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Ego-History Lessons

Jacob Collins on Pierre Nora, Jeunesse and Une étrange obstination. Recollections of French intellectual life from the theorist of self-historicization.

Colliding Particles

Jacob Collins on Bernard Harcourt, Critique & Praxis. A challenge to critical theory to return to its world-changing mission.

Reflections of the Rhine

Jacob Collins on Peter Schöttler, Du Rhin à la Manche. Historio­graphical treatments of the Rhine as reflective of Franco-German nationalist imaginaries.

Thinking Otherwise

Politico-philosophical profile of Jacques Bouveresse, close friend and colleague of Bourdieu, examining the relation of his large, idiosyncratic body of work to the French philosophical traditions it explicitly disavows. Can thinkers as divergent as Wittgenstein, Musil and Kraus be mobilized to provide a coherent and countervailing ‘Kakanian’ tradition?

The Birth of Bio-Security?

Jacob Collins on Frédéric Gros, Le principe sécurité. Taxonomy of successive forms taken by Western concepts of security, from ancient Rome to GPS.

An Anthropological Turn?

Alongside the familiar pathways of French post-structuralist thought, Jacob Collins detects an alternative trajectory in the work of four thinkers whose allegiances span the political spectrum. The return to ethnographical concepts of social belonging—fraternity, family, faith—amid the multiple crises of the 1970s.

A Metaphysics of Democracy

Jacob Collins on Marcel Gauchet, L’avènement de la démocratie, t. III. Europe’s age of catastrophe as struggle between religious and secular political logics, in the vision of a sotto voce liberal.

Link Arms!

Jacob Collins on Régis Debray, Le moment fraternité. Reimagining the third figure of the republican trinity in the age of the videosphere.