stefanos geroulanos

Co-Authored with Todd Meyers

|| University of Chicago Press, 2018 ||

Chicago site || amazon

Isis: “a tour de force.”

Jay Winter, History and Theory: “This is a book in the history of scientific thought and medical practice with dazzling asides on almost every corner of twentieth-century intellectual life..., a tour de force of intellectual history... a book of immense erudition and careful exegesis of both scientific and philosophical disputes. It adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of the effect of the 1914–18 conflict on a number of fields of scientific research and medical practice, including physiology and psychoanalysis.... The power of this book lies in its deep understanding, based on meticulous research in dozens of archives, of the way physiology and allied sciences created models, metaphors, images, and concepts that were adopted and adapted to multiple purposes by many thinkers who addressed problems of mind and body in the twentieth century.... The authors are to be congratulated for capturing the excitement of the clash of scientific ideas in this period, and for doing so in a way that gives us a glimpse of the foibles of many of the central figures. We not only hear these individuals; we can almost feel them in action.... This book is one of the truly original contributions to historical writing to appear during the centenary of the outbreak of the war in 1914.”

Times Higher Education (31 Jan.2019), Book of the Week: "[A] richly innovative study… the authors painstakingly dissect the conceptualisation of integration in the works of neurological, psychiatric and ethnographic researchers. Guiding us deftly through the complexities of the literature, they create a compelling narrative of scientific endeavour. … Geroulanos and Meyers present an imaginative case for the First World War’s transformative effect on popular and scientific understandings of the human body. Their careful exposition of the spiralling development of the concept of physiological integration in the fields of anthropology, cybernetics and philosophy makes a highly original contribution to 20th-century intellectual history and will provide a fertile springboard for future research."

Nuncius: "The originality of this volume consists not only in its object, namely the 'ontology of the body at war', but also in the method adopted, which makes use of an extremely detailed research based on the study of medical archives and scientific literature without losing sight of the overall epistemological argument. . . . Geroulanos and Meyers’ thorough investigation on the medical concepts of individuality, integration, and organism is an erudite overview of a wide range of intellectual aspects of western human culture at the turn of World War I. It is a fascinating and extremely rich volume, which provides a very broad and updated overview of the critical literature in English, German and French, and in which every chapter almost represents an autonomous and full-fledged study."

Somatosphere: “Wonderful and groundbreaking... Geroulanos and Meyers have written a monumental book that seems acutely relevant to our time: when the climate crisis and antibiotic resistance once again demonstrate the fragility of our bodies and societies and point to how our bodies are deeply entangled with nature, we once again move towards the body that physiologists and physicians a century ago struggled so hard to understand and construct…. Where Western history of ideas traditionally has credited Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud for shattering the romantic illusion of individual independence, Geroulanos and Meyers foreground the role of three physiologists and physicians: Walter Bradford Cannon, Henry Dale, and Kurt Goldstein… The originality of Geroulanos and Meyers’ work lies in pointing out how the unconsciousness, physiological regulation of the body, and the continuous possibility of its collapse, enabled individuality.”

Journal of Modern History: “An inspiring and innovative work that opens up alternative perspectives on how scholarship addresses the history of the conflict. With this study, we have a model for integrating disparate forms of data to conceive an investigation that explains the complex and divergent experiences of the First World War. The book is divided into three parts that roughly correspond to wounds, treatment, and the meaning of these new ideas for society. This arrangement allows the authors to expertly graft medical accounts, psychological reports, and political documents in a way that manages to convey the contingent nature of ideas, frameworks, and perceptions. Indeed, the fascinating aspect of the book is its ability to communicate the febrile context in which concepts regarding the human body, its fragilities, and its integration, are defined and debated…. The writing style is fluid and questioning; the account appears to be an interlocutor that presents ideas, voices, and data from the early twentieth century, deconstructing their apparent certainty before integrating them into a wider cosmology that justifies their logic. The organization and style of the book is a wonderful example of vision and erudition as it mirrors the processes of discovery and development of its subject…. An original and highly impressive assessment of how the First World War reshaped knowledge about the bodies of individuals and how this remade our understanding of the body politic.”

Central Europe: This is an outstanding book and clearly one of the most important contributions to the history of medicine of the first half of the twentieth century to appear in recent years. It is highly original, densely written, and driven by a bold and engaging argument. Geroulanos and Meyers genuinely break new ground at the intersection of intellectual and medical history, and there is reason to look forward to future research inspired by this study.

