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The last post on Lefebvre’s banned books was one I wrote a few days ago but hadn’t quite finished. I’m posting it now and expect it will be the last substantive post for some time on Progressive Geographies.
I am currently in hospital undergoing some tests and awaiting surgery. The condition is serious but treatable, and I am expected to make a good, though slow recovery.
I’ll hopefully be back before too long. Many thanks for reading this site and hopefully the archive and resources remain useful.
stuartelden
About twenty years ago, in an essay on Henri Lefebvre, I said that his book on Nietzsche (1939) was on the prohibited ‘Liste Otto’. These were books that had to be removed from sale, and existing copies destroyed, after the German occupation of France. For other reasons now I’ve recently looking at the list – the 1940 version is here – and discover that this is not one of the books on the list. Mea culpa.
As far as I can tell, only two books written by Lefebvre are on the list – there are various iterations from 1940 and through the occupation. The books are Hitler au pouvoir (1938) and Le Matérialisme dialectique (1940). So too was Cahiers de Lénine sur la dialectique de Hegel (1938) and Karl Marx’s Morceaux choisis (1934), both of which Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman had edited.
Guterman was Jewish, so this alone would have been enough for inclusion on this list. But Lefebvre’s book on Nietzsche, his Le Nationalisme contre les Nations (1937) and the collection of texts by Hegel he and Guterman had edited (1938) are not on the lists I’ve seen, and nor is their co-authored book La conscience mystifiée (1936).
There is therefore something of an arbitrary nature of the list – there are obviously reasons why the Nazi occupiers would object to those they did include, but those reasons would also seem to apply to ones they did not. The Nietzsche book, for example, is very much written as a challenge to the fascist appropriation.
In looking further into this, though, I went back to the original edition of Critique de la vie quotidienne from 1946. On the page ‘Du même auteur’, Lefebvre lists his previous publications.
There he distinguishes three ways his books were suppressed.
Interestingly, he says Le Nationalisme was in the first category; Hitler and Nietzsche in the second; Le matérialisme dialectique and the collections on Lenin and Hegel were in the third. From the lists I’ve seen, this isn’t entirely correct either for category three, but it explains why the Nietzsche book was indeed removed from sale shortly after publication, and why copies are so hard to find today. And presumably the ‘Liste Otto’ did not need to proscribe books that were already banned.
The list of books by Lefebvre ‘En préparation’ is also interesting – only a few of these were ever published, but that’s another story, some of which also concerns censorship.
I hope what I’ve reported here is accurate, but happy to receive additions or corrections.
Incidentally, my 2004 book on Lefebvre has long been available as print-on-demand only, and keeps going up in price. Someone has uploaded a version here though…
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Three books that were on the list - Le matérialisme dialectique is a later reprint
three books that were not included on the list
Eugene B. Young, Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power. Deleuze via Blanchot, Bloomsbury, 2022
Eugene B. Young, Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power. Deleuze via Blanchot, Bloomsbury, 2022
Description
Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze’s thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art.
Examining Blanchot’s suggestion that art and dream are “outside” of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault’s theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze’s philosophy of time and his work with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka’s Castle, Villeneuve’s Arrival, and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses…
View original post 192 more words
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Kristin Ross’s “The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life” – Los Angeles Review of Books podcast
Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to the author Kristin Ross about her recent book, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life, a collection of essays that examine how everyday life emerges as a vantage point for understanding and transforming our social world. The book represents three decades of Ross’s writing about the everyday in French political, social, and cultural theory and history, including the commune form and current autonomous zones in France, the romance and memory of the May 1968 protests, and the present predicaments both faced and created by the Macron government. Featuring a long interview with the pioneering philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the book also invokes the work of Fredric Jameson, Jacques Ranciere, Emile Zola, and many others, to explore the intersections of political transformation and cultural representation as resources for thinking opposition and liberation in the present.
Details of the book here. Thanks to dmf for the link.
