Writing Intellectual History after the “Age of Forms”: An Interview with Elías J. Palti – Journal of the History of Ideas blog – Part I and Part II
In this interview, primary editors Jacob Saliba and Zac Endter speak with award-winning and internationally recognized intellectual historian Elías Palti on his most recent work, Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Based on Seeley Lectures recently given at Cambridge University, the book consists of a meta-history of intellectual history in the last century. From the “Cambridge School,” Hans Blumenberg, and Reinhart Koselleck to Pierre Rosanvallon and Michel Foucault, Palti weaves together a complex range of thinkers as well as carefully reconstructs a wide array of concepts at the core of why and how intellectual historians do what they do. Ultimately, Palti seeks to clarify the evolving conditions, stakes, and epistemological ground on which intellectual history was built in the past and continues to be built up to the present.
Examines the use of ironic language among political leaders in international politics.
Irony in International Politics investigates ironic language in international politics, focusing on how political leaders use irony to articulate failures of the liberal international order. Underlining the political, performative, and affective nature of irony in international politics, the book introduces a novel typology of four forms of irony: justice-seeking irony, hegemony-seeking irony, recognition-seeking irony, and disruption-seeking irony.
Irony is typically understood as a tool of the underdog who seeks to reveal the hypocritical nature of the powerful, but Irony in International Politics shows that irony is increasingly used by the powerful who expose that there is a wide gap between the ideal and the actual in international politics. Studying cases from Turkey, the United Kingdom, Hungary, the United States, Sweden, Germany, Greece, and Russia, the book illustrates how the post-Cold War era represents a distinct scene of irony with its particular identity struggles and power asymmetries that have prompted ironic reactions.
Latin American Geographies introduces student readers to cutting-edge scholarship on a range of topics from Indigenous geographies to sustainable development and dependency theory. The book is written primarily by a Latin American-based authorship and blends complex theory with in-depth case studies in an accessible way for students with little prior knowledge.
Each chapter contains a general overview of the topic and includes summary boxes, review questions and annotated further readings. The book is divided into three sections. Section 1, “Core Themes,” gives the reader the necessary historical, conceptual and theoretical tools to make sense of and engage in contemporary geographical debates in Latin American geographies. It is divided into four areas, covering major sub-themes (historical and colonial geographies, political geographies, economic and urban geographies, and development and environmental geographies). Section 2, “Key Perspectives,” outlines key identities and positionalities that have had a profound impact on Latin American geographies, exemplifying their significance through a range of case studies. Section 3, “Uneven Processes,” provides an in-depth analysis into core geographical trends across three main themes: ecologies, urbanisation and resistance.
The book is unique in providing an introduction to Latin American geography that showcases the ideas of some of the region’s leading geographical thinkers. Aimed at undergraduate students, chapters will also be of relevance to advanced researchers looking for introductions to specific areas. The book is designed for use in the classroom as well as for independent learning.
This book expands on theories of “theatricality” in French and critical studies, adopting a transdisciplinary approach that reaches beyond performance studies into poetry, media technology, translation, and psychoanalytic theory.
Building on Artaud’s concept of theater as a “plague”—an unpredictable, cataclysmic, and contagious force that disrupts power structures and knowledge—the book challenges Aristotelian norms of theater as a medium of “healing” and “teaching.” Instead, theatricality emerges as a force of radical disruption, what Artaud called “the return of the repressed,” demanding openness to otherness.
The chapters present theatricality as primarily aural rather than visual, inciting “paranoiac listening,” invoking unretrievable “primal scenes,” and allowing unconscious “psychic” contamination. “Theatricality” is explored through works by Artaud, Genet, Novarina, and Koltès, but also Freud, Barthes, Kristeva, Girard, and Derrida. Each writer challenges the premises of their own artistic genres and fields of study, questioning binary systems like artistic production versus theoretical articulation, the technological versus the natural, and art versus life.
As shown, these binaries underpin mechanisms of repression, sacrificial violence, and the exclusion of the voiceless other. The book assigns a generative function to traditionally maligned notions like unintelligibility, madness, marginality, contagion, and criminality.
A globe shows the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and corporations.
Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity: bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space. By mapping this countergeography, which decides who wins and who loses in the new global order—and helping us to see how it might be otherwise—The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.
The formal conversion to Christianity in 1387 of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania seemingly marked the end of Europe’s last ‘pagan’ peoples. But the reality was different. At the margins, often under the radar, around the dusky edgelands, pre-Christian religions endured and indeed continued to flourish for an astonishing five centuries. Silence of the Gods tells, for the first time, the remarkable story of these forgotten peoples: belated adopters of Christian belief on the outer periphery of Christendom, from the Sámi of the frozen north to the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians around the Baltic, as well as the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia’s Volga-Ural Plain. These communities, Dr Young reveals, responded creatively to Christianity’s challenge, but for centuries stopped short of embracing it. His book addresses why this was so, uncovering stories of fierce resistance, unlikely survival and considerable ingenuity. He revolutionises understandings of the lost religions of the last pagans.
