Progressive Geographies

“Canguilhem, Dumézil, Hyppolite: Georges Canguilhem and his Contemporaries”, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, No 307, 2024, 27-48 – special issue on Georges Canguilhem beyond Epistemology and the History of Science, edited by Federico Testa.

“Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol 85 No 3, July 2024, 571-600 (open access until end of January 2025).

Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, translated by Derek Coltman, critical edition and introduction by Stuart Elden, afterword by Veena Das, HAU books, 2024 (Introduction and Afterword are open access on the HAU site).

“Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France”, History of European Ideas, online first (open access).

Three of these four publications were completed before last year’s health problems and revisiting them for copy-editing and proofs was a bit strange. The fourth was conceived, written, reviewed and published in a much shorter period of just a few months this year.

The vast majority of what I’ve written in 2024 – and really since mid-2022 – is for the book manuscript under the working title Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France, on which I’ve been sharing research updates through the year. The articles above all connect to this project, even though none of them use parts of the text. So far, I’ve not excerpted material for separate publication.

A couple of other things are forthcoming, again both completed some time ago, along with a couple of more recent book reviews and a chapter on “Foucault and Structuralism”. I’m hoping that I will complete a first draft of Mapping Indo-European Thought by the end of 2025 – that’s the entire focus again, and talks next year will all present parts of that work.

Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard (YouTube)

Website and trailer at the film’s site – Things Hidden

Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind – University of Chicago Press, 2024

Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.

Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason.

In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973.

With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.

The music I enjoyed this year, either bought in physical form, often through Burning Shed, or digitally through bandcamp.

1. 212°, Transmissions
2. Anchor & Burden, Extinction Level & Afterglow EP
3. The Aristocrats, Duck
4. Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin, Spin & Ronin Rhythm Clan, Moonday EP
5. Bass Communion, The Itself of Itself
6. BASta!, III
7. Big Big Train, The Likes of Us
8. Black Country Communion, V
9. Tim Bowness, Powder Dry
10. Caligula’s Horse, Charcoal Grace
11. Jon Durant, Momentarily
12. Fractal Sextet, Sky Full of Hope
13. Frost*, Life in the Wires
14. Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard, Perpetual Mutations
15. Neal Morse, Joseph Part II: The Restoration
16. Neal Morse and the Resonance, No Hill for a Climber
17. Opeth, The Last Will and Testament
18. PAKT, No Steps Left to Trace
19. The Pineapple Thief, It Leads to This and Last to Run EP
20. Pure Reason Revolution, Coming Up to Consciousness
21. Quartet Diminished, Deerand
22. Trevor Rabin, Rio
23. Stefan Thelen and Markus Reuter, Rothko Spaces Volume 2
24. Stefan Thelen and David Torn, Rothko Spaces Volume 1
25. Devin Townsend, Powernerd
26. Tears for Fears, Songs for a Nervous Planet
27. Transatlantic, The Absolute Whirlwind
28. Whom Gods Destroy, Insanium
29. Weather Systems, Ocean without a Shore
30. Mark Wingfield, The Gathering

For previous years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012.

Veronica Strang, Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis – Reaktion, March 2023

I’ve shared news of the book before. There is a New Books discussion with Jana Byers now available.

A major study of marine serpent deities, which embodied ancient people’s reverence of water.

Early human relationships with water were expressed through beliefs in serpentine aquatic deities: rainbow-coloured, feathered or horned serpents, giant anacondas and dragons. Representing the powers of water, these beings were bringers of life and sustenance, world creators, ancestors, guardian spirits and law makers. Worshipped and appeased, they embodied people’s respect for water and its vital role in sustaining all living things. 
Yet today, though we still recognize that ‘water is life’, fresh- and saltwater ecosystems have been critically compromised by human activities. This major study of water beings, and what has happened to them in different cultural and historical contexts, demonstrates how and why some – but not all – societies have moved from worshipping water to wreaking havoc upon it, and asks what we can do to turn the tide.

Ben Anderson and Anna Secor, The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism – Goldsmiths Press/PERC Papers, July 2025

How today’s dominant political forms—right-wing populism, progressivism, and liberalism—offer differentiated responses to shared conditions of uncertainty.