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Uwe Wittstock, February 1933: The Winter of Literature – trans. Daniel Bowles, Polity, April 2023
It all happened in a flash. February 1933 was the month in which the fate of German writers, as for so many others, was decided. In a tensely spun narrative, Uwe Wittstock tells the story of a demise which was predicted by some but also scarcely thought possible. He reveals how, in a matter of weeks, the glittering Weimar literary scene gave way to a long, dark winter, and how the net drew ever closer for Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Else Lasker-Schüler, Alfred Döblin, and countless others.
Monday, January 30: Adolf Hitler is sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Joseph Roth cannot wait any longer to learn what today’s paper will report. He leaves for the station early in the morning and takes the train to Paris; bidding Berlin farewell comes naturally to him. Meanwhile, Thomas Mann barely spares a thought for politics during the next ten days, focusing instead on his forthcoming speech on Richard Wagner.
Weaving an intimate portrait of the major figures whose lives he follows day by day, Wittstock shows how the landslide of events which immediately followed Hitler’s victory spelled disaster for the country’s literary elite. He resurrects the atmosphere of the times, marked by anxiety for many, by passivity and self-betrayal for some, and by grim determination for others. Who will applaud the new dictator, and who will flee, fearing for their life?
Drawing on unpublished archival material, this important work is both a meticulous historical narrative and a timely reminder that we must remain vigilant in the face of the forces that threaten democracy, however distant the prospect of totalitarianism may seem.
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Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State – Princeton University Press, January 2023
Sacred Foundations argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation. Existing accounts focus on early modern warfare or contracts between the rulers and the ruled. In contrast, this major study shows that the Catholic Church both competed with medieval monarchs and provided critical templates for governing institutions, the rule of law, and parliaments.
The Catholic Church was the most powerful, wealthiest, and best-organized political actor in the Middle Ages. Starting in the eleventh century, the papacy fought for the autonomy of the church, challenging European rulers and then claiming authority over people, territory, and monarchs alike. Anna Grzymała-Busse demonstrates how the church shaped distinct aspects of the European state. Conflicts with the papacy fragmented territorial authority in Europe for centuries to come, propagating urban autonomy and ideas of sovereignty. Thanks to its organizational advantages and human capital, the church also developed the institutional precedents adopted by rulers across Europe—from chanceries and taxation to courts and councils. Church innovations made possible both the rule of law and parliamentary representation.
Bringing to light a wealth of historical evidence about papal conflict, excommunications, and ecclesiastical institutions, Sacred Foundations reveals how the challenge and example of powerful religious authorities gave rise to secular state institutions and galvanized state capacity.
Thanks to Adam Kotsko at An und für sich for a discussion – Sacred Foundations and the mechanism of political theology.
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Tony C. Brown, Statelessness: On Almost Not Existing – University of Minnesota Press, November 2022
Just as the modern state and the citizenship associated with it are commonly thought of as a European invention, so too is citizenship’s negation in the form of twentieth-century diaspora and statelessness. Statelessness sets forth a new genealogy, suggesting that Europe first encountered mass statelessness neither inside its own borders nor during the twentieth century, as Hannah Arendt so influentially claimed, but outside of itself—in the New World, several hundred years earlier.
Through close readings of political philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau to Kant, Tony C. Brown argues that statelessness became a central problem for political thought early on, with far-reaching implications for thinking both on the state and on being human. What Europeans thought they saw among the “savages” of the Americas was life without political order, life less than human. Lacking almost everything those deemed clearly human had achieved, the stateless existed in a radically precarious, almost inhuman privation.
And yet this existence also raised the unsettling possibility that state-based existence may not be inevitable, necessary, or even ideal. This possibility, as Brown shows, prompts the response—as defensive as it was aggressive—that we call Enlightenment political philosophy, which arguably still orders much thinking on being stateless today, including our discourses concerning migrants and Indigenous peoples.
