derrida Today. So, I was curious when Krell published his Three Encounters: Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida book in 2023.
All of Three Encounters is extremely interesting, and the discussion of Derrida, who he knew well for many years, is very revealing of the work and the man. But for me the most fascinating parts are his discussions of working with Heidegger and Arendt on translations of Heidegger. An earlier version of part of the Heidegger discussion was published in the Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception collection, and some of it is, of course, similar to the “Work Sessions” piece, though he notes that in the book he is transcribing from his journals afresh (Three Encounters, 45). Krell only knew Heidegger right at the end of his life – Heidegger died in 1976 – and Arendt for only a couple of years too, since she died just before Heidegger in 1975. Arendt’s involvement in English Heidegger translations is something I’ve known for a long time – it’s mentioned in passing in most of the biographies (i.e. Young-Bruehl on Arendt, 304, 442; Safranski on Heidegger, 427; Grunenberg, 248-49) – but Krell adds a lot of detail to the story. He stresses how closely Arendt was involved, notably alongside J. Glenn Gray, in the Harper & Row editions. Gray had translated What is Called Thinking? in 1968, which was one of the first translations of Heidegger’s later work. As Krell says: “Nothing appeared in the Harper series in those days that did not pass through her hands and under her alert eyes” (Three Encounters, 17-18; see Arendt to Heidegger 17 March 1968; 19 August 1971). The late 1960s was also when Arendt very publicly wrote about Heidegger, in the “Martin Heidegger at Eighty” piece, first published in English in The New York Review of Books.
The whole question of Arendt and Heidegger’s relationship, from student and lover to a complicated post-war friendship and partial reconciliation has been discussed in great detail by her biographers and others. Antonia Grunenberg’s Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger is especially good. There is an even larger literature on Heidegger’s politics, on which Arendt briefly and notoriously wrote in a note to the “Martin Heidegger at Eighty” piece. Neither their personal relation nor the political question is my concern here. I have written about the political issue before. But the translation question is one that interests me.
While looking at Alexandre Koyré’s letters to Arendt (I discuss their friendship here), I went to the Library of Congress website, which has digitised much of the Arendt archive. Although the Koyré-Arendt letters have been published, it’s always nice to see the originals, and comparing a handwritten text to a printed one is a good way to learn the idiosyncrasies of written style before I attempted my own transcriptions of some of his other letters. Immediately after ‘Koyré’ in the Finding Aid is ‘Krell’. The file online has several Krell offprints, taking up over half of the pages in the document. But then there is some very interesting correspondence. Some, but not all, is quoted by Krell in Three Encounters. I also wondered if the archive had the originals of correspondence with Heidegger, even though that has of course also been published. I quickly realised that those letters are actually in Marbach, at the Deutsche Literaturarchiv. Samantha Rose Hill writes about visiting that archive here, and the Library of Congress here. But the Library of Congress does have two Heidegger files online, which contain letters to and from Arendt about Heidegger, and they were very interesting too. There is also a file of notes of a seminar Arendt taught on Heidegger and Jaspers in 1951, and some other material, including the German text of “Martin Heidegger at Eighty”, which was initially a lecture, and a French version, presumably also given as a talk.
The correspondence at the Library of Congress shows that Arendt was involved with Heidegger’s translation into English long before Krell became involved in the early to mid-1970s. Krell indicates that the most recent edition of the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence adds a letter that shows she was in correspondence with Edward Robinson in 1954 about a translation of Being and Time (Arendt to Heidegger, 29 April 1954, copied to Robinson). Krell says it is unclear when Robinson began working with John Macquarrie (Three Encounters,187-88). The Arendt-Robinson letters clarify this. Arendt praises Robinson’s translation sample, but offers a whole range of very detailed comments on terminology – it’s on five typewritten, single-spaced pages. In subsequent letters to Robinson she tries to help with funding for the project, which was considered at one point might be bilingual, on facing pages, but the German publisher prevented this. Nor did Robinson have much luck with English publishers. One rejection is quoted by Robinson: “I think the greatest service we could perform for Professor Robinson would be to persuade him not to spend any more time on this hopeless and thankless task”. Robinson nevertheless continued, and one press he contacted said that they had already been in contact with Macquarrie about doing a translation. By April 1955 Macquarrie and Robinson are working together, and are asking Arendt’s advice on translation issues, on Heidegger’s prompting. The Macquarrie and Robinson translation was published in 1962, with SCM [Student Christian Movement] Press, which became part of Blackwell, rather than other presses which were being discussed. Krell’s Basic Writings includes a different version of Being and Time’s Introduction, translated by Stambaugh. She was working on a translation of the whole book for years, which stretched to decades, and it was finally published in 1996, before that version was revised by Dennis J. Schmitt in 2010. Krell praises Schmitt’s “valiant efforts” but thinks it “has to be retranslated from beginning to end”. He doubts this will be anytime soon (Three Encounters,32).