The Politics of Feeling argues that politics has become a matter of political feelings in an age of uncertainty. If the second half of the 20th century saw the defeat and exhaustion of fascism and socialism, what remained of ideological certainty in neoliberal democracies such as the UK and the US ran aground in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The Politics of Feeling is diagnostic of how the uncertainties of the post-2008 period have transformed the political arena and made the question of how people feel central to the formation of political affiliations and divisions. We identify three competing political forms in the US and the UK today: right-wing populism, progressivism, and contemporary liberalism. We argue that rather than naming coherent programs of political thought, these popular political forms are operating as arrangements or modes of attachment and political intensity. Each one suggests a different way of remembering the past, imagining the future, and making the present politically meaningful. Each one elevates some affective orientations over others and thereby etches differences of race, class, and gender within its structure. Tracing contemporary articulations of populism, progressivism and liberalism across US and UK contexts, we at once draw out commonalities and underline the way these forms diverge both between and within these societies. The Politics of Feeling is a critique of the living edge of politics: the emergent and shifting clusters of orientations and affects that continually work to differentiate political subjects, to intensify or alienate attachments and allegiances.

Mark Neocleous, Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police – Verso, February 2025

In his new book, critical theorist Mark Neocleous engages in a sustained critique of the theory and practice of pacification. Combining philosophical analysis with historical detail, Neocleous analyses the development of pacification as a key concept through which capitalist modernity has been organised, offering readers the first book that treats pacification as an important concept in the history of state power and capitalism. Neocleous’s approach is fourfold, examining pacification as social warfare carried out through the ideology of peace; as a form of social police carried out through mechanisms of security; as law and order exercised through the permanent wars of class society; and as the myriad practices of power designed to counter insurgency.

Making use of official documents of state, the writings of counterinsurgency thinkers and the ideas perpetuated by practitioners of counterrevolution, the book unravels the complex ways through which pacification generates new forms of social war and new modes of policing that reproduce capitalist order and fabricate obedient subjects.

Through expansive accounts of war and police, and engaging with a range of topics from debt to death, from stasis to civil war, and from the police kettle to the politics of fear, the book offers a provocative analysis of the ways in which state and capital combine to build a pacified social order.

Katharine R. O’Reilly and Caterina Pellò (eds.), Ancient Women Philosophers: Recovered Ideas and New Perspectives – Cambridge University Press, 2023

There is a review by Emily Hulme at NDPR.

Despite the common misconception that ancient philosophy was the domain of male thinkers, sources confirm that ancient women engaged in philosophical activity. Bringing together a collection of essays on ancient women thinkers, with special focus on their ideas and contributions to the history of philosophy, this volume is about the earliest women philosophers, their breakthroughs, and the methods we can use to excavate them. The essays survey the methodological strategies we can use to approach the surviving evidence, retrieve the largely unresearched thought and the original ideas of ancient women philosophers, and carve out a space for them in the canon. The broad focus includes women thinkers in ancient Indian, Chinese, and Arabic philosophy as well as in the Greek and Roman philosophical traditions. The volume will be valuable for a wide range of researchers, teachers, and students of ancient philosophy.

Rita Abrahamsen, Jean-François Drolet, Michael C. Williams, Srdjan Vucetic, Karin Narita, and Alexandra Gheciu, World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order – Cambridge University Press, June 2024

The contemporary radical Right is not merely a series of nationalist projects but a global phenomenon. This book shows how radical conservative thinkers have developed long-term counter-hegemonic strategies that challenge prevailing social and political orders both nationally and internationally. At the heart of this ideological project is a critique of liberal globalisation that seeks to mobilise transversal alliances against a common enemy: the ‘New Class’ of global managerial elites who are accused of undermining national sovereignty, traditional values, and cultures. ‘World of the Right’ argues that while the radical Right is far from a unified political movement, its calls for sovereignty, civilisational orders, and multipolarity enable complex, strategic convergences with illiberal states such as China and Russia, as well as states and people in the Global South. The potential consequences for the future of the liberal world order are profound and wide-ranging.

• Provides an historical, inter-disciplinary analysis of the global rise of radical conservative parties and movements, showing how different disciplines can interact
• The wide geographical coverage clearly demonstrates how radical Right movements are operating across the world, often taking inspiration from each other’s ideas
• Traces the ideological strategies behind globalization of the Right, including its appropriation of key ideas traditionally associated with the Left, as well as introducing the radical right’s critique of the liberal international order and the call to replace it with multipolarity and civilizationalism
• Explains how many of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s core ideas concerning cultural hegemony, historic blocs, and counter-hegemonic movements have been self-consciously and strategically appropriated by the radical right, demonstrating how there is a logic and a strategy linking many radical parties and intellectuals