Il volume affronta la concezione del normale e del patologico nel pensiero sociologico francese, in particolare in Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim e Maurice Halbwachs, attraverso la prospettiva di Georges Canguilhem.
Annagiulia Canesso prova a dare una risposta ad alcuni interrogativi che caratterizzano l’odierno agone politico, servendosi dei ragionamenti dei filosofi di riferimento: quali sono le categorie concettuali cui facciamo riferimento per interpretare la società? Da quale tradizione di pensiero provengono? E quali poste in gioco racchiudono? In che modo incrociano tanto le scienze della vita quanto le scienze della società?
Quella dell’autrice è una lettura filosofica che propone di sondare le principali questioni epistemologiche, politiche e storico-concettuali contenute nel richiamo al normale e al patologico da parte della sociologia, che si istituisce come scienza della società e, contempora-neamente, come sua prassi trasformativa. La definizione di un “governo del normale” appare così come una problematizzazione della modernità che, ancora oggi, informa e plasma la nostra esperienza della politica.
Although they both studied in Germany, and were among those who attended Heidegger’s lecture courses in the 1920s, Hannah Arendt and Alexandre Koyré didn’t meet at that time. (Arendt attended lectures in 1924-26 in Marburg; Koyré in 1928-29 in Freiburg.) Their first contact seems to have been after Arendt had left Germany in 1933, when she moved to Paris where Koyré was teaching at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Teaching records of the EPHE show that Arendt’s husband at the time, Günter Stern (Anders), attended Koyré’s classes. Their friendship, though, seems to have really developed only after Arendt moved to the United States. Hannah Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl describes Alexandre Koyré as “a close friend” (p.117).
Koyré spent much of the Second World War in the USA, teaching at the New School and the École Libre des Hautes Études, and then was a frequent visitor afterwards, holding visiting positions at several US institutions including University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Although Arendt taught at both Chicago and the New School, that was from 1963-67 and 1967-75, and Koyré died in 1964, so they did not overlap. But throughout the 1950s and early 1960s they would meet in both the US and when Arendt was in Europe. Young-Bruehl says that Arendt was invited by Koyré and Jean Wahl to speak to the Collège Philosophique in Paris after the war, but she found the social side of these visits too much (p. 245; citing a letter from Arendt to Hilde Fränkel on 3 December 1949). Arendt was pretty critical about French intellectuals generally, and some of her letters to her second husband Heinrich Blücher are often rude about them. But she seems to have genuinely liked Koyré and his wife.
What survives of the Arendt-Koyré correspondence is interesting – it is available as a scan online at the Library of Congress, which holds Arendt’s archives; and was published by Paola Zambelli, Koyré’s biographer, in 1997. But it only covers the years 1951-63, and what survives are only Koyré’s letters to Arendt. As I’ve said before, I understand there is little correspondence in Koyré’s archives. Zambelli provides a useful introduction to the letters. Koyré wrote to Arendt in French – one of their shared languages. (Koyré corresponded with another German-born US philosopher, Horace M. Kallen, in English, and he knew German well.) An English translation of the Koyré-Arendt letters would be worthwhile, I think; perhaps also an edition of the Koyré-Kallen letters.
A page of one of Koyré’s letters to Arendt
Here, though, I won’t discuss the Koyré letters to Arendt, or Zambelli’s useful introduction, but just mention a few other traces of their friendship I know. Arendt tells Gershom Scholem that she had arranged for copies of Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Scholarship to go to a range of contacts in France, based on a list that Koyré had put together (19 March 1947). One of those copies was to Koyré himself, and Arendt tells Scholem on 30 September 1947, that:
I just had a long talk with Koyré, who just arrived to give lectures at Chicago University. – (By the way, I like him very much.) About reviews of your book in France: Koyré himself is writing one for the Revue Philosophique.
I don’t think that review ever appeared. Arendt’s marked-up copy of Scholem’s book is available online from Bard College. In a letter to Karl Jaspers, Arendt writes of her delight that Koyré has contacted her on 4 October 1950: “Koyré called out of nowhere this morning; great glee”.
There are some potentially interesting thematic links between their work. One would be the political lie, on which both Koyré and Arendt wrote. This is work which has been revisited in more recent times, including the reprint of Koyré’s text in October in 2017, and the renewed attention to Arendt’s work on totalitarianism. Jacques Derrida discussed both Koyré and Arendt in his lecture “History of the Lie: Prolegomena”, which exists in a few different forms including in Without Alibi. (A version of this lecture was, incidentally, one of the two times I heard Derrida speak.)
Another shared interest would be technology and spatiality. Arendt’s copy of Koyré’s 1957 book From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe is preserved as part of her library, and the marked-up pages have been made available online. Arendt cites the work in The Human Condition, published the following year, and on their shared understandings the best sources I know are essays by Waseem Yaqoob and Bernard Debarbieux.