In Three Encounters Krell uses his own archives and correspondence with Heidegger and Arendt, as well as with his parents and others to provide a lot of detail about his translating and editing work on Heidegger, along with some of the rights issues that complicated the work of Basic Writings. Heidegger and, especially after Heidegger’s death, his wife were involved in some of the negotiations. Some of the translations were already in English, and there was a complication about whether the publishers of those controlled the English rights, even if the translations were to be done anew. This was complicated by Vittorio Klostermann – the man initially, and then the press that bears his name – beginning the work of editing the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger’s writings in the mid-1970s. The problem was that some of Heidegger’s books had been published by different German presses. The volumes of the Gesamtausgabe which edit texts published with different publishers in Heidegger’s lifetime are therefore only available to subscribers to the edition, not for individual sale. But it also meant Klostermann could not release the rights to some texts for Basic Writings, which delayed the book until the Heideggers intervened. There was a plan for a follow-up volume of essays edited by Krell in the history of being, but this never materialised.
There are some indications of Arendt’s work on the translations in her letters to Heidegger, but the Arendt archives add a lot of interesting detail. There are many letters from Krell to Arendt, and some of her replies to him. She was also writing on his behalf to get funding, as was Gray. There are also letters to others that relate to this story, including with Fred Wieck of Harper & Row about some of the other translations in the Harper series, and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann about plans for the Gesamtausgabe, which von Herrmann edited. Krell also sent Arendt at least one of his work notes written up after one of the meetings with Heidegger. There are some other letters sent to Arendt, often with replies, where people were asking her questions about interpretation of his work or, at times, his political actions. And a little correspondence about a failed plan to bring Heidegger to America, of which he had doubts, and which was prevented in the end by his health.
So, although Arendt’s involvement in the translation of Heidegger is mentioned in studies of her and Heidegger, it is so overshadowed by the biographical, and at times the intellectual links, that it doesn’t receive much discussion. There are other published sources for a fuller story. Krell published some parts of his correspondence with Gray in 1981, and says he still has sixty-eight letters from 1973 to 1977 (Three Encounters, 25). He also adds in a note: “I am also wondering whether Glenn and Hannah’s correspondence will be published; clearly, it would be crucial for understanding her writing of The Life of the Mind” (Three Encounters, 33 n. 8). Many of those letters are available in the Arendt papers, along with the typescript of her Introduction to Gray’s The Warriors. Discussing them would require a whole new post, at least – they are very interesting on precise terminological choices in translating Heidegger, the challenges of publication, the problems of the translators they commissioned, and other issues.
I don’t think Arendt mentions the detail of translating Heidegger in her letters to her second husband Heinrich Blücher, but in 1958 she does mention corresponding with Ralph Manheim, who translated An Introduction to Metaphysics, and reading the galley proofs of Heidegger’s 1961 Nietzsche book (Within Four Walls, 328, 369-70, 373, 375-76). Blücher died before Krell was in contact with Arendt, so he’s not mentioned in these letters, and nor is Gray. But it seems to me that there is a lot available now – from Krell’s fascinating memories to correspondence and these archives – which would enable a much fuller treatment.
In 2020 Krell wrote a piece called “Three Last Dubious Projects”, in which he outlines ideas for books he is not sure he will manage to complete. One of them is this book on the memories of Arendt, Heidegger and Derrida, and in the essay it is the theme which receives by far the most discussion. The two other projects are a “genealogy of Nietzsche interpretations devolving from Bataille and Heidegger” and “a discussion of Derrida’s strange mix of biology and biography in his work on Nietzsche”. I’d very much like to read both.
References
Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty”, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York Review of Books, 21 October 1971; reprinted in Michael Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978, 293–303.
Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, ed. Lotte Kohler, trans. Peter Constantine, New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1996.
Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters 1925-1975, ed. Ursula Ludz, trans. Andrew Shields, Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2004.
Stuart Elden, Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Stuart Elden, “David Farrell Krell, Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida’s Geschlecht, Albany: State University of New York, 2015”, Derrida Today 9 (1), 2016, 85-88.