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences: "The value of this book is its deep engagement with new source materials that implicate many core phenomenologists and medical anthropologists. . . Geroulanos and Meyers have offered a vast compilation of historical actors across a range of fields who, together, offer a complex origin story of twentieth-century neuro-physiology, psychology, social theory, political theory, and therapeutics."

Choice: ‘Recommended’.

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The Lancet article: here. Aeon article here.
New Books Network interview podcast: here (itunes link here)

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The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover?
 
In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.
 
Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in. 

Deborah Coen, Yale University: “A shared concept of human individuality lies at the heart of intellectual traditions as varied as psychoanalysis, cybernetics, and medical humanism: an individuality knowable only at the moment of its collapse. This is the remarkable argument of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, a provocative and poignant book, and one that will be essential reading for historians of modern science and medicine. By reconstructing modern neuromedicine’s confrontation with the violence of industrialized warfare, Geroulanos and Meyers have given us a model for writing intellectual history that is simultaneously materialized, embodied, and transnational.”

David W. Bates, University of California, Berkeley: “Geroulanos and Meyers have written a terrifically original book. In an important sense, it is inventing its own subject—namely, the emergence of the idea that the body is a self-integrating entity—in that there has not to date been a clear articulation of this concept and certainly no comprehensive historical tracking of its development in modern scientific and medical thought. Engaging and clearly written, and with vivid examples, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe will certainly attract an eclectic set of readers, but will have especially strong appeal for specialists in the history of medicine, psychology, and social sciences.”

Edited with Dan Edelstein and Natasha Wheatley

University of Chicago Press, December 2020 || website

Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.

Essays by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Claudia Verhoeven, Anson Rabinbach, Lauren Benton & Lisa Ford, Emma Kowal & Joanna Radin, Jamie Martin, Sunil Purushotham, Kevin M. F. Platt, Marwa Elshakry, Henning Schmidgen, Maria Stavrinaki, Kristen Loveland, Andrea Westermann, and the editors.

Table of Contents here

Ann Stoler (New School): “What a gift this magnificent edited volume will be for those of us who have long sought to identify the implicit and violent ways in which power is garnered in battles over timing and time. With conceptual and empirical acuity, this is a volume that ‘harasses’ disciplinary strictures as it explodes the most revered canons. Moving from ‘multiple temporalities’ to conflictual ones is at the heart of this collective agenda, each author showing why such a conceptual and methodological move disrupts the seamlessness of linear histories and are critical moves we need to make. Here is a volume of depth, creativity, and inspiration for those long obsessed with thinking time and temporalities and for those who have not broached how profoundly such thinking recalibrates our collective futures—both their dark diagnostics and enabling horizons.”

Udi Greenberg (Dartmouth): “This exciting and wide-ranging collection explores a crucial nexus of modern life: how social-political visions and conceptions of time shape each other. Its dazzling collection of case studies brings to life political leaders, scientists, economists, activists, and jurists as the authors chart how the interaction between temporality and authority transformed life across the globe. With original research and fresh methodological insights, Power and Time is a vital contribution to our understanding of contemporary history.”

Ethan Kleinberg (Wesleyan): “In Power and Time, Edelstein, Geroulanos, and Wheatley have curated a constellation of essays that take up the fascinating and vexed relation between the history of time and the times of history. The essays provide incredible range but maintain a tight thematic focus through the analytical pairing of power and time. In doing so, they offer an original and comprehensive survey of temporal regimes and the reciprocal feedback loop between the nodes of power that create them and the means by which that power is maintained. Power and Time is impressive in scope and depth and an important contribution to the new metaphysics of time.”

Reviews:

“A penetrating collection of essays which span an extraordinary breadth. Here, one finds minimal focus on monumental ‘regimes’ of time. What matters instead are the tensions in temporalities that subsist within any set of historical conditions. As the editors argue, the temporal landscape of history is neither empty nor static but always replete with conflict and conflict potential. And, as the essays amply demonstrate, this provides rich pickings for the attentive historian…. ‘Chronocenosis’ not only attunes us to the complex temporal frequencies of power conflicts but also enables us to locate new conflicts that may otherwise lie hidden from the historian's eye. And these conflicts are manifold…. There are seemingly few domains of historical research that could not benefit from this approach. The dazzling diversity of these essays is testament to this.… One must hope that the basic thrust of the ‘chronocenosis’ approach survives, for it seems to offer a genuinely productive foundation on which to expand the historical study of time in a very practical – and global – sense…. The book’s subject matter is expansive, its temporal registers vast. It… is difficult to imagine a historian who could not benefit in some way from consulting it.”

