A theoretical intervention into the challenge of thinking through the complexities of life, in Iran or elsewhere. Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault offer us a model of thinking as a practice. Each attempted one project in which they were thinking systematically about ongoing events, and offering that thinking as a contribution to public understanding. Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to observe the Adolf Eichmann trial, and her contemporaneous writing was published in The New Yorker magazine. Foucault traveled to Iran to observe the early stages of the revolution, and his contemporaneous writing was published (mostly) in the Corriere della Sera newspaper. These two projects have commonly been regarded as their author’s most controversial and have often been ignored or used to denigrate the writer’s entire theoretical oeuvre. Yet they offer compelling models of thinking as a practice that critically links the self and the world. Rescuing theory from the confines of academic specialization restores it, and us, to the possibility of thinking as a practice of freedom, and freedom as the daily possibility of beginning anew.

Boulez’s status as a modern is rarely doubted. Yet he provided relatively little by way of explicit reflection on the concept of modernity. This chapter traces a path via Charles Baudelaire’s formulation in his essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, and Michel Foucault’s commentary on it, to Foucault’s essay on Boulez himself, ‘Pierre Boulez, ou l’écran traversé’. There, Boulez is seen as motivated by ‘the necessity of a conjuncture’, an imperative for action demanded by whatever nexus of circumstances and contradictions confronts the individual in the present. The conjuncture, as further amplified by Louis Althusser, offers useful perspectives on Boulez’s modernity, which is often characterised as prescriptive and deterministic but which emerges here as relativist and perspectival, stressing contingency rather than inevitability. Above all, modernity comes to signify not a binding aesthetic but an enduring ethic, whose manifestations remain particular to the historical and problem contexts in which they arise.

This chapter focuses on the question of resistance in D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988). Love argues that, although Miller’s approach anticipated many aspects of queer modernist reading practice, it is ideologically distinct in evincing skepticism about the liberatory potential of expressions of sexuality, including non-normative sexuality. Miller’s understanding of sexuality as present and licit rather than taboo and unspeakable thoroughly absorbs Michel Foucault’s critique of what he called the “repressive hypothesis.” In this sense, Love argues, Miller offers not only a queer reading of realist fiction but also realist queer criticism, which emphasizes existing realities over political potential.

This book explores what Europeans in the twentieth century understood by individual freedom and how they endeavored to achieve it, often against the odds. The Introduction lays out its conceptual bases, arguing that the quest was multi-faceted and unfolded in nonlinear ways, which jars with teleological narratives of the rise and decline of “the individual.” It disputes Annelien de Dijn’s recent account of one dominant concept of modern liberty and is attentive to mainstream as well as marginalized versions of individual freedom, questioning Michel Foucault’s idea that the former were “imposed on us” through disciplinary power. Instead, the book borrows from sociologist Georg Simmel and political philosopher Isaiah Berlin to stress the subjective, gradual, and unpredictable character of individual freedom and the fact that it was pursued against a range of obstacles and constraints. It tells a story of conflict-ridden expansion. Men and women had to claim their personal freedom in a context marked by world wars, the expanding power of the state, the constraints of work life, pre-established moral norms, the growing influence of America, and the uncertain future of colonial rule.

This chapter reprises the arguments advanced in the first four chapters of the book, and assesses the question of what “lessons” history can teach on that basis. It argues that the habits and methods of analysis, interpretation, open-ended inquiry, and intellectual flexibility that study in History cultivates are uniquely valuable in the specific circumstances of our own time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that it is these habits, rather than any specific political values, that make History uniquely valuable as a form of education for citizenship. It argues, finally, that this is the only approach to the civic value of history education that is compatible with the ethical principles foundational to the discipline of History. In closing, it presents the case for viewing the understanding that history offers us no lessons as the most important lesson history can teach us. This is a lesson that can teach us to think and act with due deliberation, to inquire more deeply before acting, and to act in full confidence that our actions will have unintended consequences.

This chapter offers a reading of Ebrahim Moosa’s Al-Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination, which, through the concept of dihlīz, identifies “the Ghazālian secret” to overcoming false binaries, whether between Ghazālī and his peers or between Islam and the West, as the embrace of a liminal existence. Moosa renders the debate between Ghazālī and the Muslim philosophers (p. falāsifa) of his time as analogous to the contemporary struggle between post-imperialism and globalization. Although his reinterpretation of dihlīz opens new perspectives, we contend that his argument imposes postmodern precepts onto an Abbasid thinker. The historical Ghazālī conceived of the Abbasid Empire in terms of an unfolding divine will and so sought to empower it. Ultimately, we suggest that Moosa marshals Ghazālī to accord mysticism, which replaces objectivity as the “master” paradigm, higher epistemic value than modern reason. This does not correspond to the life and thought of the historical Ghazālī, whose priorities concerned guaranteeing the success of a state project to which he was existentially committed.