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Edgar Landgraf, Nietzsche’s Posthumanism – University of Minnesota Press, September 2023
While many posthumanists claim Nietzsche as one of their own, rarely do they engage his philosophy in any real depth. Nietzsche’s Posthumanism addresses this need by exploring the continuities and disagreements between Nietzsche’s philosophy and contemporary posthumanism. Focusing specifically on Nietzsche’s reception of the life sciences of his day and his reflections on technology—research areas as central to Nietzsche’s work as they are to posthumanism—Edgar Landgraf provides fresh readings of Nietzsche and a critique of post- and transhumanist philosophies. \
Through Landgraf’s inquiry, lesser-known aspects of Nietzsche’s writings emerge, including the neurophysiological basis of his epistemology (which anticipates contemporary debates on embodiment), his concerns with insects and the emergent social properties they exhibit, and his reflections on the hominization and cultivation effects of technology. In the process, Landgraf challenges major commonplaces about Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the idea that his social theory asserts the rights of “the strong” over “the weak.” The ethos of critical posthumanism also offers a new perspective on key ethical and political contentions of Nietzsche’s writings.
Nietzsche’s Posthumanism presents a uniquely framed introduction to tenets of Nietzsche’s thought and major trends in posthumanism, making it an essential exploration for anyone invested in Nietzsche and his contemporary relevance, and in posthumanism and its genealogy.
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Miri Davidson, “Jean Baudrillard Grasped the Symbolic Life of Capital but Lost Track of the Material World“, Jacobin, open access
French thinker Jean Baudrillard developed a pioneering analysis of symbolism and consumption in modern capitalism with some valuable insights. But he lost sight of the material structures on which capital’s power depends and drifted into a political dead end.
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Inédit de Michel Foucault : le discours philosophique – discussion on Radio France with Orazio Irrera and Judith Revel
Inédit de Michel Foucault : le discours philosophique, Radio France, podcast Samedi 13 mai 2023
Dans un texte inédit, le penseur français fait l’histoire du discours philosophique et l’aborde avec un regard critique.
Avec
Judith Revel Philosophe, traductrice, professeure des universités au département de philosophie de l’université Paris Nanterre, spécialiste de Michel Foucault et directrice du laboratoire Sophiapol
Orazio Irrera éditeur, maître de conférence à Paris 8
Comment la philosophie peut-elle nous aider à appréhender l’actualité ?
Dans un texte inédit rédigé en 1966, Michel Foucault se demande quel est le rôle de la philosophie. Il questionne le développement de la pensée philosophique, s’attarde sur Descartes, Kant et Nietzsche. Pas encore penseur du pouvoir, il esquisse déjà un regard critique et poursuit son travail de penseur de la pensée.
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I discuss my recent book The Archaeology of Foucault (Polity, 2023) on the New Books Network with Dave O’Brien (audio)
Dave has now generously discussed all the books in this series:
Foucault’s Last Decade, 21 September 2016
Foucault: The Birth of Power, 6 November 2017
The Early Foucault, 11 February 2022
we also discussed Shakespearean Territories, 18 December 2020
Many thanks Dave!
More information on all the Foucault books, discussions, reviews and research updates here.
The Polity books page is here.
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Benjamin Tallis, Identities, Borderscapes, Orders: (In)Security, (Im)Mobility and Crisis in the EU and Ukraine – Springer, February 2023
This book provides a pre-history of Russia’s war on Ukraine and Europe’s relations to it, illuminating the deep roots of the EU’s neighbourhood crisis as well as the migration crises the Union created in the last decade. To do so, the book employs a new and innovative framework that allows for a comprehensive, yet nuanced analysis of borders and a more cogent interpretation of their socio-political consequences.
Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship the book analytically examines the key common elements of borderscapes and links them in related arrays to allow for nuanced evaluation of both their particular and cumulative effects, as well as interpretation of their overall consequences, particularly for issues of identities and orders. The book offers a significant conceptual and theoretical advance, providing a transferable conceptualization of borderscapes to guide research, analysis, and interpretation. Drawing on the author’s experience in policy, practice and academia, it also makes a methodological contribution by pushing the boundaries of reflexivity in interpretive International Relations (IR) research.