– Marcus Colla, “The Spectre of the Present: Time, Presentism and the Writing of Contemporary History” in Contemporary European History 30.1 (2021).

The brilliant new edited volume, Power and Time illuminates how… fractured and fractal patterns trace distinct historical temporalities. Taking competing “temporal regimes” as an object of study, this collective work foregrounds how diverse and divergent models of time structure relations of power. Rather than seeking to unify (or reconcile) history, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley ramify it. “Against the consensus approach to a single, overarching past,” they write, “we identify instead a multiplicity of pasts, each with different, oftentimes ambiguous relations to ‘the present.’” The array of case studies in the volume is fittingly wide-ranging: touching on the temporal imaginaries of law from America to Australia; histories of brain science to frozen indigenous blood samples; narratives of prehistory to the geological past and future of plastic; the periodization of imperial China to that of the Muslim Golden Age; the temporal rupture of the French Revolution to the millenarian “helter skelter” of the Manson family; fascist ideas of “the new man” to postcolonial visions of futurity. Resisting narrative synthesis, the assembled chapters supplement the bold analytic intervention of the introduction, drawing it out in multiple directions. Moving across space as well as time, the volume proposes sixteen ways of looking at “heterochrony,” or plural temporal ideas and orders.  At once drawing on and critically responding to Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual histories of temporal regimes, the editors offer historians a new conceptual framework with which to describe temporal coincidence and collision–what they describe as “chronocenosis.” As borne out in the assembled essays, this generative concept invites creative adaptation and adoption in fields that range from political, economic, and legal history to histories of science and aesthetics.... This volume could not be more timely in calling critical attention to time as an at once historical and political problem. Our current moment’s convergent crises– war and global pandemic, racial reckoning and white supremacist reaction, populist and populationist nationalism, abysmal material inequality and catastrophic climate change–summon specters of the past and future in ways that at once collude and collide. Newly politicized, the writing of history is now a scene of hotly debated wars over history (and theory). State-generated reports and recommendations, legislative measures, and court decisions the world over seek to ratify official accounts of history and its supposed progress. Claims of advancement effectively deny or evade the present-day symbolic and structural legacies of past violence, perpetuating them, and projecting them into the future. In response to instrumentalist accounts of history, historians perform an urgent public role in correcting the record and documenting those pasts. No less important is their critical metahistorical work, which grapples with how to articulate past, present, and future. Power and Time, alongside other recent work by Joan Scott, Priya Satia, and Samuel Moyn, points to the limits– and hazards– of hitching imaginaries of the future to a progressive vision of historical time. Documenting myriad wounds inflicted by the idea of time’s arrow, it does not promise to heal those wounds with a redemptive promise of reconciliation. Nor does it endeavor to replace that narrative with a less sunny but ultimately singular account of decline and fall. Tracing multiple patterns and possibilities, it generates spaces for thinking about alternative political visions that do not assume that time will simply continue straight into the future.

– Judith Surkis, H-Diplo

The Invention of Prehistory: Violence, Empire, and our Obsession with Human Origins —— now out from Liveright (April 2024)!

“Nimbly moving across a great expanse of space and time, The Invention of Prehistory dismantles our most widely accepted ideas about the origins of humanity. This is intellectual history as it should be written: serene in its mastery of intransigent material, yet endlessly provocative in argument, and ultimately fatal to long-cherished assumptions and prejudices.” —Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger

“[A]n incisive and captivating reassessment of prehistory . . . In lucid prose, Geroulanos unspools an enthralling and detailed history of the development of modern natural science. It’s a must-read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“An astute, powerfully rendered history of humanity.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

amazon

Liveright/Norton website

Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory―and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates that claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world.

The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Rousseau, Darwin, and Marx. Yet as he shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem only natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialized peoples could be “bombed back to the stone age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages.

As Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past―and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past.

