Progressive Geographies

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra – trans. Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley, Stanford University Press, August 2026 Thus Spoke Zarathustra stands alone among Nietzsche’s published works as a poetic and narrative rendering of his most sophisticated ideas through the medium of Zarathustra’s uniquely prophetic voice. It is also the first place where Nietzsche proposes his theory of will…

Friedrich Lenger, The Price of the World: A Global History of Capitalism – trans. Daniel Steuer, Polity, June 2026 Over the last 500 years, capitalism has produced a world that is highly interdependent and at the same time highly asymmetrical. These asymmetries were often established by violent means and are in many cases vigorously defended to this day. In his ambitious global history of…

Emily Eakin, The Frenchmen or, my Life in Theory – Penguin, July 2025 Review in The New York Times; feature in The New Yorker (requires subscription). Thanks to dmf and Alin Constantin for the alert. When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors. This was French theory, a set of recondite…

Anthony Iles and Mattin eds., Abolishing Capitalist Totality – Minor Compositions, 2026 When capitalism feels inescapable, theory becomes a weapon to challenge fatalistic totalities. This book explores the limits of the colonization of everyday life by economic logic gone mad. Wherever we are we find ourselves choking, trapped in a world built against us we feel we don’t belong to. A world that…

Francis Dupuis-Déri – Killer Althusser: The Banality of Men – trans. Mélissa Bull, Between the Lines, June 2025 On November 16, 1980, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser strangled his wife in their Parisian apartment, in a period when she was thinking of leaving him. What do we know about Hélène Legotien today? Almost nothing, except that she was murdered by her illustrious spouse. In a…

Two recent editions of texts by Marc Bloch, Étienne Wolff’s Science des monstres, two recent books by Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? and What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, Peter Sloterdijk’s The Continent without Qualities: Bookmarks in the Book of Europe, Onur Erdur, School of the South: The Colonial Roots of French Theory, Catherine Klein-Gousseff ed., Retours d’URSS: les…

Older books by Bloch and Braudel, bought second-hand, a reedition of three important texts by Derrida,  Force de loi, Voyous, Fichus, and the recent La Chose Séminaire (1975-1977) Suivi de la 6e séance de Donner le temps II, Paige Marie Patchin, Love in the Time of Zika: Environmental Crisis and the Future of Reproduction and Timothy Neale, How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent, and the…

I’ve written about Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900-1940), an important scholar of Celtic languages and mythology, briefly before in this series. From various accounts, there are two pieces of information about her. After the death of her first husband Michel Jonval in 1935, Sjoestedt married the Sanskrit scholar Louis Renou (see here). One of the reasons for Sjoestedt’s suicide in December 1940…

Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi, Puzzles: A Seminar on the ‘Benefit of Christ’ – trans. Thomas Haskell Simpson, Seagull, March 2026 I’ve previously shared some of the many tributes to Ginzburg, who died in June. I hadn’t seen that this early seminar was now translated. I’m writing a short piece on Ginzburg for the ‘Sunday Histories‘ series, which I’ll share soon. A seminar, a…

Elvan Cobb, Infrastructured Landscapes: Spatial Histories of Early Ottoman Railways – Brill, July 2026 In Infrastructured Landscapes, Elvan Cobb reveals how the arrival of railways originating from the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir reshaped the very fabric of space and experience in western Anatolia during the transformative decades of the late 19th century in the Ottoman Empire. The…

Cary Wolfe, Jagged Ontologies – University of Minnesota Press, July 2026 Rethinking life, justice, and the biosphere through the sharp edges of jagged ontology In this groundbreaking book, Cary Wolfe dismantles some of the most entrenched assumptions in contemporary interdisciplinary thought, foremost among them the idea that “flat” ontologies are adequate to the challenge of a robust,…

David Armitage, Teresa M. Bejan, and Felix Waldmann eds. The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives – Oxford University Press, July 2026 The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives offers the most comprehensive collective overview of Locke’s political thought in over fifty years. It brings together research essays by political theorists, historians of political thought, and…

Elena Woodacre, Lucinda H.S. Dean, Simon Lambe, Patrik Pastrnak, Exploring Monarchy in Medieval Europe, 1000–1500 – Routledge, July 2026 Through wide-ranging thematic chapters, this book offers students a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of monarchy across Europe in the Middle Ages. The volume is separated into four themes: Concepts of Rulership, Exercising Authority,…

Dimitrios Lais, Foucault’s Ethics of Genealogy: Antiquity, (Neo) Governmentality, and Globalisation – Palgrave Macmillan, July 2026 This book offers a bold reinterpretation of Michel Foucault’s late work, reconstructing him as an ethical philosopher whose account of antiquity provides crucial resources for understanding contemporary forms of power. Bringing Foucault into original dialogue with…

Gabriella Soto, Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting – University of Ariona Press, March 2026 I’ve shared news of the book before. There is now a New Books discussion with Jennifer Rose Najera. Thanks to dmf for this link. Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both…

Holly Randell-Moon, Environments of Power: Vibrant Terrain and Landscapes of Resistance – Manchester University Press, July 2026 Environments of power provides unique case studies of environmental inclusion and exclusion across the Americas, Africa, Japan, India, and the South-Pacific. Using more-than-human and Indigenist approaches, chapters focus on Indigenous environmental resistance,…