I am beginning work on Koyré’s other correspondence, and have found few mentions of Arendt. But he does tell a friend in 1959 he is looking forward to Arendt visiting Princeton, where she will be the “first woman professor” (see the report in Princetonia). There are few other traces of the friendship with Koyré in the correspondence of Arendt, at least in that which I have seen. Arendt told Jaspers of Koyré’s death in 1964, which she had learned of though Anne Weil.
Annchen wrote that Koyré had died. I don’t know whether you knew him. An old friend of ours. Sad. I saw him a year ago in Paris after he’d had a stroke that aged him a lot. Then, Annchen wrote, he had bone cancer. So—thank God.
Anne Weil was a childhood friend of Arendt, who was married to the philosopher Éric Weil. Weil dedicated his Logique de la philosophie to Koyré, and they are mentioned in Koyré’s letters to Arendt. Éric Weil was also a co-editor of Critique with Georges Bataille. More connections and networks to explore.
References
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
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 Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926-1969, eds. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber, San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992.
The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, ed. Marie Luise Knott, trans. Anthony David, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Bernard Debarbieux, “Les Spatialités dans l’œuvre d’Hannah Arendt”, Cybergeo : revue européenne de géographie, 2014, https://doi.org/10.4000/cybergeo.26277
Jacques Derrida, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena”, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, 28-70.
Alexandre Koyré, “Réflexions sur le mensonge”, Renaissance I, 1943, 95-111; revised version as “The Political Function of the Modern Lie”, Contemporary Jewish Record 8 (3), 1945, 290-300; reprinted in October 160, 2017, 143-51.
Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957.
Alexandre Koyré, “Lettres à Hannah Arendt (1951-1963)”, ed. Paola Zambelli, Nouvelles de la république des lettres 13 (1), 1997, 137-56; introduced by Paola Zambelli, “Koyré, Hannah Arendt et Jaspers”, 131-37.
Waseem Yaqoob, “The Archimedean Point: Science and Technology in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, 1951-1963”, Journal of European Studies 44 (3), 2014, 199-224.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2ndedition, 2004 [1982].
Paola Zambelli, Alexande Koyré in Incognito, Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2016; trans. Irène Imbart, Alexandre Koyré, un juif errant? Firenze: Musée Galileo, 2021.
Archives
Hannah Arendt Papers. Library of Congress: Correspondence, 1938-1976; General, 1938-1976
Fonds Alexandre Koyré, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales archives, Humathèque Condorcet, https://cak.ehess.fr
This is the ninth 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. The other posts so far are:
A new history of Futurism and its fraught ideological ambitions, centered on sculptural experimentation
As the first comprehensive avant-garde of the twentieth century, Italian Futurism sought to integrate modern life with every imaginable aesthetic medium. The detached materiality of sculpture offered a singular proving ground for the drive to merge art and existence. Sculpture’s theory and practice offers a distillation of Futurism’s larger aims and frustrations: a will to mechanize haunted by the tradition of craft; the liberation of flight burdened by mass and gravity; the lyrical mutiny of form chastened by the exigencies of design; and a dream of totality splintered by the contingency of the fragment.
Centered on avant-garde sculpture in Italy and other European countries between the world wars, Fragments of Totality ventures a new history of Futurism and its fraught ideological ambitions. Illuminating understudied works by prominent artists like Giacomo Balla, Enrico Prampolini, Fortunato Depero, and Bruno Munari alongside the efforts of many lesser-known figures, this first major study of Futurist sculpture opens onto wider questions: from labor and leftist Futurism, to the politics of aesthetic autonomy, to the intersections between race, imperialism, and materials. The medium—and the idea—of sculpture sets into relief the demands of any project of modern cultural totality. Futurism’s shifting definitions of “plasticity” underscore the volatile political economy not only of interwar Italy, but also perhaps of a wider Western epoch.
How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt do they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the career of German polymath Johann Daniel Major (1634–93), Curating the Enlightenment uncovers how late seventeenth-century scholars crafted the research university as a haven for critical inquiry in defiance of political and economic pressures. Abandoning the surety of established intellectual practice, this ‘experimental century’ saw Major and his peers reshaping fragments of knowledge into new perspectives. Across new disciplines, from experimental philosophy to archaeology and museology, they reexamined what knowledge was, who it was for, and how it was to be stored, managed, accessed, judged, and transformed. Although later typecast as Baroque obstacles to be overcome by the Enlightenment, these academics arranged knowledge in dynamic infrastructures that encouraged its further advancement in later generations, including our own. This study examines these seventeenth-century practices as part of a continuous intellectual tradition and reconceptualizes our understanding of the Enlightenment.
A history of “priming” research that analyzes the field’s underlying assumptions and experimental protocols to shed new light on a contemporary crisis in social psychology.