Superficially at least, the stories of Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) and Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) would seem to connect. Both were born in Russia – Nabokov in Saint Petersburg; Jakobson in Moscow; both went into exile after the Revolution – Nabokov in Cambridge and Berlin; Jakobson in Czechoslovakia then Scandinavia – before both moved to the United States.
They both taught in elite US institutions. Jakobson was the career academic, teaching at the École Libre des hautes études (ELHE), alongside Koyré, Lévi-Strauss and Jean Gottmann, among others, and then at Columbia University and Harvard University. In his final years he had an affiliate position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nabokov was primarily a novelist but also taught at Wellesley College and Cornell University. The historian Marc Moise Szeftel (1902-1985) had a similar life and career, escaping Ukraine to Poland, Belgium and then via France and Spain to the United States, teaching at Columbia, Cornell University and the University of Washington.
In the mid-1950s Nabokov was being considered for a chair in Russian Literature at Harvard, and there was support from some academics, but it was apparently Jakobson who destroyed his chances with a brutal, if very funny, putdown. Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd tells the story of a department discussion of the possibility:
There Roman Jakobson, the star performer in Harvard’s Slavic troupe, staunchly opposed someone else who might take top billing and attacked Nabokov for his quirky ideas on Dostoevsky and other great Russian novelists. Nabokov’s advocates asked if he were not a very distinguished novelist in his own right. Jakobson replied: “Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?” No one managed to parry that thrust (Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years,p. 303; compare Galya Diment, Pniniad, p. 39).
Jakobson must have known that Nabokov had actually worked at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology as a curator of butterflies while teaching at Wellesley College. (On his lifelong work as a lepidopterist, see Nabokov’s Butterflies.)
Nabokov of course learned of this opposition through mutual friends, and the acrimony was doubtless part of the reason for a failed collaboration between the two of them on an English translation of “The Song of Igor”. This was a Russian poem, alternatively known as “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” or other variants. It dated from probably from the late 12th century or the early 13th, and was written in Old East Slavic. Jakobson had worked on a critical edition of the text with Henri Grégoire and Szeftel as La Geste du Prince Igor’, published in 1948. Though appearing with Columbia University Press, the essays and apparatus in the book were in French: this was a collaboration between scholars who had met at the ELHE, and the text was formally volume 8 of the Annuaire de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales et slaves. (A collaborative course on the text had been taught at the ELHE in 1942-43, with others involved, including Alexandre Koyré.) While the volume also included French and English translations, Jakobson’s contribution was the edition of the text, a modern Russian translation and an essay on the authenticity of the text. His parts are reprinted in his Selected Writings Volume IV.
Nabokov wrote a review essay of this volume, and Boyd tells the story of how he struggled to find a journal for it. Approaching Jakobson, the suggestion was made that Nabokov’s translation was included alongside the Russian text and notes for an English edition. This was for a series Jakobson was going to edit of Russian classics for students, and Nabokov agreed, suggesting also his translation of Eugene Onegin for the series (Boyd, p. 145). Around 1957 – following this slight at Harvard – Nabokov broke this collaboration off. There were other reasons – perhaps due to ideological differences, perhaps due to literary approaches. Boyd also tells the story of dinner party that did not go well (p. 215). Nabokov objected to Jakobson’s ties to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Boyd picks up the story:
He had had a contract for years with the Bollingen Press for an annotated English edition of The Song of Igor’s Campaign to be prepared with Marc Szeftel and Roman Jakobson. All three contributors had been paid an advance. Although in no position to repay his share, Nabokov wanted to withdraw from the joint edition rather than work with Jakobson. To his delight, Bollingen agreed not to demand he return his part of the advance. He promptly wrote to Jakobson, explaining that he wanted to withdraw from their joint project on account of ‘your little trips to totalitarian countries.’ He had heard that the year before, in Moscow for a conference, Jakobson had wept at his return to the city, and had promised to come back soon. Nabokov was in fact convinced that Jakobson was a Communist agent. At a time when university faculties were hostile to the search for Communists on their campuses, Nabokov befriended the FBI agent assigned to Cornell and declared he would be proud to have his son join the FBI in that role. No wonder it was impossible for him to work alongside Jakobson (p. 311; the letter is from 14 April 1957).
Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977, p. 216
In the end, Nabokov made the English translation alone, published in 1960. He told Gleb Struve that it was “without the collaboration of the unacceptable Roman Jakobson” (3 June 1959). In this translation, Nabokov only briefly acknowledges the history:
I made a first attempt to translate Slovo o Polku Igoreve in 1952. My object was purely utilitarian—to provide my students with an English text. In that first version I followed uncritically Roman Jakobson’s recension as published in La Geste du Prince Igor. Later, however, I grew dissatisfied not only with my own—much too ‘readable’—translation but also with Jakobson’s views. Mimeographed copies of that obsolete version which are still in circulation at Cornell and Harvard should now be destroyed (p. 82 n. 18)
Nabokov was very critical of previous editions: “I have also seen The Tale of the Armament of Igor, edited and translated by Leonard A. Magnus, Oxford, 1915, a bizarre blend of incredible blunders, fantastic emendations, erratic erudition and shrewd guesses” (p. 19).
