Some books received in recompense for review work from Rowan & Littlefield – Wittgenstein’s diaries, Wahnich, The French Revolution in Theory, the Heidegger and Löwith correspondence, a biography of WEB Du Bois, Leslie Hill, Nancy, Blanchot and Mihail Sebastian’s Journal 1935-1944.
Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques 1961-1983, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Flammarion/Vrin/INA, 2024
De 1961, date de son retour en France après plusieurs années passées en Suède, en Pologne et en Allemagne, jusqu’à la fin de sa vie, Michel Foucault a été très régulièrement présent à la radio, d’abord sur la chaîne France III National, puis à partir de 1963 sur France Culture. La parution de ses ouvrages est l’occasion de débats : c’est le cas de l’Histoire de la folie, de Raymond Roussel et de Les Mots et les Choses. La radio accueille aussi d’importantes conférences comme « Langages de la folie », « Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques », « Les utopies réelles ou lieux et autres lieux » et « Le corps utopique ».
La diversité des émissions et des thèmes traités reflète l’insatiable curiosité d’esprit de Michel Foucault : philosophie, sciences humaines, médecine – en particulier la psychiatrie –, histoire, littérature, politique, théâtre… Vision panoramique d’un Foucault saisi sur le vif, dans la chaleur et la surprise de l’échange, ce volume fournit la meilleure des introductions à l’une des grandes oeuvres de la pensée.
Many thanks to Clare O’Farrell at Foucault News for the link. This edition has been planned for a long time, so it’s great to see it is nearly out.
Trevor Wilson, Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy – Northwestern University Press, November 2024
Recounts Kojève’s key role in the pivotal exchange of ideas between Eastern and Western European intellectuals in the early twentieth century
This book shines critical new light on the story of Alexandre Kojève’s intellectual origins and his role in the emigration of Russian philosophy into the West in the early twentieth century. Trevor Wilson illustrates how Kojève, at once adversarial to the insular communities of émigré philosophy and yet dependent on their networks and ideas for professional success, navigated the specters of the Russian tradition in pursuit of an autonomous self-definition as a philosopher and intellectual.
Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy analyzes the philosopher’s complicated relationship to the interwar diaspora and the complex role played by the Russian tradition in his intellectual formation. Wilson examines Kojève’s early writings in the émigré press on Russian religious philosophy, Soviet politics, and Eurasianism and argues for their enduring relevance for understanding Kojève in his mature period. Crucially, he contextualizes Kojève’s famed seminars on Hegel and examines how Kojève’s thought became embedded in the politics of the Cold War. Based on newly transcribed and translated archival material, he highlights a previously unacknowledged, transnational exchange of ideas between Eastern and Western European intellectuals and shows how it played a pivotal role in twentieth-century intellectual history—and its legacy in the twenty-first.
Wilson is also now contracted to make the first complete translation of Kojève’s famous seminars on Hegel – the existing English translation only includes about half of the French published material.
I missed this when it came out last year, but Matthew Hannah briefly and generously reviews The Archaeology of Foucault (Polity, 2023) in Cultural Geographies. It’s restricted access, unfortunately. Here’s the opening paragraph.
Throughout his impressive body of work in intellectual history, Stuart Elden has been content to remain in the background, leaving others to traffic in major interpretive gambits. His readers are typically offered a fine mesh of specific bibliographic insights spread like dew-laced morning spiderwebs over the writings of Foucault, Heidegger or Canguilhem. The Archaeology of Foucault, though, breaks subtly with this self-effacing tendency in Elden’s work, and quietly reveals a bit more of his scholarly commitments than do the other volumes. It is not marked by a bold step into the limelight. But it is telling that it is the only one of the four volumes with a title that names its method…
Marx 13/13 – Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory seminar series
Karl Marx’s writings contain many of the most impactful ideas that have transformed—and still today continue to transform—the course of human history. Marx’s ambition for philosophy, namely to change the world, has inspired critical thinkers and activists for over a century now and around the globe. His ideas have motivated social movements and stirred political action in progressive directions ranging from revolutionary class struggle and worker autonomy movements to feminist, Black, queer, transgender, and other forms of Marxist and progressive thought.
Today, there is still so much more to mine in Marx’s work for the advancement of solidarity, equality, social justice, and cooperation. In these times of crisis, with the mounting threat of right-wing extremism, the weakness of liberal centrist parties, and the cataclysmic risks associated with global climate change, it is essential to return to Marx to rethink and catalyze what is to be done and how to move forward.