“Stefanos Geroulanos reveals how the quest for human origins emerged from the imperial mandate—to possess the earth and control its peoples. His subtle, passionate book steers us away from an unreal past and toward an equal, peaceful, and sustainable future for all.” —Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers

“In a brilliant masterstroke, Stefanos Geroulanos turns the tables on those shining a lamp on human origins, documenting how they have always held up a mirror to themselves and their own times. Accessibly and expertly explicating a dizzying array of theories of early society, and their stories of antediluvian psyches, cyclical violence, dominant mothers, hominid predecessors, simian cousins, and tribal peoples, this magnificent book reminds us that inquiry is always political—and that the continuing fashion of exploring the birth of civilization and the dawn of everything have the darkest roots.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Humane and The Last Utopia

“The idea that some people have stayed behind in a savage state while others have ascended to civilisation has caused and continues to cause immense suffering for those supposed to be human animals, bombed back to the stone age or otherwise disappeared from history. Covering an enormous territory from Rousseau to Wakanda, displaying a firework of erudition, written with verve, The Invention of Prehistory will be a milestone on the path to a less destructive relation to the deep past.” —Andreas Malm, author of Fossil Capital and How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“In this remarkable and enlivening study, Stefanos Geroulanos traces the development of our modern fascination with humanity’s deep past, and lays out that fascination’s deadly costs.” —Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex

|| Stanford University Press, 2017 ||

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This book returns us to a time and place when the concept of transparency was met with deep suspicion. Between 1945 and 1985 in France, academics, artists, revolutionaries, and state functionaries spoke of transparency in pejorative terms. Associating it with the prying eyes of totalitarian governments, they undertook a critical project against it—in education, policing, social psychology, economic policy, and the management of information. Focusing on Sartre, Lacan, Canguilhem, Lévi-Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Transparency in Postwar France explores the work of ethicists, who proposed that individuals are transparent neither to each other nor to themselves, and philosophers, who clamored for new epistemological foundations. These decades saw the emergence of the colonial and phenomenological "other," the transformation of ideas of normality, and the effort to overcome Enlightenment-era humanisms and violence in the name of freedom. These thinkers' innovations remain centerpieces for any resistance to contemporary illusions that tolerate or enable power and social coercion. This book offers a panorama of postwar French thought where attempts to show the perils of transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major inventions, many of which we now take for granted.

JHI-Blog interview with Sarah Dunstan here (itunes podcast link here)

New Books Network interview with Roxanne Panchasi here (itunes podcast link here).

Reviews:

Andrew Dunstall, History & Theory: “Masterful… a full-blown piece of critical theory.”

Sarah Shurts, American Historical Review: “An exceptional accomplishment, complex in its task and ambitious in its scope.”

Laurent Jeanpierre, Syndicate Forum: A work of great ambition. [...] Its method is absolutely singular. Demarcated from both the Cambridge School and especially Koselleck's program by its specific and deliberate ambition to minor concepts and the quasi-invisible notions of intellectual discourse.... This is an extremely innovative work and will be a classic for the historiography of this period.

Carolyn J. Dean, H-Diplo: An impressive achievement…. The book traverses a staggeringly broad set of ideas linked by the emergence of this concept of transparency… [Geroulanos] does not limit himself to great thinkers and, in an original move, carries his analysis of the transparency metaphor intodiscourses about the black market, gangsters, juvenile delinquents, and young rebels in New Wave cinema. As he demonstrates with great elegance, transparency defies and cuts across philosophical classifications, capturing the emergence of new anxieties, new objects of analysis, and new modes of seeing the world as well as new self-perceptions.

Clare Birchall, Syndicate Forum: Transparency in Postwar France reminded me that there is a whole (counter-)tradition of thinkers who can be enlisted to explain why promises of political transparency and the fanfare that announces the arrival of open government data portals seem hollow; why transparency practices are shot through with the contradictions and aporias of transparency as a concept.

Mark Mason, French History: “Geroulanos is superb in formulating a shared problematic in the work of a range of thinkers (‘from Leroi-Gourhan to Foucault, from Canguilhem to Derrida, from Lacan to Jacob, the same sequence of conflict emerges, as though philosophies intersected like meridians at the conceptual pole of “the present time”’.) that he proposes to call ‘the narrative of a bifurcation of the “now”’ and in which ‘ending transparency did not mean succumbing to opacity; it meant endorsing complexity and irreducibility, taking up a chance at the liberation of difference and self-division’. Most importantly, perhaps, Geroulanos explicitly putting his extraordinary work of tracking and formulating critiques of transparency in the service of ‘thinking the subjective, social, and epistemological complexity and violence of the world now on offer’, ‘committed resistance to these spectacles of power’, and the facilitation—eventually—of the rise and work of justice, constitutes a vital challenge for historians to respond to in terms of further reflection on how they conceive of their function and the utility of their histories.”