Nabokov did not spare the other scholars who had worked on the Song of Igor either. Of the French Slavist philologist André Mazon, he said his study “while containing many interesting juxtapositions, is fatally vitiated by his total incapacity of artistic appreciation” (p. 81 n. 17). His feud with Mazon was in part about the interpretation of the Song in relation to other Russian tales, with Mazon believing it was a much later forgery. There is also a debate about whether the Song is based on the Zadonschina, or if the Song preceded that and was its model. The debate is complicated by the destruction of the only manuscript in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, leading to debates about its authenticity. But the Mazon-Nabokov dispute also fed into Mazon’s opposition to any innovations in linguistics being brought to bear on literary analysis. Mazon and his brother Paul (a Greek scholar) were a powerful force at the Collège de France, where they both had chairs. André Mazon was opposed to anyone with links to Jakobson. He tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent Georges Dumézil’s election in 1949, but they were part of the initial opposition to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s election around 1949-50, alongside the administrator Edmond Faral. Lévi-Strauss was eventually elected a decade later, after Mazon and Faral had retired.
The proposed English edition of TheSong of Igor for Bollingen was never published. Szeftel was unhappy Nabokov did not acknowledge his and Jakobson’s comments in his version (see Diment 1997, pp. 40-41). The Igor translation contract with Bollingen Press is interesting in itself, since this was the English-language outlet for publications from the Olga Froebe-Kapteyn and Carl Jung-led Eranos circle, funded by the Mellon family. Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin did appear in this series in four volumes in 1964. One contained an Introduction and the translation, there were two volumes of commentary, and a fourth with a photo-reproduction of the Russian text and an index. The professor in Nabokov’s Pnin has been compared to Szeftel, Jakobson, and Nabokov himself,though Nabokov denied at least Szeftel was the model (see Boyd pp. 288-89; Diment 1996 and 1997). Most likely Timofey Pnin is a composite of them and others, but as Diment indicates, he is working on a study of a text which sounds remarkably like the Song.
Update 4 May 2025: Some further sources for this story are discussed here.
9 Nov 2025: I discuss Nabokov’s original translation and Jakobson’s intent to complete his edition here.
References
La Geste du Prince Igor’: Épopée Russe du douzième siècle, ed. and trans. Henri Grégoire, Roman Jakobson and Marc Szeftel, New York: Columbia University Press, 1948.
The Song of Igor’s Campaign: An Epic of the Twelfth Century, trans. and foreword by Vladimir Nabokov, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960.
David M. Bethea and Siggy Frank (eds.), Vladimir Nabokov in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Galya Diment, “Timofey Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marc Szeftel”, Nabokov Studies 3, 1996, 53-75.
Galya Diment, Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.
Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings IV: Slavic Epic Studies, The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1966.
André Mazon, Le Slovo d’Igor, Paris: Librairie Droz, 1940.
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, London: Penguin, 1997 [1957].
Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977, eds. Dmitri Nabokov & Matthew J. Bruccoli, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990.
Vladimir Nabokov, Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings, eds. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, trans. Dimitri Nabokov, Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. and ed. Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Bollingen Foundation, four volumes, 1964.
Marc Szeftel, “Correspondence with Vladimir Nabokov and Roman Jakobson”, in Galya Diment, Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997, 103-119.
This is the sixth 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:
Fragmenting Cities offers a conceptionally innovative and empirically detailed analysis of the surprising acceptance and normalization of state-based stigmatization and discrimination based on place. It does this by drawing on the example of the first state-sanctioned definition of “ghetto”, the controversial “ghetto list” produced by the Danish government.
Troels Schultz Larsen and Kristian Nagel Delica introduce policy schizophrenia as a concept to describe instances where the state simultaneously stigmatizes people from the top while engaging in urban renewal at the bottom, deepening the fragmentation of the city. They develop a meticulously researched neo-Bourdieusian model of the state as nested fields, designed for empirical confrontation and comparative analysis. Through comprehensive socio-historical analysis, this book demonstrates how marked urban and political changes over the past four decades constituted a symbolic revolution, radically upending the fundamentals of not-for-profit housing.
Investigating relationships that have been neglected in contemporary governance research, urban studies, and critical political geography, this book is an essential read for academics, researchers and students of human geography, sociology, urban studies, planning, and governance. Additionally, it is an accessible and innovative resource for policymakers in the field.
This is the first collection of essays approaching aspects of Greek antiquity and its reception through ‘necropolitics’. It discovers traces of necropolitics in the unburied and maltreated corpses of the Homeric epics; it follows the manifestations of necropower in Greek tragedy, historiography, and biography; and it delves into torture, capital punishment, and non-normative burials in the ancient Greek world. It contributes to the debate – much of which is only available in modern Greek – on recent archaeological evidence, notably the iron-bound individuals discovered in the Athenian suburb of Phaleron, and includes a captivating exploration of necropolitics in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Greek-tragedy-inspired cinema.