Analyzing three main sites in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the book challenges conventional critical wisdom on EU bordering in the Schengen zone, at its external frontiers, and in its Eastern neighborhood. In so doing, it sheds new light on the politics of post-communist transitions as well as the contemporary politics of CEE. It also shows how EU bordering and its relations to identities and orders created great benefits for many Europeans, but also hindered the lives of many others and became self-defeating. This book is a must-read for scholars, students, and policy-makers, interested in a better understanding of Critical Border Studies (CBS) in particular, and International Relations in general. It will also appeal to anyone interested in CEE or wishing to get a deeper understanding of Russia’s war and the fight for Europe’s future.
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Engin Isin, The conditions of planetary citizenship – online lecture, 13 April 2023, 4pm BST
registration required via Eventbrite
This lecture outlines the conditions that are creating planetary citizenship movements in the 21st century. The planetary citizens are activists, cosmopolitical, agonistic, solidaristic, and disobedient. The planetary citizens are mobile, multiple, and transversal. They act against injustice and for justice by performing abolishment, disobedience, refusal, and resistance. We will discuss how the gatekeepers have taken notice and developed various strategies of incorporation, pacification, and immobilization of planetary citizenship movements.
About the speaker: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/politics/staff/profiles/isinengin.html
Responding to the widespread cynicism, disengagement and alienation citizens across the globe express towards official political cultures, this series investigates the idea of ‘the critical citizen’. What constitutes a critical citizen? And can a critical citizenry be (re-) activated as an antidote to contemporary political crises?
More information on the Language, Literature and Politics Research Group can be found here
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Natasha Wheatley, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty – Princeton University Press, June 2023
Sprawled across the heartlands of Europe, the Habsburg Empire resisted all the standard theories of singular sovereignty. The 1848 revolutions sparked decades of heady constitutional experimentation that pushed the very concept of “the state” to its limits. This intricate multinational polity became a hothouse for public law and legal philosophy and spawned ideas that still shape our understanding of the sovereign state today. The Life and Death of States traces the history of sovereignty over one hundred tumultuous years, explaining how a regime of nation-states theoretically equal under international law emerged from the ashes of a dynastic empire.
Natasha Wheatley shows how a new sort of experimentation began when the First World War brought the Habsburg Empire crashing down: the making of new states. Habsburg lands then became a laboratory for postimperial sovereignty and a new international order, and the results would echo through global debates about decolonization for decades to come. Wheatley explores how the Central European experience opens a unique perspective on a pivotal legal fiction—the supposed juridical immortality of states.
A sweeping work of intellectual history, The Life and Death of States offers a penetrating and original analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and time, illustrating how the many deaths and precarious lives of the region’s states expose the tension between the law’s need for continuity and history’s volatility.
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Peter T. Struck and Sophia Rosenfeld (eds.), A Cultural History of Ideas – Bloomsbury, six volumes, November 2022
A massive, six-volume reference work, at a high price, but looks impressive if you can find a suitable library copy…
How has the nature of ideas evolved over time? How have ideas been shaped, employed and received in different social and cultural contexts?
In a work that spans 2,800 years, these ambitious questions are addressed by 62 experts, each contributing an overview of a particular theme in a specific period in history. The volumes explore the development of ideas , primarily in the West, from a range of disciplinary angles.
Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole and, for ease of navigation, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This schema offers the reader the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes or following one theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the 6.
The 6 volumes cover: 1. – Classical Antiquity (800 BCE – 500 CE); 2. – Medieval Age (500 – 1450); 3. – Renaissance (1450 – 1650) ; 4. – Age of Enlightenment (1650 – 1800); 5. – Age of Empire (1800 – 1920); 6. – Modern Age (1920 – 2000+).
Themes (and chapter titles) are: Knowledge; The Human Self; Ethics and Social Relations; Politics and Economies; Nature; Religion and the Divine; Language, Poetry and Rhetoric; The Arts; History.
The page extent is approximately 1,728pp with c. 240 illustrations. Each volume opens with Notes on Contributors, Series Preface and Introduction, and concludes with Notes, Bibliography and an Index.