Nicholas Heron, Syndicate Forum: An important book... it seeks to trace neither the history of a single idea, nor that of an individual concept, but proposes instead to show how a panoply of well-known ideas and concepts, specific to a particular intellectual tradition and language context, appear in a new light when treated as webbed together by a “phantom concept” that manifests itself only through their interplay. The concept of transparency is thus not itself the hero of the history it is understood to constitute; rather, it is revealed only through the dense web of counter-concepts – mask, night, other, complexity, difference, theatricality, ambiguity, heterogeneity, to name but a few – whose refusal of it in fact forms the immediate subject matter of the book. “Semiotic history” is, accordingly, the highly suggestive name that Geroulanos gives to the kind of intellectual history in which he is engaged in this work.

Mayanthi Fernando, Syndicate Forum: Transparency in Postwar France is a brilliant, erudite book, at once wide-ranging in its scope and intricate in its details... an intellectual history anchored in the social.

Audrey Evrard, H-France Forum:“Transparency, as examined here, has more to do with mechanisms a society or individuals deploy for self-reassurance, self-justification, and political and moral order. Piercing through transparency in a critical manner requires active perceptual shifts that re-engineer long-established collective ways of seeing and thinking. As such, Geroulanos’s ambition for producing a critical history of the present equally lets us ponder en transparence the obscure legacy of the Enlightenment and Western modernity... Transparency in Postwar France is a captivating read, which bears resonance with our present times in so many ways and in contexts that exceed the geographical boundaries of France.”

Edward Baring, H-Diplo: The most comprehensive intellectual history of the postwar French moment since Martin Jay’s magisterial Downcast Eyes, published a quarter of a century ago. Geroulanos’s readings are rich and subtle.

Emile Chabal, H-France Forum: “In its erudition, richness and analytical rigour, [Transparency in Postwar France] takes the intellectual history of postwar France in exciting new directions. The most obvious innovation is that the entire book is held together, not by one or two authors, or a specific concept within a thinker’s writing, but by a single master concept: “transparency”. This becomes the guiding thread that gives the arguments their coherence. Of course, for this to work, “transparency” not only needs to be a clearly-articulated concept, but also speak meaningfully across texts, times and places. This is a tall order.... Geroulanos makes an impressive case.... What is immediately obvious about this book is how it has changed the way I look at post-war France. I am starting to see new connections, debates, ideas and images.”

Ana Isabel Keilson, Contemporary European History: “Interweaving intellectual history with political history, history of science and cultural studies, Geroulanos shows how French intellectuals ‘built tool after tool for dismantling’ Cartesian-based claims to society, ethics and politics as coherent, legible and stable entities.… Geroulanos gives us a model for doing a kind of Derridean analysis, as he turns over the ideas of multiple thinkers from multiple perspectives and multiple contexts.”

Judith Surkis, Rutgers University: "This expansive and original book sheds important new light on the thought of the trente glorieuses as profoundly preoccupied with opacity and otherness. Geroulanos communicates the deep ethical and political commitments that motivated these philosophical and social investigations, underscoring why the French thought that emerged in this period still matters."

Camille Robcis, Cornell University: "With elegance and rigor, Geroulanos traces the evolution of the concept of transparency in postwar France in fields ranging from philosophy and film to psychoanalysis, medicine, and social history. Interweaving original archival research with careful close readings, this extremely impressive semiotic history challenges us to think about texts, their contexts, and our present in fascinating new ways."

Bernard Harcourt, Columbia University: "Essential for understanding the problems we face in the digital age with regard to new forms of exposure, Geroulanos's masterful account of postwar thought inaugurates a new style of semiotic history and provides a necessary propaedeutic to a revaluation of our current ideals of transparency and openness."

Co-Edited with Zvi Ben-Dor Benite and Nicole Jerr

|| Columbia University Press, 2017 || CUP site || amazon || paperback 2018

With essays by Glenn W. Most, Yuri Pines, Nicola di Cosmo, Jason Frank, Justin Stearns, Stanca Scholz-Cionca, Bernadette Meyler, Dan Edelstein, Miranda Spieler, Alexei Yurchak, Cathy Gere, Li Chen, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, and the editors.