Antonia Grunenberg, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: History of a Love, trans. Peg Birmingham, Kristina Lebedeva and Elizabeth von Witzke Birmingham, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Edward Robinson and John Macquarrie Oxford: Blackwell, 1962; trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray, New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, ed. David Farrell Krell, San Francisco: Harper Collins, four volumes, 1991.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, London: Routledge, 2nd edition 1993.
David Farrell Krell, “A Smile and a Sense of Tragedy: Letters from J. Glenn Gray”, Philosophy Today 25 (2), 1981, 95-113.
David Farrell Krell, “Work Sessions with Martin Heidegger”, Philosophy Today 26 (2), 1982, 126-38.
David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992.
David Farrell Krell, Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida’s Geschlecht, Albany: State University of New York, 2015.
David Farrell Krell, “Three Last Dubious Projects”, Research in Phenomenology 50 (3), 2020, 407-24.
David Farrell Krell, Three Encounters: Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023.
This is the eleventh 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 deeply moving exploration of the relationship between thinking and drawing, from the author of the groundbreaking Ways of Seeing
The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (a.k.a. Bento) spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes—but no drawings.
For years, without knowing what its pages might hold, John Berger has imagined finding Bento’s sketchbook, wanting to see the drawings alongside his surviving words. When one day a friend gave him a beautiful virgin sketchbook, Berger said, ‘This is Bento’s!’ and he began to draw, taking inspiration from the philosopher’s vision.
In this beautifully illustrated book, Berger uses the imaginative space opened up in this experiment to explore politics, storytelling, Spinoza’s life and times, and the process of drawing itself.
A powerful meditation on political resistance and the global search for justice
From the ‘ War on Terror’ to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on the far extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned attack on the poverty and loss of freedom at the heart of such unnecessary suffering.
These essays offer reflections on the political at the core of artistic expression and at the center of human existence itself.
Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Any artwork reflects the artist’s intentions, but also its times: therefore all art is political
In Permanent Red, John Berger argues that the contemporary artist should strive for a realism that aims for hope, to transform the world. Surveying the work of historical artists as well as that of near contemporaries such as Picasso, Léger and Matisse, he explores the role of the artist, dividing these figures into those that struggle, those that fail, and the true masters. He explains why we should study the work of the past: in order to understand the present and to rethink the future.
First published in 1960, Permanent Red established John Berger as a firebrand critic willing to broadcast controversial opinions on some of the most important British artists of the day, including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
Update August 2025: it is reviewed for Antipode by Danny McNally here.
A firsthand look at the lives of those who reside in no man’s land—the violence they endure and their immense resilience.
“No man’s land” invokes stretches of barren landscape, twisted barbed wire, desolation, and the devastation of war. But this is not always the reality. According to Noam Leshem in Edges of Care, the term also reveals radical abandonment by the state. From the Northern Sahara to the Amazon rainforests, people around the world find themselves in places that have been stripped of sovereign care. Leshem is committed to defining these spaces and providing a more intimate understanding of this urgent political reality.
Based on nearly a decade of research in some of the world’s most challenging conflict zones, Edges of Care offers a profound account of abandoned lives and lands, and how they endure and sometimes thrive once left to fend for themselves. Leshem interrogates no man’s land as a site of radical uncaring: abandoned by a sovereign power in a relinquishment of responsibility for the space or anyone inside it. To understand the ramifications of such uncaring, Leshem takes readers through a diverse series of abandoned places, including areas in Palestine, Syria, Colombia, Sudan, and Cyprus. He shows that no man’s land is not empty of life, but almost always inhabited and, in fact, often generative of new modes of being. Beautifully written and evocative, Edges of Care reveals the unexamined complexities and political dynamics hidden within and around places governed by callous indifference.
Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. At the same time, we have been warned by everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists about the negative consequences stemming from our current obsession with choice. It turns out that not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities and anxious about what best to select. There are social costs too. How did all this happen? The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom.
Taking readers from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one’s convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, those often with the fewest choices, who have frequently been the drivers of this change. She concludes with an exploration of how reproductive rights have become a symbolic flashpoint in our contemporary struggles over the association of liberty with choice.
Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from novels and restaurant menus to the latest scientific findings about choice in psychology and economics, The Age of Choice urges us to rethink the meaning of choice and its promise and limitations in modern life.
Enzo Traverso, a leading scholar of modern European history and thought, is the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. His books include The Origins of Nazi Violence (2003), The End of Jewish Modernity (2016), Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914–1945 (2016), Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (2017), The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (2019), The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate(2018), Revolution: An Intellectual History (2021), and Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography (2022), which he discussed with Sakiru Adebayo on the Blog. Traverso’s work is distinguished by its vast scope, metahistorical self-reflexivity, and distinctive relation to the history of the Left, given that he was born into the Italian Communist Party. His latest book, Gaza Faces History (Other Press, 2024), translated from the Italian by Willard Wood, began as a series of articles and interviews for Italian and French newspapers in the months after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. Contributing editor Jonathon Catlin spoke with Traverso about his latest book and how modern European history and thought can illuminate our present moment.