In 2012, a team of Belgian scientists reported that they had been unable to replicate a canonical experiment in the field of psychology known as “priming.” The original experiment, performed by John Bargh in the nineties, had purported to show that words connoting old age unconsciously influenced—or primed—research subjects, causing them to walk more slowly. When subsequent researchers could not replicate these results, Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman warned of a “train wreck looming” if Bargh and his colleagues could not address doubts about their work. Since then, the inability to replicate other well-known priming experiments has helped precipitate an ongoing debate over what has gone wrong in psychology, raising fundamental questions about the soundness of research practices in the field.
Anatomy of a Train Wreck offers the first detailed history of priming research from its origins in the early 1980s to its recent collapse. Ruth Leys places priming experiments in the context of contemporaneous debates over not only the nature of automaticity but also the very foundations of social psychology. While these latest discussions about priming have largely focused on methodology—including sloppy experimental practices, inadequate statistical methods, and publication bias—Leys offers a genealogy of the theoretical expectations and scientific paradigms that have guided and motivated priming research itself. Examining scientists’ intellectual strategies, their responses to criticism, and their assumptions about the nature of subjectivity, Anatomy of a Train Wreck raises crucial questions about the evidence surrounding unconscious influence and probes the larger stakes of the replication crisis: psychology’s status as a science.
In the NYU archives today, I read the typescript of a lecture given by Edmund Leach about Roman Jakobson at the New York Institute for the Humanities, and wondered if it had been published. One better, the audio recording of this lecture was made available on the New Books Network just a couple of years ago.
The lecture says it is from 1982, but since Leach says in the lecture that Jakobson died in July of “last year”, it must date from 1983, and the typescript suggests February.
In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear the 1982 Gallatin Lecture, in which Sir Edmund Leach discussed the work of Roman Jakobson, who he met in 1960, at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
Jakobson was one of the pioneers of structural linguistics, and a major influence on Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. He taught at Harvard from 1940 until his retirement in 1967. Leach was a British social anthropologist, and the provost of King’s College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979.
More lectures from the Institute of Humanities vault are here.
A pioneering excavation of Adorno’s geography which engages fascism and antifascism in the terrain of geographical theorising
Brings fascism and antifascism into the heart of geographical theorising
Argues that thinking geographically is indispensable to thinking antifascistically
Argues that thinking antifascistically should be at the core of thinking geographically
The first staging of a sustained engagement between Adorno and geography
A systematic disclosure of how Adorno’s writings – on diverse matters from philosophy to music – entangle a critical-geographical sensibility
To think antifascistically is necessarily to think geographically; to think geographically ought to be to think antifascistically. This aphorism sets the compass for this book’s ambitious attempt to fold questions of fascism and antifascism into the remit of Geotheory (the focus of the host book series). Alert to fascism’s pernicious haunting of our contemporary moment, it reaches for intellectual resources through which to fashion constellations of antifascist thought hinging on attentiveness to space, place, landscape and nature.
Specifically, the book offers the first attempt to systematically explore the ‘geographies’ integral to the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno, premier exponent of the Frankfurt School of critical theory whose writings – on philosophy and sociology, politics and culture, literature and music – were often framed precisely against the threat of fascistic regression. By disclosing Adorno’s geographies, the shape of a geographical antifascism comes into view as a transformational restatement of critical geography’s spirit and purpose.
I’ll be part of a discussion of the book with Chris Philo and Felicitas Kübler, London Group of Historical Geographers, online 27 May 2025, 5pm. More details when I have them.
Erving Goffman and the Cold War presents a provocative new reading of the work of sociologist Erving Goffman. Instead of viewing him as a “marginal man” or academic outsider, Gary D. Jaworski explores Goffman as a social theorist of the Cold War. Goffman was deeply connected to both the ethos of his time and to a range of cold warriors and their critics, such as Edward A. Shils, Thomas C. Schelling, and the researchers on “brainwashing” associated with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, among others. Chapters on loyalty, betrayal, secrecy, strategy, interrogation, provocation, and aggression concretely illustrate these connections. Erving Goffman and the Cold War shows that Goffman was much more than a microsociologist of mundane life; he was a perceptive analyst of the Cold War America.
Iain D. Thomson is renowned for radically rethinking Heidegger’s views on metaphysics, technology, education, art, and history, and in this book, he presents a compelling rereading of Heidegger’s important and influential understanding of existential death. Thomson lucidly explains how Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death led directly to the insights which forced him to abandon Being and Time’s guiding pursuit of a fundamental ontology, and thus how his early, pro-metaphysical work gave way to his later efforts to do justice to being in its real phenomenological richness and complexity. He also examines and clarifies the often abstruse responses to Heidegger’s rethinking of death in Levinas, Derrida, Agamben, Beauvoir, and others, explaining the enduring significance of this work for ongoing efforts to think clearly about death, mortality, education, and politics. The result is a powerful and illuminating study of Heidegger’s understanding of existential death and its enduring importance for philosophy and life.