What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings. Using global intellectual history as a bridge between approaches, periods, and areas, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and the images and ideas on which it rests.

The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a discussion of the continuing power of Lenin’s corpse, from an analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an exploration of the imagery of “the people” in the Age of Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific historical regimes and conflicts, the book’s contributors examine intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship, religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its representations.

Samuel Moyn, Yale University: "That sovereign power is often fragile and never established once and for all is the startling proposition that organizes this spectacularly interesting sequence of investigations. Sovereignty is impossible to study, the essays propose, without attention to its ‘scaffolding,’ defined as all the symbolic management that power continually requires. Leaping across time and spanning the world, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty showcases scholarly gems that together reflect how the crown of sovereignty is kept in place—and sometimes slips."

Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University: "This volume showcases the best of global intellectual history. Sovereignty emerges as a complex force: aesthetically layered, politically mutable, historically contingent, and consistently elusive. At the same time, despite the apparent Eurocentrism of the concept's recent lineage, readers will come away convinced of the importance of sovereignty as an analytical category, key to making sense of political culture in world history and political thought in global context."

Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine: "Joining performance studies with philosophy, theology, and ethnography, the figure of the scaffold aptly evokes the symbolic supports and global visibility of sovereignty today. The contributors to this ambitious collection of essays fearlessly disclose recurrent features of sovereignty across time and space, often beginning immanently with the cosmic cartographies generated by particular regimes and projected in aesthetic displays, liturgical exercises, and citational enterprises that reveal common themes in the global drama of majesty."

|| Stanford University Press, 2010 ||

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French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twentieth century. In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Kojève, Levinas, Heidegger, Koyré, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God" without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being, language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism as insufficient and ultimately violent.

Blurbs and Reviews:

"Stefanos Geroulanos's valuable, sophisticated, and dense book recounts a crucial chapter in the twentieth-century undermining of the Western humanist tradition. Rewardingly focused on French intellectual life from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, this meticulously excavated study argues that, in the face of interwar distress, scientific and philosophical innovations, and a miscellany of competing versions of humanism, some prominent thinkers were drawn to variously phrased forms of antihumanist atheism. In addition to its stand-alone merits, this study offers an invaluable prehistory to a later, better-known, and more influential antihumanist wave among French intellectuals during the 1950s–1970s . . . [I]t is a worthwhile read and sure to be a compulsory reference in the field."

—Julian Bourg, Journal of Modern History

 

"This book introduces a terrifically learned new intellectual historian who has provided a strikingly novel and philosophically interesting genealogy of the antihumanism that most observers associate with too recent an era of thought. Of interest to anyone concerned with the the rich traditions of Continental philosophy, Stefanos Geroulanos's investigation gives the French scene in the 1930s its due, with neglected figures, new departures, and influential breakthroughs that still challenge the temptation to make the humanity of man the basis of reflection."

—Samuel Moyn, Columbia University

"All too frequently anti-humanism serves as a mere slogan or a term of abuse. This broad-ranging and original new study of the anti-humanist movement in twentieth-century French thought helps us to comprehend the deeper complexities of this theme across numerous domains--philosophical, literary, religious, and political. Resisting facile judgment and alive to paradox, Geroulanos's book unsettles, reframes, and provokes at every turn. A work of true consequence by a compelling new voice in European intellectual history."

—Peter E. Gordon, Harvard University

"The tradition of humanism, so long an affront to religious faith, has more recently been challenged from non-religious perspectives, perhaps nowhere as fiercely as in 20th-century France. With incisive readings of many of the masters of French thought, Stefanos Geroulanos unearths the tangled roots of post-structuralist anti-humanism, and in so doing, raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human in the 21st century."

—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

"Rarely do I learn more from a scholarly book than I have from Stefanos Geroulanos's An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Geroulanos's central thesis is compelling but simple . . . [W]e have here a 'last man,' heir to those 'negations' of the world named freedom, history, and individuality, whose historical realization reveals that humanness is ultimately based upon a relation to death. To the degree that this antihumanism continues to order thinkers like de Man, Derrida, and Foucault, it has also shaped many Anglophone intellectuals of my generation. Geroulanos tells a story that thus illuminates us too."