Does postcolonial studies present a theoretical framework appropriate to Romanization studies? Does Romanization studies have evidence appropriate for postcolonial theories? Even though postcolonial theories did not stem from ancient Roman imperialism per se, they provide a heuristical tool to destabilize the discourse that has sustained imperial systems through history. They help Roman historians and archaeologists to reach a deeper understanding of the dynamic process of imperial discourses and to deconstruct the imperial discourses built through the complex layers of histories. This chapter does not deliver an exhaustive analysis or a landscape overview of postcolonial studies according to a certain order of significance or thematic categorization as is the common practice in the discipline, for example, along the triad of Said-Bhabha-Spivak or along the axis of theoretical and materialist approaches. Instead, here I explore postcolonial ideas which have influenced and reoriented Romanization studies.

This chapter explores Michel Foucault’s impact on the history of sexuality by emphasizing the disparate and evolving nature of his work and its often-controversial influence on the history of sexuality as a field. The essay begins by summarizing the arguments of the four volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, while recalling the project’s turbulent history. The first volume maintained that sexuality’s history in the West was characterized by an “incitement to discourse” (rather than repression) which sealed the “Faustian pact” between sexuality and the pursuit of truth, while also drawing sexuality into power relations. Yet Foucault’s interest in early Christian sexual practices led him to reorient his project towards an exploration of classical antiquity and the role played by sexuality in practices of subjectivity. The essay’s second part examines how historians of sexuality have drawn on Foucault’s insights, focusing on the divergences between historians influenced by Foucault’s first volume (dealing with knowledge and power) and those inspired by the latter volumes (prioritizing subjectivity). After examining Foucault’s impact on feminism and queer theory, the essay concludes by noting that many historians of sexuality have made productive use of Foucault’s work without concurring with his philosophical conclusions.

This historiographical chapter discusses how the rise of LGBTQ+ history has shifted understandings of how all gender and sexual identities are formed and contested. It begins with a discussion of the activist origins of the field of LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s, and then moves on to discuss the centrals debates that animated early scholarship in the 1980s. The chapter then moves to the rise of queer theory in the 1990s, and analyzes how that innovation reshaped the field by introducing concepts such as heteronormativity. The 1990s also witnessed the rise of scholarship on colonialism and sexuality, which in turn impacted the field of LGBTQ+ history, which up to that point had been very focused on the Global North. Thus, the third section of the chapter discusses how, since 2000, the field of LGBTQ+ history has increasingly been global in scope, with increased attention to political economies, transnational flows, and state formation. In conclusion, the chapter discusses the rise of trans histories, and how these histories have pushed LGBTQ+ historians to think about gender in new and innovative ways.

Chapter 8 is dedicated to analyze the conceptual foundations of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. This provides an insight into the preconceptual constitution of the “ground of depositivities” on which theories hold. Then, it discusses the criticism to it and Foucault’s answer to his critics. This led him to elaborate on the difference between “structures” and “discursive formations” and develop the different strategies needed for the reconstruction of the latter. As this chapter shows, Foucault’s perspective combines the two opposite currents, structuralism and phenomenology, to elaborate a particularly fruitful approach to intellectual history. Finally, it addresses the crucial point of how to account for epistemic mutations and what he calls its événementiel character.

The author examines the place of consent in treaty interpretation at the time of the marginalization of the role of the intention of the parties. Whether the characterization of international law as a legal system grounded in State consent has ever been empirically true is, as he argues, open to discussion. For him, the law of treaties, however, is commonly seen as ‘a bastion of consensualism’. This sense of confidence has, however, never sat easily with treaty interpretation. The author claims that, despite the lip service sometimes paid to the fiction of the common intention of the parties, the official doctrine of treaty interpretation rests on the primacy of the terms of the treaty.

