Obiits

1995 (Demolition), 1996-99 (Composition) Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York University Press, 2019).

July 1794 / posthumous Saint-Just, “Fragments d’institutions républicaines,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Michèle Duval (éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1984), pages 966-1009. Miguel Abensour edited a more recent edition in 2004. The only (?) English translation seems to be that of @rbzpr on Tumblr: “Fragments on the Republican Institutions (Louis Antoine Saint-Just) - @rbzpr on Tumblr,” translated by @rbzpr, RBZPR, <Tumblr, web archive>. [The translation of Saint-Just linked above still has to be checked for needed corrections, and in any case we should try to get in touch with @rbzpr to free it from Tumblr by mid-February 2026.]

One of the most generous resources and introductions to Saint-Just’s “republican institutions” is Miguel Abensour’s “The Theory of Institutions and the Relations of the Legislator to the People According to Saint-Just” (1967/68), which can be downloaded on-site [here (fr)]. His references are, as mentioned, incredibly helpful, instructive, but really go beyond any instrumentality. We have made most of them available here, in digest form. The digest in question really constitutes a second page to this bibliography and scaffolds its own network of references:

1740-1752, 1953 Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Boundas (Columbia University Press, 1991), especially for its developments concerning atomism and association (26-7), the positivity of the moral world and its invention (e.g. 30, 40), the latter as fiction and “feigning” (69, 79-80, 128) and its positivity as habit (throughout); finally, the production of solidarity at a distance as a positive task (32, 37-51, “sympathy”). Deleuze’s own bibliography to Instincts and Institutions (1953) is available in totality here.

1994 Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George R. Collins (Verso, 1997), esp. concerning enmity, “fraternity” and distance.

1795 Hegel, “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” in On Christianity, trans. Knox (Harper Torchbooks, 1961), regarding “the Republic”, the critique of possessive individualism as world-loss, and an illustration of the intrinsically political and polemical nature of modern concepts of “society”: pages 154–59 and 165. Its sequels or afterlife shadow “Sittlichkeit”, “Gattungswesen”, “Gemeinwesen”, “Geselligkeit”, “community” and “society”. Characters include (very contradictory ones) Henriette Herz and Schleiermacher’s theory of the “sociable” salon (1799), Feuerbach (~1840), Durkheim (1893 and 1912), Tönnies’ Community and Society (1887/1912) subtitled “Treatise on Communism and Socialism as Empirical Patterns of Culture”, Simmel and Weber, Mauss (total social fact 1925), ellipsis: in short, the lineage constitutive of “Sociology” whose object (“society”) is inextricable from the political quarrel which, in the 1790s, was still narrated in an epic form as the story of the fall of the Roman Republic as the myth of the birth of capitalism.

1817-18, 1820 Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science, trans. Stewart and Hodgson (University of California Press, 1995), section 134 including its long remark (only slightly indented after the first paragraph); Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Wood, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Hegel’s remark to section 273 and addition to section 274. Law is a knowledge of social form, but the making of the social cannot be grasped as the mere declaration of laws; a constitution is not given from without to a heap of atoms. The revolution was already social, not blank slate. The perspective of “founding” can be misleading.

1851, 1908, 1932-34 1) Karl Marx, “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” from Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 11: 1851-1853, (International Publishers, 1979), which reflects on the problem of recognizability. The bourgeois revolution borrowed costumes and poetry from the past, Napoleon as Caesar. Marx asserts that these costumes will no longer serve. An epic of critique must replace them. 2) In Reflections on Violence, Sorel takes stock of its insufficiency; another epic is needed. He calls on “myth” to give plausibility to collective action, and proposes the image of the “general strike”. 3) Gramsci’s Prison Notebook 13: Jottings on the politics of Machiavelli, known as The Modern Prince, asks which myth can hold the morning after when the abstract equality of a riot must organize, endure, and differentiate. Again a problem with the perspective of beginnings. 4) A wider bibliography includes Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1912-13), Mass Psychology and Analysis of the I (1921), and Civilization and its Discontents (1930) as well as Lacan’s The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1971-72).