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Alisa Zhulina, Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life – Northwestern University Press, January 2024
Reads canonical works of modern drama in relation to the economic ideas of their era
Emerging amid the turbulent rise of market finance and wider socioeconomic changes, modern drama enacted vital critiques of art and life under capitalism. Alisa Zhulina shows how fin-de-siècle playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, and Gerhart Hauptmann interrogated the meaning of this newly coined economic concept. Acutely aware of their complicity in the system they sought to challenge, these playwrights staged economic questions as moral and political concerns, using their plays to explore the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and others within the boundaries of bourgeois theater.
Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life reveals the prescient and unsettling visions of life in a new financial and societal reality in now-canonical plays such as A Doll’s House, Miss Julie, and The Cherry Orchard as well as in lesser-known and long-overlooked works. This wide-ranging study prompts us to reevaluate modern drama and its legacy for the urgent economic and political questions that our present moment.
“An extraordinary book whose scope and ambition are truly impressive. Alisa Zhulina works hard to overcome the academic silos that separate the humanities from economic theory by recuperating a more expansive notion of economics—that of the oikos—to put them in a productive exchange. All of this is executed with the highest rigor, intelligence, and creativity, and grounded in an expansive knowledge of the materials. There aren’t many scholars today who can match Zhulina’s linguistic and intellectual range.” —Leonardo Lisi, Johns Hopkins University
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Generative AI and University Futures: Three Seminars at University of Manchester, May 2023
We’re hosting 3 in person seminars about generative AI and university futures at the University of Manchester on Critical AI literacy (May 10th), Assessment Reform (May 17th) and Training for Academics (May 24th). All in person from 3pm to 5pm on those dates. Please only register if you intend to participate in person because we have a limited number of places available for each event, which we intend to offer in the order of registration.
Since it was launched in November 2022, Open AI’s ChatGPT has enthralled millions with its uncanny ability to respond to queries in a conversational manner. Its capacity to immediately respond to natural language questions with detailed factual knowledge has sparked debate about whether the typical forms of university-based assessment can survive this technological innovation. While there are many questions remaining to be answered about how different groups within the student community perceive these developments, and the extent to which they are already being used in assessment, there is a widespread belief within the university sector that something fundamental has shifted. This rapid growth in generative AI’s capacity to automatically produce authoritative cultural forms presents a challenge to the university as a custodian of knowledge and conferrer of credentials…
More details and booking form here.
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A short excerpt from the coda of The Archaeology of Foucault is available open access at The Montréal Review.
It discusses Foucault’s tributes to Jean Hyppolite and the visits to SUNY Buffalo in 1970 and 1972.
Thanks to publicity staff at Polity for making this possible, and the editor Tony Tsonchev for the invitation to include something.
More details on the book at the Polity website.
I also did an interview on the book for the New Books Network this week, which the host Dave O’Brien says will be available next week. [update: now available here]
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Bought in Paris or second-hand, connecting to either the new Indo-European thought project or the earlier Foucault one. I’ll just mention a couple – La bibliothèque de Georges Bataille is the illustrated catalogue to the recent sale of a part of his library (available to download as pdf here), and Emmanuelle Loyer’s Paris à New York is about French academics and artists who left Europe for New York in the Second World War.
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On 19 May 2023 I’ll speaking at a workshop on Translation and the Archive in the Continental Tradition, organised by Henry Somers-Hall for Royal Holloway, University of London. It will be held in central London at Senate House. Registration is free, but required via Eventbrite.
The other speakers are Alan Schrift on Nietzsche, Daniel Smith and Charles Stivale on Deleuze and Julia Ng on Benjamin. My talk will be “From the Archive to the Edited Translation: Lefebvre, Foucault, Dumézil”.
We have put together this workshop to explore those aspects of the project of philosophy that are often seen as simply the groundwork or condition for the philosophical project itself, namely those processes of translating, editing, compiling, and those of the archive, both its constitution and consultation. This workshop will explore themes of the nature and operation of these processes in the continental tradition, both in terms of how they constitute the territory of philosophical thought, but also the ways in which the specificity of continental philosophy affects the process of translation, and how these projects of translation have affected the philosophical work of the translators themselves.The workshop brings together a number of internationally recognised researchers to discuss the role of these themes in their own work, both as translators and editors, and as thinkers.
The workshop will take place in Senate House, Central London, on May 19th, 2023.
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