Chapter 3 examines the core creative practice at the heart of the institution and tradition of the Theater an der Ruhr and most public theatres in Germany: the rehearsal. Rehearsals are not merely the most significant spaces for the training of the body and elaboration of a play. They are also practices for the cultivation of a particular form of comportment described by actors and directors as Haltung. The rehearsing of Haltung, which is discussed as an example of an ethnographic concept, that is, one stemming from the theorising of my interlocutors, constitutes the fundamental ethical practice and internal good facilitated by the institutional tradition of the Theater an der Ruhr. This chapter examines the broader significance of studying the learning of conduct during rehearsals and makes a case for their study as foundational to an understanding of creativity and self-formation in theatre. It also investigates issues of authority and discipline, thinking about rehearsals as a form of social practice rather than an artistic means to create a staging.

Chapter 3 considers the evolution of military disciplinary practices as military thought became ever more akin to a human science. It focusses on a key work in the theorisation of military discipline, Robert Jackson’s A Systematic View of the Formation, Discipline, and Economy of Armies (1804). Drawing on his extensive experience as a surgeon in the British army, Jackson places the medicalised body at the heart of military discipline. He insists that the soldier must be viewed as a living organism, possessed of a complex and self-governing interiority that determines how tactics operate. In Jackson’s conception, the soldier appears as a self-governing figure who functions independently and at a distance from disciplinary sites, a figure who more closely resembles the modern subject than the mechanical automatons associated with Frederick the Great’s military drill practices. More than this, however, Jackson’s book reveals how Romantic aesthetics penetrated military thought. The military’s concern with the imagination of the soldier in the field was undoubtedly a ‘shock’ to poets, Clausewitz surmised, but was nonetheless central to emergent aesthetic concerns with perception and interiority that suggest an unexplored context of wartime media surrounding a Romantic poetics and its formation of subjectivity.

Images of rape in late-medieval and early renaissance Italy belong to the broader question of sexual violence and societal responses to it. Both aspects are significant: These representations equally relate to the reality of rape and collective ideological responses to it. On the one hand, what people do to each other defines who they are. Collective behavioral norms and patterns establish the boundaries of day-to-day interactions and organize life in a community. They also turn people into particular versions of themselves. If they allow, condone, or perform sexual violation of others, this makes them members of a rape-prone society and potential rapists. Similarly, an ideal rape-free society could be defined by the complete eradication of any sexual act under coercion. This opposition seems to offer an unambiguous distinction between communities based on consensual and nonconsensual sexuality.

Chapter 7, “Persuasion, Conviction, and Care: Jane Austen’s Keeping,” develops Cavell’s striking interest in Michel Foucault’s final works on “care of the self.” Cavell, in his autobiography Little Did I Know, marks his engagement with Foucault’s concept of parrhesia, or truth-telling, as it developed from a seminar Cavell co-taught at The University of Chicago. As a fictional investigation of the conviction-persuasion distinction, Persuasion suggests rethinking the idea of being convinced through a practice of reason-giving whose grounds are to provide advance rationale for their validity of support. Rather, in Foucauldian practice Cavell finds “a place and an instrument of confrontation.” Anne Elliot, the protagonist of Persuasion, undertakes a turn from the obedient subject of persuasion to a linguistic and social agent of conviction. I conclude the book’s reading of Cavell’s Austen under the aegis of “vulnerable conformity” by underlining a shift in the meaning of conformity as such, drawing from George Saintsbury’s 1894 essay on Austen’s “keeping” as an alternative to heroic investment.

The introduction states the argument and introduces key concepts, including ideas of multitude and political arithmetic, as well as important distinctions, including that between quantitative and qualitative aspects of demographic thought. It briefly surveys past approaches to the history of population as an idea, paying particular attention to Michel Foucault. It then outlines the book’s episodic approach; explains its geographical and temporal scope (England, Ireland and the British Atlantic, circa 1500 –1800); characterizes the range and types of sources used; and describes its focus on the emergence of population as an object of knowledge and qualitative manipulation (referred to as demographic governance), as well as on questions of the locus and limits of power over population (referred to as demographic agency).

This chapter starts by arguing that traditionally the writing of history has a strong connection to the construction of identities, be they national, class, ethnic, gender or spatial identities. The theory of history has also re-inforced that link until a range of diverse thinkers came to question this. I am discussing in particular Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Chris Lorenz, Chantal Mouffe, Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. The collective impact of these authors has been to produce a greater self-reflexivity about the relationship between history and identity formation in many historians. The book, however, is not about a whiggish story of progress towards self-reflexivity, but it highlights that work which, in the author’s view, has been successful in being self-reflective about the historians’ part in the construction of identities.