—Simon During, The Immanent Frame

"Beyond recasting the work of the best known thinkers of the mid-century, Geroulanos also highlights the significance of lesser-known figures, from the philosophy of science to theology. In incorporating these voices, he is able to show that atheist antihumanism, far from being opposed to currents of either scientific or religious thinking, was, in fact, deeply indebted to them . . . [This book] asks questions about the writing of history anew. In the process, it posits new horizons for thinking about the interrelationship between secularity and religion at a moment when these are highly charged questions in French history and politics—as well as beyond them."

—Judith Surkis, The Immanent Frame

"Focusing on a narrow period, roughly 1930 to 1954, and proceeding as an investigation into the emergence of antihumanism as a cultural figure in the overlapping spheres of philosophy, literature, theology, and politics, the book augurs a sea change in our historical approach to French intellectual currents . . . Geroulanos has irrevocably upended the conventional genealogy of the field."

—Knox Peden, History and Theory

"An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought examines a complex series of debates in mid-twentieth century French philosophy that culminates in the rise of antihumanism during the 1960s. The book is a rich and sophisticated intellectual history, offering food for thought for the specialist and non-specialist alike. . . Geroulanos argues convincingly that French antihumanism is rooted in the historical onset of this crisis during the pre-war period, in what separates the twentieth century from the nineteenth, and that an archaeology of antihumanism is utterly necessary if we wish to understand the present age."

—Ryan Coyne, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion

"[T]he approach Geroulanos takes—putting atheism at the center of things—leads to insights . . . Geroulanos pays subtle respect to a range of intellectual positions and demonstrates the extreme complexity of the conversations, and the fierce disappointment that animated them."

—American Historical Review

"One of the things that intellectual historians show us, although often only implicitly, is the fluidity of the terms of debates that we take to be self-evident. In An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, Stefanos Geroulanos shows us this fluidity by focusing on the French history of objections to (and reformulations of) humanist discourse from 1929 to 1952, a history that suggests that the rigidity of the categories of 'religion' and 'humanism' in Anglophone discourse is exceptional and unnecessary."

—Martin Kavka, The Immanent Frame

"Geroulanos's lucid, carefully written text fills in a void in the secondary literature on this incredibly fruitful and influential time in French thought . . . [T]he intellectual history Geroulanos traces demonstrates that the antihumanism developed in 1930s Paris should be seen as proto-poststructuralist thought. The negative anthropology, questioning of positive knowledge, and antifoundationalist epistemology of this period were later appropriated and transformed by figures such as Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze . . . Geroulanos's text provides a pathway for understanding how and why theologians and atheist Continental philosophers have proved to be such strange and intimate bedfellows."

—Reviews in Religion and Theology

"An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought achieves a much-needed dialogue between intellectual history and the history of philosophy. Rather than reduce intellectual history to a history of intellectuals—their publications, academic standing, and milieux—Geroulanos preserves the substantive content and stakes of atheist anti-humanism across four decades of debate."

—MLN: Modern Language Notes

"[Geroulanos's] work offers an impressive narrative of the complex history of anti-humanism in twentieth-century French thought . . . . [T]he book is rich in historical detail, suggestive in its historical analysis, and provocative philosophically."

—Terence J. Martin, The Journal of Religion

I co-translated two books by Georges Canguilhem.

His epistemological works play a significant role in my more recent research; see "Publications" for a couple of my essays on GC, and, separately, a series of relevant arguments on him in both of my recent books: Transparency in Postwar France and The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe.

Co-Authored with Todd Meyers

|| August Verlag (Walther König Verlag), Berlin, 2014 ||

II AV site || amazon

Précis: This book reconstructs a major effort at reconceiving the human organism and the human self in the wake of World War I, an effort that is tied to the life and death of the Weimar Republic. It is a historical and philosophical study of Kurt Goldstein’s book Der Aufbau des Organismus (The Organism), a book that Goldstein wrote in Amsterdam during his flight from Nazi Germany to the United States in 1933-34. It centers on the work growing out of Goldstein's famous early studies of aphasia and neurology: our interpretation concerns his influential treatment of the organism as an integral individual, indeed an individual that functions as a whole when it is threatened with collapse. This conception reaches well beyond questions of consciousness and neurology and offer not only a replacement of existing neurological pictures of the body, but an attempt to provide a physiological, therapeutic, and philosophical sense of the individual. The book first situates Goldstein in the neurological and physiological studies of the postwar period, attending in particular to his treatment of the individual human organism; it then studies three short films from Goldstein's case histories; finally it looks closely at Goldstein's remarkable influence on Ernst Cassirer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Georges Canguilhem.

