Contr’un

I’ve now posted a complete working translation of Joseph Déjacque’s, “The Humanisphere.” There are a small number of problem sections, which I believe will be obvious. I hope, too, that much of what is really special about the work will be obvious as well. There is still a fair amount of editing, smoothing and annotating to be done before we can move forward with publication, first with the collaboration of another translator and then with the comrades at Little Black Cart. But it seems to me, based on my first quick revision of the text, that there is less of […]

I just finished the last paragraphs of a first-draft translation of Joseph Déjacque’s The Humanisphere, a major milestone in a process I started back in 2007, when I translated an excerpt, “Authority and Idleness,” that I at first didn’t even know was from a longer work. As I mentioned when I completed the draft of Part I, Déjacque’s style poses all sorts of interesting challenges, so there are a few stages yet to go before this goes to press, including handing it off to a comrade for his suggestions. But the hardest parts are finished, and I think the start-from-scratch […]

I’ve finally completed a first-draft translation of Part I of Joseph Déjacque’s The Humanisphere, which is not long, but has to be one of the most difficult translation tasks I’ve attempted. I decided to start from scratch, despite the existence of several previous attempts, because I encountered some obvious problems and missed references. If I had known quite how many difficulties I would encounter, I might not have taken the task on, but I’m glad I did.  Déjacque’s style is at once fascinating and maddening. Taking Scandal, as often as not, for his muse, he had a tendency to rant […]

There is another batch of Proudhon’s manuscripts, 1300+ pages worth, available on the Gallica site.

I’ve just finished a working translation of Ravachol’s “Memoirs,” which were dictated to his prison guards in 1892, and am taking the opportunity to also post two related documents, “The Hare and the Hunter,” the article for which Ravachol’s accomplice Georges Etiévant was tried and convicted in 1898, and a letter to the “Comrades of l’Endehors,” by Emile Henry, written in response to Malatesta’s “A Little Theory,” in the wake of Ravachol’s trials.

The Ville de Besançon, home of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, has an excellent digital archive site, which I just discovered includes scans of several of Proudhon’s manuscripts, including Pologne (source of The Theory of Property), Chronos, and notes on a number of the published works. We can hope that Economie and La propriété vaincue will eventually be available, but what is already there amounts to thousands of pages of material most of us have never had a chance to examine.

One of the consequences of adopting this model of the encounter as a key tool is that we are confronted more directly with the ways in which Proudhon’s sociology complicates oppositions like that between individualism and socialism. On the level playing field we’re exploring, both individual human beings and all of the collective individualities enter the encounter as what I’ve been calling equal uniques, individuals, but on potentially very different scales. In the context of the analysis of Proudhon’s State-theory, I raised the practical difficulties of realizing this sort of encounter in practice between individuals of such different scales, and/or […]

One of the more difficult tactical questions in this new phase has been the question of vocabulary, of how to stock this “toolkit” that we’ve been assembling. I would love to keep the truly esoteric terminology to a minumum, but even jargon has its uses—chief among them the highlighting of concepts which are themselves more than a bit esoteric. I have a great deal of faith in readers’ abilities to negotiate complex discussion of property, capitalism, socialism, association, etc., without recourse to anything more than the sort of clarification one would expect in any careful study. But when it is […]