Jupiter is the god who hurls thunderbolts, Dius Fidius the god of oaths…
Read MoreFoucault was long concerned with traditional philosophical questions which, in the final years of his life, he explored through classical texts…
Read MoreKantorowicz led a remarkable life, and it seems only right to wonder what else he might have achieved as a scholar had he not encountered so many challenges to his academic career.
Read Moreby Stuart Elden The One King Lear, by Brian Vickers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 416 pp. Anyone who has seen more than one production of a Shakespeare play in a theatre, or watched a film version, will know that the words said by the actors can change. Speeches are cut in whole or part, some…
Read MoreFoucault’s Last Decade is a study of Foucault’s work between 1974 and his death in 1984. In 1974, Foucault began writing the first volume of his History of Sexuality, developing work he had already begun to present in his Collège de France lecture courses.
Read MoreThe key figures are Cardinal Richelieu and Chancellor Séguier, and Foucault thinks it is important that he can discern the “first great deployment of the ‘arms’ of the State independent of the person of the King”.
Read MoreFoucault promised various books on the relation between power, subjectivity and truth in his career. In the first volume of the History of Sexuality, published in 1976, he said that it would be followed by a series of five books, of which the first was under the title La chair et le corps (The Flesh and the Body), looking at the question of confession since the late Middle Ages.
Read MoreDelivered between January and March 1973, La société punitive was Foucault’s third annual course at the Collège de France. It is the eleventh of his thirteen courses there to be published, in what have been uniformly excellent editions under the general editorship of François Ewald and the recently deceased Alessandro Fontana.
Read MoreImmanuel Kant, Karl Friedrich Hagemann, 1801 by Stuart Elden Kant: Natural Science, edited by Eric Watkins, translated by Lewis White Beck, Jeffrey B. Edwards, Olaf Reinhardt, Martin Schönfeld, and Eric Watkins, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 822 pp. This important collection of Kant’s writings on natural science is part of the excellent Cambridge Edition of the…
Read Moreby Stuart Elden William Shakespeare’s late tragedy Coriolanus is often seen as one of his most political plays. Set in ancient Rome, and based upon the life of the title character as written by Plutarch, the resonances with Shakespeare’s own time have often been remarked upon, especially in terms of the corn riots and resultant…
Read MoreDespite Foucault’s oft-cited interest in Nietzsche, only a couple of pieces on him were ever published…
Read MoreCrescent Nebula and the Soap Bubble, photograph by Adam Evans by David Beer Bubbles: Spheres I by Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Wieland Hoban, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 663 pp. According to Peter Sloterdijk, ‘[a]s a nobject, the vulva is the mother of granite’ (302). Where should we start with a statement like that? Indeed, the question…
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