In Marx 13/13, we turn to Marx’s key texts and read them through the lens of world-historical interpretations that pushed Marxian thought and praxis in new directions: toward operaismo or workerism, Black Marxism, feminist, queer and transgender theories, postcolonialism, cultural studies, Freudian or Foucauldian strands of Marxism, as well as Leninist, Maoist, and social democratic forms of Marxism. This public seminar series will reread the original Marx texts chronologically, in conversation with formative interpretations of the texts that have shaped different branches of Marxism or progressive thought, with the guidance of brilliant contemporary critical philosophers…
… And then, of course, to triangulate and illuminate these pairing of texts, we will hear from brilliant living critical philosophers to comment on the Marx readings and provide a contemporary, cutting-edge take on these paired works. We will be joined by eminent critical philosophers, including Amy Allen, Cinzia Arruzza, Étienne Balibar, Tithi Bhattacharya, Bruno Bosteels, Jean Louise Cohen, Jules Joanne Gleeson, Michael Hardt, Rahel Jaeggi, Sandro Mazzadra, Nancy Fraser, Judith Revel, Martin Saar, Renata Salecl, Gayatri Spivak, Brandon Terry, and Kendall Thomas.
Jacques Rancière in conversation with Oliver Davis – London, 12 November 2024
Meet French philosopher Jacques Rancière in conversation with Professor Oliver Davis (University College Cork).
A leading philosopher and specialist of Marxist political philosophy and aesthetics, Jacques Rancière significantly contributed to 20th century political theories with major works including La Nuit des prolétaires (1981; The Nights of Labor: The Workers’s Dream in Nineteenth-Century France), Partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (2000; The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible), and Le Spectateur émancipé (2008; The Emancipated Spectator).
In conversation with Professor Oliver Davis (University College Cork), Rancière will give special insight into the universe of post-68 philosophy, his contributions to modern political theory, his conception of emancipation, and his understanding of the relationship between art and politics.
All (budding) philosophers welcome!
Mark Neocleous, Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police – Verso, February 2025
No publisher page yet, but in online bookstores and Google books.
Update December 2024: the publisher page is here.
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.
E-International Relations interview – Klaus Dodds
Klaus Dodds is Executive Dean and Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 1994 and took up a position at the University of Edinburgh. Thereafter he joined Royal Holloway. He has held a Visiting Erskine Fellowship at Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury (2002) and been a Visiting Fellow at St Cross College, University of Oxford (2010-11) and St Johns College, University of Oxford (2017-18). In 2005 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Geography and a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust (2017-2020) for a project concerned with the ‘Global Arctic’. He has published many books and articles concerned with the geopolitics and governance of the Polar Regions, as well as the cultural politics of ice and border geopolitics. These include The Scramble for the Poles (2016), Ice: Nature and Culture (2018) and Border Wars (2022). His latest book, co-written with Mia Bennett is provisionally titled Unfrozen: The Battle for the Future of the Arctic (Yale University Press 2025).
Frédéric Keck, How French Moderns Think: The Lévy-Bruhl Family, From “Primitive Mentality” to Contemporary Pandemics – HAU books, April 2024
This book traces the contributions of the Lévy-Bruhl family to social and political thought and expertise in 20th-century France, shaping the anticipation of economic and health crises.
How French Moderns Think tells the story of the French sociological tradition through four generations of the Lévy-Bruhl family: Lucien, who founded the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris; his son Henri, who founded the Institute of Roman Law; his grandson Raymond, who took part in the creation of the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies; and his great-grandson Daniel, a vaccine specialist at the Institute of Public Health. This family history casts a new light on the philosophical debates about “primitive mentality” and the “savage mind.” By drawing on the expert knowledge inherent in this family genealogy, the articulation between the logical and the “pre-logical” is not a cognitive question but rather a problem of anticipating unpredictable events. By relating Lévy-Bruhl’s engagements from the Dreyfus Affair to the Minister of Armaments during the First World War, Keck narrates the confrontation of the socialist ideal of justice and truth with the French colonial experience and its transformations in global technologies preparing for pandemics.
“Alexandre Koyré and Georges Canguilhem” – audio recording of my talk to workshop ‘On Concrete Human Problems’: Georges Canguilhem on Medicine and the Human Sciences, University of Bristol, 26 September 2024
Thanks to Federico Testa and Pierre-Olivier Méthot for the invitation. I don’t think the other papers were recorded, but I think the plan is for at least some of them to be published.
I wrote about Canguilhem in a book of that title published by Polity in 2019. This piece, though, is a continuation of some work I’ve been doing on Koyré over the past year.
My article “Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France” is now available online first in History of European Ideas, and it’s open access.
I say what I’ve found about one of his teaching positions in Koyré in Cairo, and about some of the archival links to Georges Canguilhem and Jean Gottmann – the first of which informed this paper.