When Theodor W. Adorno returned to Germany from his exile in the United States, he was appointed as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Frankfurt and he immediately made a name for himself as a leading public intellectual. Adorno’s widespread influence on the postwar debates was due in part to the public lectures he gave outside of the university in which he analysed and commented on social, cultural and political developments of the time.
This first volume brings together Adorno’s lectures given between 1949 and 1968 on music, literature and the arts. With an engaging and improvisational style, Adorno spoke with compelling enthusiasm on subjects as diverse as Marcel Proust’s prose, Richard Strauss’s composition technique and Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Germany, restoring its social and intellectual institutions, needed to embrace the new music and writers who had been neglected, particularly with regards to Proust. To rebuild was taken to mean rediscovery, but Adorno also nurtured a vision of tradition which – far from being unthinkingly conservative – would attest to society’s honestly-appraised relationship to the past while it underwent the process of modernization. The volume illustrates Adorno’s deep commitment to holding contemporary music and culture to standards commensurate with the aspirations of a modern world emerging from the horrors of war.
This volume of his lectures is a unique document of Adorno’s startling ability to bring critical theory into dialogue with the times in which he lived. It will be of great value to anyone interested in the work of Adorno and critical theory, in German intellectual and cultural history and in the history of modern music and the arts.
This second volume brings together Adorno’s lectures given between 1949 and 1968 on social and political themes. With an engaging and improvisational style, Adorno spoke with infectious vigour about architecture and city planning, the relationship between the individual and society, the authoritarian personality and far-right extremism, political education and the current state of sociology, among other subjects. After Auschwitz, it was incumbent on Germany to undertake intensive memory work and to confront the reality of its own moral destruction, while rebuilding its political and economic systems. To rebuild was taken to mean rediscovery and looking outward, but Adorno also nurtured a vision of tradition which – far from being unthinkingly conservative – would attest to society’s honestly-appraised relationship to the past while it underwent the process of modernization. The volume illustrates Adorno’s deep commitment to holding society to standards commensurate with the aspirations of a modern world emerging from the horrors of war.
This volume of his lectures is a unique document of Adorno’s startling ability to bring critical theory into dialogue with the times in which he lived. It will be of great value to anyone interested in the work of Adorno and critical theory, in German intellectual and cultural history and in sociology and politics.
It connects to the translation and introduction in Historical Materialism of an interview Lefebvre conducted with Patrick Tort in 1986, reflecting on a lecture Lefebvre had given thirty years before.
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 and open access.
« Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs ». En 1955, c’est par ces quelques mots que commence Tristes tropiques. Vingt ans plus tôt, entre 1935 et 1939, Claude Lévi-Strauss, son auteur, parcourait le Brésil en compagnie de sa première épouse, la philosophe et anthropologue Dina Dreyfus, à la rencontre des peuples autochtones du Mato Grosso. De ces mois passés au cœur de l’Amazonie subsistent des carnets de terrain. Aujourd’hui déposés à la BnF, ils recèlent un véritable trésor : notes ethnographiques et linguistiques, croquis, partitions musicales, extraits de roman, photographies. Ce livre, issu des recherches menées sur cet ensemble documentaire et illustré des plus belles pièces du fonds d’archives, éclaire d’un nouveau jour la genèse d’un des plus célèbres récits de voyage du XXe siècle.
Alexandre Kojève is one of the twentieth century’s most seductive and intriguing figures. A product of the Russian merchant bourgeoisie, he became, depending on one’s point of view, either an overzealous bureaucrat or a secret agent who infiltrated the upper echelons of French state bureaucracy, spending the last twenty years of his life working in international diplomacy and high finance. Marco Filoni describes each facet of Kojève’s different lives in crystalline detail: the cultural circles of his youth, his studies, his philosophical passions, his fundamental theoretical choices, and his intellectual network, as well as the students who would become part of the intellectual elite, including Lacan, Bataille, and Merleau-Ponty. Drawing on rich archival material, unpublished texts, correspondence, and written and oral testimonies, The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève is a major benchmark for scholars of Kojève and of twentieth-century intellectual and political history. Filoni paints a vibrant portrait of one of the most influential intellectuals of the modern era, deftly composing Kojève’s personal, political, and philosophical lives.