Während seiner Flucht vor den Nationalsozialisten schrieb der Neurologe Kurt Goldstein 1933-34 ein Buch, das die Erkenntnisse jahrelanger klinischer Forschung zu Hirnverletzungen, Aphasien, tonischer Muskulatur und Wahrnehmungsstörungen in einem Werk zusammenbrachte. Der Aufbau des Organismus sollte zu seinem Meisterwerk werden, eine groß angelegte Synthese seines neurologischen, physiologischen und therapeutischen Ansatzes. Goldstein entwickelt darin einen Begriff des Individuums, der weit über die Grenzen der normalerweise mit seinem Namen in Verbindung gebrachten Aphasieforschung und Neurologie hinausgeht und zu einer umfassenden Neubewertung der Begriffe Norm, Gesundheit und Heilung in Medizin und Psychiatrie führen sollte. Experimente im Individuum untersucht Goldsteins Konzeption von Organismus, Patient und Selbst anhand der engen Verknüpfung seiner Tätigkeiten als Arzt, Forscher und Epistemologe. Über die holistischen und vitalistischen Debatten zu Goldsteins Werk hinausgehend verorten Stefanos Geroulanos und Todd Meyers Goldsteins epistemologische Kritik und therapeutische Innovationen innerhalb eines Kontexts von Umwälzungen in der Physiologie, die von dem Gewaltausbruch des Ersten Weltkriegs getrieben werden. Mithilfe kürzlich wiederentdeckter Forschungsfilme konzentrieren sich die Autoren auf die experimentelle Forschung, die dem Aufbau des Organismus zugrunde liegt, dem Buch, das nicht zuletzt Goldsteins therapeutische Anliegen zum Ausdruck bringt. Schließlich erkunden sie Goldsteins weitreichenden philosophischen Einfluss, u.a. im Werk Ernst Cassirers, Georges Canguilhems und Maurice Merleau-Pontys.

Reviews: "[Die Autoren haben] einen zentralen Beitrag und zugleich einen hervorragenden Einstieg in die Lektüre von Goldsteins Philosophie des Lebens vorgelegt." ("[The authors] have presented a central contribution and at the same time an excellent introduction to the reading of Goldstein's philosophy of life.") -- Lukas Engelmann, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 28.1 (2015)

Edited with Todd Meyers (McGill University)

In the introduction to Knowledge of Life, Georges Canguilhem writes that knowledge and life do not assume a hierarchical order, one preceding or constituting the other. Instead, Canguilhem argues that knowledge and life come to rest upon one another, even in moments when one seems to unmake or undo the other. Life is imbued with thought, entangled with it, and in the end, undiminished by it. Life–its subjects, forms, peoples, and geographies (both real and imagined, and regardless of scale)–can no longer (if ever) be thought of as singular.

In the tightly woven lattice of knowledge and life is found a common conceptual space for anthropology, history, biology, philosophy, art, and medicine. The Forms of Living series seeks to provide an outlet for theoretically and methodologically rigorous writing theorized and articulated through various disciplines, frames, and attempts. Thus the series promotes translations of important works in languages other than English, organizes edited volumes serving as introductions to scholars not well known to Anglo-American audiences, and delivers original and provocative writing from renowned scholars as well as first-time authors. By connecting works that may not otherwise be read alongside one another, Forms of Living eavesdrops on conversations already occurring between scholars, and begins new conversations on what is at stake between knowledge and life and the forms each takes.

This is my main project for the foreseeable future: a broad, detailed account, divided into several parts, of the history of the concept of the "New Man" and allied ideas regarding the possibility of going beyond simple social reform and indeed regenerating human nature, as these appeared across: the aesthetic politics of major European regimes; Napoleon's code civil, its design, and the ways in which it instituted a bourgeois man; the human sciences (as sciences of the diagnosis and use of human plasticity, from 19th-century hygiene to cybernetics and neo-behaviorism); the post-1848 dreams of returning to a pure past as a way of moving into a perfect future; and, as a particular case, the Nazi New Man. I am not sure how the project will be organized as a whole, and for now I'm researching.

The "Uses of Prehistory" project is an outgrowth of one of these parts.